4 tools for building a social media empire

In a business world, not so very long ago, many
debated the pros and cons of integrating social
media into their company’s marketing plan.
A few enterprising leaders championed strategy and
took the brave leap into conquering the brand
presence on a variety of social media networks.
The bricks were laid to the castle of benefits that
come with a strong social media presence —
improved SEO, customer insights, brand authority…
the list goes on. Those days are now long gone.
Your business, no matter if it’s a fledgling startup
or international enterprise, is on social media
winning battles for engagement, retention and
customer service. To continue building a social
media empire, you need battlegear to manage
bombastic analytics, promote kingly content and
further grow golden conversion rates. Gone are the
days of tedious management – it’s the age of
essentials for schedulings, reporting and link
tracking. To be the best, you need the best tools of
the trade. Here are a few to consider:
Grow presence with BuzzBundle
Like the name suggests, Link-Assistant.Com’s
social media tool BuzzBundle , bundles up all of the
optimal features needed to create “buzz.” The
platform integrates Facebook, Twitter, Google+ ,
LinkedIn , VKontakte , blogs, forums and Q&A sites
for posting-with-a-purpose and converged strategy
across all sites.
A key feature to the platform , separating it from
others on the market, is the ability to manage
different social media personas without any
logouts or logins. For example, the President of the
company is not likely to be commenting on the
company Facebook page during the day because
they’re busy. So, with careful strategy the social
media team can craft a persona to rep the brand
for interaction with company content. Then, switch
to seamlessly posting as a customer service
persona to respond to questions, complaints and
feedback. Use these personas to encourage and
add to generating positive buzz. Talk about
effective, easy reputation management . You
shouldn’t leave your company’s reputation in the
hands of trolls or disgruntled customers.
BuzzBundle works to max out SEO so you’re the
top of the heap on Google (and other search
engines). From one screen social media managers
can view a full perspective of who is linking to your
company’s website from across the web including
blogs, forums and social media.
Plus you can compare and contrast by evaluating
to industry competitors by viewing where they are
getting linked to across the web. This is valuable
info for considering where to link-build on the
most SEO-productive places.
Speaking of competitors, always be on top of their
battle plans. Your competitors will make you better
by pushing you to continue innovating, conversing,
and developing. BuzzBundle makes it incredibly
convenient to monitor competitor mentions,
discussions and SEO. The best way to beat the
beast is to play their game—add keywords and
URLs to the social management portal for regular
reporting on the competition.
You wouldn’t buy a bike before you tried it, right?
Same goes for social media tools. When picking
and choosing from the cornucopia of digital
holding management software it’s always wise to
test the platform. Luckily BuzzBundle is
downloadable for free on Mac OS X, Windows, and
Linux and UNIX.
Leverage employees with PostBeyond
For a large enterprise, employees can be a valuable
target audience and resource for spreading brand
messaging. Employees, after all, are your
company’s most valuable asset. If employees feel
connected with the brand and want to help the
company succeed they will be encouraged to share
content about the company. This is where a tool
like PostBeyond adds value.
An advantage to PostBeyond is the marketing and
social media team controls the primary message
that gets disseminated by employees. Along with
this start and expiration dates can be applied to
the content, which is important in the case of an
embargo or new product release. After content is
pushed to users connected to the PostBeyond
platform, administrators can evaluate what content
is most effective with employees as well as see
who has generated the most traffic for the brand.
Which sounds like an excellent feature to organize
an incentive program for content sharing around.
For the employee, the platform is beneficial for
keeping company news in one easy portal as well
as one-click sharing. Remember before integrating
a platform like PostBeyond into the workplace it is
essential to have clear social media guidelines as
well as set the expectation that sharing on social
about the company during the day is welcomed,
within certain parameters.
Visual ROI with Canva
Beyond the basics of Facebook and Twitter the
growth of visual social networks (think Instagram,
Periscope, Snapchat , Pinterest) have exceptional
potential for branding and engagement. Depending
on your brand’s target audience, these platforms
may actually be your most valuable, (think
Millennials on Snapchat). It is never too late to get
in on this game, as few companies are fully
investing (or doing so slowly) in these networks
due to longstanding strategy and a lack of social
tools to assist in content creation.
Canva comes to the rescue with its readymade
templates and incredibly user friendly image
editing tools from cropping to enhancements, and
everything inbetween. Focus on a hashtag or shine
the light on a quote by adding text in a variety of
fonts or placing speech bubbles. Seriously,
everything from the perfect specs for an Instagram,
to photo grids, to badges with your company’s
handles for the next industry event can be created
swiftly in Canva online and then downloaded for
production and rollout.
That visual ROI can be huge; don’t miss it just
because you don’t have the photo editing tools or
software on your desktop.
B2B selling made simple with pipeliner
Messaging to customers through social media is
one thing, but actually selling them on a product or
service is another. Pipeliner CRM was designed
with the input of sales pros for sales pros to use to
close the deal. The system is used for tracking all
aspects of the sales process, complete with org
charts, task lists, and 3D timelines of sales
opportunities and closures.
Pipeliner CRM integrates communications of
Facebook, Twitter, Google+ along with email and a
wide range of apps.
For sales managers, Pipeliner offers the ability to
compare sales personnel performance based on
five KPIs and separable by time period, territory,
region, and team. This can aid in better
management and overall performance for the
company.
The system is highly visual and incredibly
appealing. It does not force you to change your
sales process or stages to fit within the box. No
programming or full-time administrator is needed
as your sales team can configure the customizable
sales process.
Before you get back to work
These social tools are just the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to running a successful social
media empire. Depending on your goals and type
of social media presence (conversational, customer
service, B2B selling, a mix of many) there are
going to be numerous tools that serve your needs.
Define the end goal before investing in a tool, host
training with your team, and then get to work
scaling your presence above and beyond any
current barriers.