Monday, 17 September 2012

Useful tools to increase your followers

When running an online store, your engagement through social media is important in not only allowing you to generate added traffic and sales for your business through social commerce, but to also allowing you to engage with your customers and create a unique brand identity. However, if you run your own business, with the number of social media posts and updates you receive every day, it can often be difficult to keep track of all your different accounts. If you are struggling to monitor your social media presence, you can look to use a social media tools in order to give you a helping hand. 

Twitter Lists - While this is simply making use of the Twitter "List" feature within the social platform rather than an separate application, it is a great tool for filtering out your followers in to separate categories. What I mean by this is that, in order to create a brand identity for your business, you may have followed people who are to do with your field of interests, but whose Tweets you don't really care about. You can use the Twitter list feature to segment those people whose Tweets you would like to see into one specific list, meaning that you won't longer have posts you don't really care about taking up space on your feed. The only downside to this is that a list can only contain a maximum of 20 users, meaning that if you have a few hundred followers, you are going to have to filter down your followers into specific lists that relate to what they Tweet.

Crowdbooster - A social media application that you can link to your Facebook and Twitter accounts allowing you to gain an insight into the analytics of your platforms. This enables you to see which of your posts had the best effect on each platform, giving you a helpful look at how you can alter future messages to increase their effectiveness. The application also gives you recommendations about who you should follow that are related to your ecommerce store, while also giving you further tips on what time of the day you should post your messages. One of the key features of Crowdbooster comes in it's audience insights feature. What this does is group your followers into specific categories related to things that they are interested in. If you find that a vast majority are interested in one particular topic, you can look to tailor your content to target these individuals.

Klout - Although many people constantly question how effective your Klout score is, the tool can be useful in allowing you to generate more information regarding your social media posts than you would get through the platforms themselves. A recent overhaul in Klout's layout allows you to see people who have mentioned and engaged with you as well as how each of your posts have performed on each platform. There are a total of 12 different social media platforms for you to link together. Depending on your engagement across the various social media sites, you will receive a "Klout score" that is generated out of 100. The higher the number, the more socially effective you are. 

Social Mention - One of the better social media tools that you can use. If you run an online store looking to promote your brand then this is definitely an application you should be using. How is works is that you visit the social mention website and enter the keyword or phrase you would like to search for. This would most likely be the name of your business. The application will then search across all social media platforms and bring back a list of all the posts which have mentioned that particular word. This is a great way to constantly keep up to date with what it being said about your business or products. 

Postling - Another social media tool that allows you to monitor all of your social media accounts from one user interface. Rather than having to post content on each of your social media accounts, you can use the tool to simply write out your post once and have it placed on each of your social media pages, allowing you to maximise your reach and engagement. Like other tools you can also group together contacts into specific categories, while also allowing you to see instantly what people are saying about you and your posts. However, one of the main benefits for small businesses comes in the ability to instantly see any reviews about your business that are left on Yelp or CitySearch. If you run a small business that is based heavily on public opinion, a number of bad reviews could cripple your business. This feature allows you to become instantly aware of any reviews posted and enables you to respond to one bad review, stopping you from receiving numerous bad reviews for the same issue. The only downside to this is that you must pay to use it, starting at $1 the first month and then $5 for each month after that. 
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