All marketing specialists understandably place high value on the power of influence in social media marketing, as it can play a big part in their relative success in the medium. However, due to the constant growth of the social media audience - and the endless flow of tweets, posts and discussions - manual monitoring of social media bis a constant challenge. You have to keep an eye on the usage of the keywords, look through discussions where they're used and participate in them, keep track of trends, check the keywords of the rivals, check contacts - and all this this before we even mentioning the creation of new, relevant content for your own account. The process, at times, can seem endless.
However, when you have a family and want to have some free time to spend with them, you can use social media monitoring tools to help.
For my social media, as well as for monitoring my kids' activities, I use cell phone monitoring app (available at http://pumpic.com). It helps me to keep track of all updates without constant searching and clicking. So I've taken the model of this approach and started to search for the most helpful social media tools. And from all tools I've tried I would like to recommend these:
1. Hootsuite. Definite must-have. Hootsuite gathers information from multiple social media sites into one place. And this tool is especially effective when you're working in team as you can discuss the analytics reports there and manage team activities as well.
2. Klout. Klout's brilliant when you want to find out what influences the target audience of your business - thus you enabling you to boost engagement among your audience.
3. Social Mention. This tool enables you to listen to what millions of people are saying across social media platforms. It looks through more than 100 social media sites and checks all mentions of your brand name and/or keywords, categorizing them into relevant fields.
4. TweetDeck. If you're having trouble working out the best times to tweet, this tool's for you. Aside from scheduling tweets, also enables you to track hashtag use.
5. Mention. This tool is really powerful, providing monitoring of more than a million of sources - if your brand is mentioned in any one of the 42 languages covered, it'll let you know. The great thing with Mentions is that you can use it for free via trial in all its glory and then use a free basic plan.