Over the last few years, social media has become an integral part of business and marketing. Now a days, people in the business industry depend a lot on social media to help them keep in touch with their current clients. The internet is a dynamic place. There are so many new things happening around the world and we cannot be online 24/7 to keep track of everything. On top of it, there are multiple social media platforms fighting for attention at any give time. If you’re a small business, you cannot imagine hiring dedicated staff for social media management. Even if you can afford it, you may still not want to.
According to a survey, 40% of small business owners are most likely to outsource TV/radio ads and 35% are likely to do the same with SEO and just 5% want to outsource social media marketing and email newsletters. So, the question here is, how can you manage staying on top of things; interact and engage with your followers while scheduling all those posts on each of these accounts?
This is where social media dashboards come into the picture. An avid social media marketer would’ve probably heard of a social media dashboard before. For those of you who don’t know, a social media dashboard makes social media management seem like a piece of cake. It syncs all your social media accounts in a single convenient place. Basically, a dashboard also allows you to see all your social media analytics at one place, thus eliminating the need to manually go into each account and check what happened in the past week. A social media dashboard will let you connect with all major social media platforms out there. At the bare minimum, most good tools will sync Facebook, Twitter, Google + and LinkedIn. The benefits of using a social media dashboard are – Productivity, Tracking, Scheduling, Analytics and Collaboration.
The five social media dashboards that help small businesses are –
Hootsuite –
Hootsuite is the most widely known social media dashboard. It is easy to use and packed with features. It lets you manage your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, along with Google+, Foursquare, WordPress and MySpace. The platform also offers apps that allow you to monitor and manage marketing tools such as MailChimp or Constant Contact.
VerticalResponse Social –
VerticalResponse Social was created to provide an all-inclusive marketing service for small businesses. This platform blends social media and email tools and is perfect for small business owners who are pressed for time. It’s also a great “social media for dummies” tool — if you’re not too savvy about social media, VerticalResponse Social handles everything for you.
Postling –
Postling is a social media dashboard that not only lets you manage multiple social media accounts, but also scours the Web and sends instant notifications when your business is mentioned on review sites. This platform offers an aggregate screen that pulls your accounts together in an amalgamated stream. It’s compatible with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, WordPress, and YouTube.
SproutSocial –
SproutSocial is probably the best looking and has an engaging dashboard and a Messages view that streams all your account activity into a single feed. The “Smart Inbox” feature also collects your direct social media messages, including mentions on Twitter and Facebook, in an email interface. It also includes some pretty powerful analytics that report on your followers’ demographics and make suggestions for message improvement.
Sendible –
With Sendible, you can pull in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as a long list of blogging platforms and image sharing sites. The platform includes aggregate and monitoring tools, advanced scheduling, analytics and tracking, and a suite of autoresponders for email and social networks. One of the best features of Sendible is the ability to drill down on social networks, letting you choose specific locations to post.
Know of any other kickass social media dashboards? Let us know in the comments. 🙂