By Lucy Hardaker, Published November 14, 2014
Whether your social media goals in 2015 are to generate reach, engagement or leads, (or all three!) you’re going to need some social tools to help you carry out your strategic plans.
But how do we know which social media tools will provide true value in the coming year? Don’t sweat it B2B marketer – you’re not the only one! A whopping 85% of marketers feel they don’t know which social tools are best.
To help you carry out your 2015 social media strategy, we’ve put together some of the top paid-for tools and free tools that will provide value and insight in the coming year – and ultimately help you deliver against those all-important goals & KPI’s.
Free Tools
Social Mention
Beyond keyword tracking, Social Mention provides key insight into your brand’s overall reach and sentiment across social networks and the wider web. It tells you what is said about your brand, and the ‘feeling’ associated with it too.
How to use this tool: Monitor and analyse your brand’s online sentiment on a weekly or monthly basis to gauge the reaction of your followers and audience in a wider context. By understanding passion and sentiment, you’ll gain added human insight into your engagement and reach metrics.
BuzzSumo
Buzzsumo provides social data on top performing content and influencers based on what you search for – and can be as broad or niche as your search terms. What makes this tool so awesome? It highlights the content trends that are driving the highest number of shares across key social networks.
How to use this tool: Use this insight to steer your content distribution on social media – what are the types of headlines and topics each network is most interested in? And how can you incorporate this insight into your wider content strategy?
Feedly
Feedly is an RSS service that helps you find timely and topical content from reputable blogs and sources – all in one feed. You can follow any number of relevant blogs and websites in pretty much any industry, and even pick out top shared and valued ‘featured posts’.
How to use this tool: Become a valued resource to your followers and build engaging social relationships by sharing great content from other sources. Use Feedly to set up dedicated news feeds around industry relevant topics that you can share directly onto your social networks.
Paid Tools
Publishing & Analytics Tools
B2B Marketers are coming under more pressure every day, with over half of us having responsibilities in 7 out of 10 areas of marketing. Tools like Sproutsocial, Hootsuite and Buffer (to name a few) are timesaving dashboards that provide a wealth of insight into your social marketing performance too.
How to use these tools: By managing multiple social networks across one platform, you’ll free up time to delve into the deeper metrics these tools provide, and pull monthly, weekly and daily insight to steer your social activity.
Integrated Marketing Automation Tools
Over 80% of top performing companies are planning to adopt marketing automation tools before 2015 – and with good reason, conversion rates can increase by over 50%! Using tools like Hubspot and Marketo mean you can create integrated campaigns, incorporating your social media activity across multiple touch points (e.g. blogs, landing pages, and emails).
How to use these tools: By utilising a ‘closed system’, you can closely monitor progress across multiple channels, and measure how your social media activity influences different touch points.
Whether you’re looking to gain true insight, and build value or free up time for analysis, carry out your 2015 social media strategy with confidence using these top recommended tools.
Want to be the Ultimate B2B Marketer? Download the Ultimate Content Planner to align your social media and content strategy for 2015.
What social media tools will you be using in 2015? Tweet us @LeadForensics using #UltimateContent.
This blog was originally posted on the Lead Forensics website. Read the original article here.
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