3 Must-Have Features When Choosing Social Media Management Software
When you use various social media platforms, maintaining each account can be difficult. Beyond managing different social media accounts, you need software to provide you with advanced features to catapult your business to the next level.
Reputation Management
Every business will encounter a mixture of criticism and praise. Now, social media is the primary platform customers use to voice their opinions and concerns about businesses. Some of these opinions will go directly on your social media pages. However, it can be impossible to track every mention of your business on social media. Reputation management features can compile information that might otherwise go unnoticed. Staying updated on how customers perceive your business shows you care about the opinions of your customers.
When you notice consistent, ongoing problems, you can use this information to make improvements. You also need to know when criticism of your company crosses the line and becomes slanderous. Quick action by your business can help defuse the situation before it escalates. Just as you want to address criticisms, you want to acknowledge praise. Word of mouth is one of the most effective and influential forms of advertising. When customers have good things to say about your business without being asked, they deserve acknowledgement.
Social Analytics
Social analytic features can give you a wealth of information about your audience and how they engage with your brand. This information can be critical in product development or advertising campaigns. You can quickly determine basic information from different social media platforms, such as age, location and gender of your audience. For example, if your business specializes in clothing and you are releasing a winter line of clothing, you will want to know the geography of your audience on different social media platforms.
If a significant percentage of your audience on one social media platform lives in areas with harsh winters, you may want to advertise more information about your winter coats. On other social media platforms, your audience may be largely people who live in milder climates. Heavily marketing winter coats to an audience living in areas with milder winters would not be as effective. When possible, you can use demographic information to create targeted advertising campaigns based on the characteristics of your followers on each social media platform.
Posting Schedules
Automating most of your social media activity makes maintaining each account easier, especially as your company grows and you have several social media accounts. Your business can formulate posts weeks or months in advance and spend more time engaging with the community you have created around your brand. Scheduling your posts is not only about efficiency. Some social media management software incorporates other features to optimize your posting. No matter how interesting or useful your post, allowing it to go live at the wrong time can reduce the impact.
Having a general idea of what time users are the most active on different social media sites can help you schedule your posts more effectively. You want your posts to go live when they are more likely to be noticed by your audience. The way audiences consume information on different social media platforms can also influence how often you repost information. Reposting information is more acceptable on social media sites where the feed goes by fast, since posts are easily overlooked. Since information goes by quickly, you can feel comfortable repeating posts more than once per week without annoying your audience.
The usefulness and influence of social media on your business is an important part of marketing and customer relations. Consider incorporating social media management software with advanced features to help improve your online presence and create effective interaction with your audience.