How Social Media Management Tools Help Community Engagement and Social Listening
Nowadays, you see small brands becoming popular overnight and creating conversation across the country. As brands are becoming larger and more successful over time, there have to be some tips and tricks that help them grow along the way, right?
Well, that is where social media tools come into play. Social media tools are helpers for brands to grow extraordinary over time. There are a myriad of them, which we will discuss later. But first, let’s discuss what they assist with.
Social Listening
One of the many things that social media tools assist with is social listening. According to What Is Social Listening, Why It Matters, and 10 Tools to Make It Easier, social listening gives brands the opportunity to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about them on social media.
It is specifically, when you track any conversations that your brand has been a part of, and check your social media platforms for mentions. Social listening is considered to be a two step process, as stated in the article.
Step #1: To monitor social media channels for brand mentions, competitors, keywords, and products related to your business.
Step #2: To analyze the information for ways to put all the information you have learned into action. This ranges from completely shifting your brand positioning, to simply answering a comment from a customer on a social media platform.
Community Engagement
Another thing that social media tools assist with is community engagement. According to 8 Tips for a Foolproof Community Engagement Strategy, community engagement is the process of engaging with your community to build a larger audience and gain new customers. It is then extended to keeping the customers attentive and updated within the particular brand.
The article then goes to discuss tips for community engagement strategy such as: be enthusiastic, attitude matters most in communications, know which channel for which kind of content, show interest and be interested in your community, promote others before yourself, etc.
Now that we have talked about what social media tools do, let’s talk about two that are taking the world by storm and how they implement these ideas.
According to The 25 Best Social Media Management Tools for Businesses of all sizes, two of the top social media management tools are Buffer and Hootsuite.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management platform that is designed to help brands, businesses, agencies,with creating meaningful engagements and driving results. It has a variety of products for engagement, team collaborations and publishing.
Buffer: A Microcosm for Better Social Relations, explains that there are many tools from Buffer that are extremely helpful. One of the features that Buffer has in particular is the ability to bring a company’s multiple social media accounts into one dashboard. This makes it easier for the company to create a schedule, monitor posts, view analytics, etc.
Additionally, Buffer offers a “reply” platform where brands can answer back. With Buffer, the account is particularly able to see “context-rich customer profiles” where it can see whoever is liking its pictures, their location, and possibly their company or position in the company.
Although Buffer seems to be extremely popular among social media management tools, Hootsuite seems to be a fair competitor as well.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is known as the biggest social media management tool, with over 15 million users. It has the ability for users to measure their social ROI, schedule content, analyze data and more.
Hootsuite offers many features that most platforms do not, such as being able to monitor many accounts at once, connect with 35 networks, and schedule many social media posts at the same time.
Hootsuite vs. Buffer
According to Social Media Management Tools Showdown: Hootsuite vs.Buffer while comparing the two, it can be found that there are definitely pros and cons to both. Both platforms allow you to add multiple social media accounts on the free version. Hootsuite limits users to 30 scheduled posts total, while Buffer only allows 10 per social media account.
In terms of availability when it comes to social media platforms, Both Buffer and Hootsuite work with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, Hootsuite can manage Wordpress blogs and Youtube channels as well.
As for conversation management, Hootsuite and Buffer are quite different. As stated above, Hootsuite lets users to customise their dashboards. With this feature, companies can create a tab for Twitter mentions, Facebook messages, Youtube comments, and reply all within the same spot.
Although Buffer has this ability, it uses an entire different platform called Buffer Reply. Reply allows companies to assign a certain conversation to a team member, add notes to conversations, and even see when team members are responding.
Both Buffer and Hootsuite have the ability of improving community engagement and social listening. However, Buffer Reply in particular seems to be very catered towards improving community engagement. It seems that it works most for improving two-way communication.
It can be concluded that if you are thinking about social media management tools that you would want to boost community engagement, it seems that Buffer reply may be your best bet. However, Hootsuite seems like an amazing option as well for different reasons!
