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.

Read next: 14 essential social media collaboration tools

Image credit: Shutterstock