Gadgets on a Utility Belt: How Social Media Management Tools can Streamline your Social Listening Process
A social media management tool is software designed to simplify the process of planning out social content across platforms and campaigns. Social media management tools allow you to “publish to, monitor, and manage one or more of your social media networks from one interface” (Cockburn). From creating and posting content to analytics and reporting, these tools help streamline the posting process and simplify operations to cut costs and labor time.
Social media management tools are crucial to the success of any business with an online presence because they provide the ability to manage tasks from multiple platforms on a single dashboard, which is a huge time saver. Additionally, a social media management tool that includes a content calendar allows you to effortlessly connect your content and social accounts, serving as a content organizer to ensure material reaches the targeted audience at the correct time. These tools have the ability to monitor your campaign as a whole and combine data from each platform together into one. “Viewing top-level metrics allows you to assess overall performance and use your learning to make adjustments and further boost engagement/click-throughs/sign-ups/etc.” (Brennan, 2017). Moreover, social media management tools act as a governance system to proofread posts before publishing to avoid mistakes and social faux pas. Social media management tools keep your business and personal accounts separate and have features to limit which employees can perform certain tasks. Therefore, when all corporate social media updates are published to a dedicated platform, it becomes much more difficult for users to post from the wrong account, as they do not need to switch between accounts in their apps. Finally, social media management tools are used as listening tools to monitor customers and competitors. By observing how your competition responds to trends and developments within your industry, it “becomes easier to define a strategy that builds on the successes of your competitors and avoids the mistakes they make” (Brennan, 2017).
One of the key aspects any company would choose to use a social media management tool is the effectiveness it provides in allowing their social media management team the ability to engage in active social listening. Social listening is a proactive management tactic used to better understand what your customers want in a product or service and the reasons behind those needs. “With social listening, you actively keep tabs on industry hashtags, keywords, and competitor accounts. Setting aside time in the day, you purposefully read through matching tweets, pins, and other social posts to see what you can learn from them and how you can improve your own messaging and social media activity” (Osman, 2020).
A comprehensive social listening strategy requires a third-party tool to analyze large volumes of data. “For example, analyzing your brand’s @mentions on Twitter within a given timeframe and surfacing frequently mentioned hashtags, keywords, and associated terms can help you gauge sentiment and understand what people are saying about your brand, products, and campaigns” (Tesmond, 2019). Listening tools provide immense value by discovering patterns and uncovering trends which businesses can use for making strategic decisions.
Hootsuite is one social media management tool that really allows managers to engage in social listening. It gives you the opportunity to both create content effectively and compare analytics to help determine the best kind of content to post as well as when to post it. These features are essential in helping boost your company’s ROI (McLachlan, 2020). First, the scheduling function is key because timing is crucial for how positively your followers respond to content. Hootsuite gives you the ability to select your desired platform, queue the text, and click “Schedule for Later” to make it much easier to post certain content at a desired time. This helps your general social listening strategy because it allows you to actively keep up with the content your followers want to see. Next, Hootsuite’s capability of allowing you to monitor your multiple social media accounts and streamline your customer service functions will help increase the quality, not just the quantity, of your posts.
Sprout Social, on the other hand, is another social media management platform that offers many similar features as Hootsuite does. Sprout Social’s analytics has great functionalities such as quantitative and contextual data analysis that allows you to see how successful your script is, for example, as well as how you’re doing compared to competitors. Another useful aspect of Sprout Social is their content scheduling, which is very similar to Hootsuite’s feature, but Sprout calls theirs “ViralPost”; it is a great feature that finds the optimal time to post based on your followers’ activity. Furthermore, the Smart Inbox allows you to simultaneously keep track of and monitor conversations you’ve had with followers about your brand. It is useful for helping in social listening because it really centralizes these conversations and allows you to keep referring back to them so you know what kind of alterations need to be made to your branding so you can retain and expand your follower base. Next, another helpful feature is Brand Keywords, which help track a variety of topics and display custom searches so you can respond and engage with followers more easily. The Keyword Report will allow managers to uncover a variety of trends in your Twitter trac, which enables you to show followers the most talked-about aspect of your business.
In summary, social media management tools are like gadgets on a tool belt. They enable social media managers many different ways to engage in social listening. These include creating curated content calendars, following advanced metrics that will allow them to analyze how effective their content is and how well-received it is with followers, and searching for keywords to be able to track trends within the network. Two examples of these tools are Hootsuite and Sprout Social, and they both use similar methods and techniques to help managers accomplish their goals.
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