The 4 Best Social Media Apps for your Business

Some of the most often used apps online these days are social media related. People the world over, and in all walks of life, are using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Instagram every single day.

They’re using these tools to share their ideas, entertain their friends, and give personal updates to those in their social spheres (and strangers too!). This interest has drawn marketers to social media. Those looking to get the most out of their social media marketing campaigns, and minimize the amount of time they spend doing so, turn to various online applications.

What you can do with a great social media management tool is nothing short of lifesaving for many social media account managers.

Here are 4 applications that social media managers and businesses should look at.

SocialOomph

This multi-platform social media tool is designed to increase your productivity. It currently supports:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Numerous blog platforms

The free side of SocialOomph is best used with Twitter where it can help you schedule tweets, track targeted keywords and features an automatic spam control feature in your DM inbox.

The paid features of the site include:

• scheduled sharing across all platforms
• blog publishing and management
• updating your accounts by email
• scheduling recurring posts and updates

The paid service can really make for a self sufficient little social media tool for many types of online marketing campaigns. This is another one of those time saving apps that allow you to log into one account, manage all of your content in one place for multiple accounts and post it from there. Why log in and out of 3 or 4 accounts all day?

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is my own most used social media management platform. This great tool is an all in one social media application that allows you to post updates to the following accounts:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Foursquare
• MySpace
• Wordpress
• Mixi

With over 3.5 million users, the company has seen great success. They have achieved this success thanks to an innovative design. The most common use for Hootsuite is to manage any one of, or all of, the above mentioned social media platforms. Every single one can be handled from one easy to navigate dashboard.

A Twitter specific feature is the URL shortener ow.ly. This allows you to take up less space when you tweet a link. This is a valuable feature for those looking to maximize what they can say within their 140 character limit. It also allows users to use the data gathered from Hootsuite’s own metrics which are connected to the ow.ly link.

Tweriod

The strength of Tweriod, for all those Twitter account managers out there, is that it allows you to look at statistics for the audience you have on Twitter. The most useful stats it tracks are:

• what your best time may be for sending out a tweet
• when you have the highest number of followers online

Never waste a great tweet again by knowing when you should send it out! This particular social media tool is usually never used on it’s own and is used in conjunction with a broader tool like Hootsuite.

Tweepi

This Twitter specific social media tool is designed to help you regulate your Twitter followers. It is best known for it’s ability to find users who have ‘unfollowed’ you so that you can choose to keep them around or unfollow them as well.

Other useful features include:

• locating inactive users, giving you the option to unfollow them
• being able to ‘force’ other users to unfollow you
• discovering users that you have neglected

You will be hard pressed to find another social media management tool that is better at organizing and editing your Twitter community.

What social media tools work for you?

The number of tools out there that can help online marketers maximize the efficiency of their marketing efforts is nearly uncountable. What you need to figure out is if you’re looking to manage multiple accounts from one dashboard, or if you’re looking to manage one specific account better.

Here is a link to an article with 5 further Twitter management tools alone. If Twitter is you primary social media app, or one you need to focus on more, this article could help you maximize your potential. For those reading, what tools have you been using to maximize your own social media campaigns?