5 Social Media Tools That Hugely Benefit Your Business

Do you really need social media tools? Oh yes, you do.

Social media is big but we all know how it sucks time out of your already busy schedule.

Organic marketing doesn’t directly contribute to your ROI (but it does so indirectly and is one of the major parts of the what I call as the digital marketing spectrum).

You can’t really put your finger on how social media contributes directly to your bottomline, and get that.

No one ever said that everything you do in business has to directly put cash on the table. Blogging, social media, and email marketing also help boost your brand value and help maintain authority in the niche your business operates in.

That’s what it does. It’s a new way to build your branding.

When you send that Tweet out, people notice you even if that tweet lasts for just about an hour. Your Facebook posts still get views, and so do your videos.

But you do want social media to work for you and contribute in some way, don’t you?

Here’s how you make it work for your business with a few of these tools:

Google’s UTM Generator Tool

Wondering what a regular Google UTM (Urchin Tracking Mode) is doing on a list that was supposed to be dedicated social media tools?

You wouldn’t want to put out a single social update or a link anywhere without the UTM URLs. Google’s UTM generator helps you churn out a specific URL that helps track where the traffic is coming from.

While you’d still get to track sources and mediums that generate traffic for your website by directly looking into your Google Analytics data, you’d not want to take a chance. Instead, you can stay in control by taking that little effort upfront and track your sources.

Go here, bookmark the Google URL Generator and use it for every medium or source you use to generate traffic.

While you are here, this is how you create UTM links for your marketing campaigns:

Linkiro

Linkiro helps you make every social media update count. Use Linkiro to make your calls to action (point to a landing page or your website) and generate leads or make sales.

Sign up for Linkiro, Create your branded Call to actions (Point the buttons to your landing pages, your website, or any other page you want to promote. Much like Snip.ly, your CTA will show up on any page your social follows will visit.

Read Linkiro Review

Snip.ly

Snip.ly has been around for a while and I’ve always advocated using Snip.ly while you post updates on social media so as to lead traffic to specific pages or landing pages you’d want them to visit.

Snip.ly helps with a dedicated bar (with a CTA) at the bottom (or top) of every page that you’d share on social media even if what you are sharing isn’t really your content.

Now, consider this:

For all our clients, we advocate the 50:30:20 principle to follow on social media. What this means is that:

Out of 10 updates on social media (all networks), you’d share, post or update this way:

• 50% (Or 5 out of 10) updates from all other non-competing sources of information with links on social profiles. In our case, we’d be sharing anything about digital marketing from online sources like moz.com.
• 30% (or 3 out of 10) updates with content from our own blog or other content marketing pieces we publish elsewhere (including Youtube videos or SlideShare slides)
• 20% (2 out of 10) updates are strictly related to engagement, casual talk, connecting with others, etc.

In this typical scenario, you are posting/sharing/publishing at least 50% of all the updates that are not your own. Which means that if you use snip.ly for every external piece of content you share, you’d have that much chance of getting traffic from all of those updates daily.

HootSuite Or Buffer

Social media might be big and important. If you don’t focus and be careful, you’ll find that it can suck all the time and productivity out of your busy schedule.

You can’t afford to log in and out of your social networks all day long. Plus, given that an average social media update’s life is just about an hour, you’d have to post many updates just to be visible and generate enough impressions to make an impact or be known or become popular.

That’s why, you’d need to use Hootsuite or Buffer to help schedule posts in advance. This frees up your time for all the other things you’d need to do.

Brand24

If you marginally popular, you’d start seeing people mention your brand. They’d often discuss about your brand and there might be full-fledged communities around your brand. Plus, there are also random mentions about your business or brand that you’d miss if you are not monitoring your social presence all the time.

As if social media itself wasn’t a major time suck by itself, monitoring every single conversation around your brand will potentially wipe out days and weeks off your calendar.

But there’s a smarter way to monitor your brand. Use Brand24 and make your job a wee bit easier. Brand24 allows you to monitor all your social channels, mentions, conversations, and more.

Note: Did you know that SEMrush has a comprehensive social media toolkit? You can schedule posts, monitor social mentions, track your social content, and also run social ads.