February 26, 2014

Buffer helps manage your social media.

As the saying goes: ‘You can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.’ Success in business is no different in this regard. Today, it is essential to apply modern tactics like using the power of social media for online marketing. You will have to stay updated, use the newest tools and, of course, cater to the need of the hour.

Here is a guide to some of the best modern social tools to help you excel in your business.

1. Social Media Management (SSM)

SMM tools, such as HootSuite, Buffer or Sprout social, are by far the most popular categories. As the names suggest, they help you manage your social media. Typically, they do one or all of these three things:

Social listening, meaning getting alerts when your company or brand is mentioned;

Scheduling and automation, like posting tweets at regular intervals, even when you are asleep;

Showing social analytics, meaning detailed reports that help you understand what you are actually accomplishing with your social media activities.

2. Social Collaboration

These are social tools that you can use inside your company for collaborating with your co-workers or clients. Essentially, they are internal social networks (also called enterprise social networks, private social networks or social intranets) that come with tools that are typically used by companies for employee directories, organizational charts, project management, document management, video conferencing, calendars, client management and so on. Bitrix24 is the most well-known social collaboration platform that small companies use with the biggest set of free tools, while Yammer has become a standard for large corporations. Jive Software and Salesforce Chatter compete in this space as well and may challenge the Yammer dominance shortly.

3. Social CRM

Social CRM or customer relationship management helps you use social media services, the technology and techniques enabling organizations to better engage customers. Often, Social CRM is also referred to as Social Media Monitoring. NimbleCRM, BatchBook and BlueCamroo are powerful tools that help you find new clients while also interacting with existing ones via social channels. Social CRM can also be used to determine customer communities generally managed by the companies themselves.

4. Social Feedback and Customer Support

It goes without saying that feedbacks and customer support is the key to business improvisation. What better if that can be done socially? Introduce yourself and your business to UserVoice.Com, UserEcho.Com and UserRules.com and soon you will know how effectively you can get customer support and social feedbacks. By far, these tools can be classified as the best deciders of your success in business because it gives you an idea on what the end-users think. There is nothing better than knowing what your customers think about your products or services; you will know your accurate areas of improvement.

5. Social Knowledge Management

Social media today, is not just changing ways of interaction but the way people work. The power of social media can be used to optimize your functions in a big way. You can share, distribute and access knowledge more effectively. As complexity and speed increases dramatically in today’s business and work environment changes regularly, there will be more demand for social knowledge management tools. Two of the best tools one can recommend are BloomFire and KnowlegePlaza.Net.

There are several other social media tools that can keep you engaged with your favorite social media sites. Knowing them or using them will do a world of good for your online business and sometimes offline business too. After all, modern business is all about implementing modern ideas.

Kathryn Smith is an SEO and finance blogger who recommends http://debt-consolidation-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ for your financial guidance. Over the years she has strived hard to help fellow people and businessmen to come up in their education and business respectively.