5 reasons why top successful businesses are using social media tools and you should too!

By Nischal Shetty

There are thousands of businesses out there doing the same things as you are, maybe they’re even better at it than you are. It’s so important to always be on your toes when it comes to acquiring new customers because each missed opportunity could lead to losing valuable customers to a competitor.

Social media is a huge space filled with millions of potential customers. According to a recent study, there are currently more than 3 billion active social media users around the world. That’s almost half of the world’s population! Social media is a serious market that your brand just can’t afford to miss out on.

But it sure is a crowded space! Chances are that almost all of your competitors already have a social media team managing their socials. From the biggest corporates to start-ups, and even small business firms, everyone understands how important the social media market is. But, maintaining a well-balanced social media presence can be a time-consuming and costly process if not done smartly.

A social media management tool is what will help you gain that extra edge over your competitors while also helping you save time, effort and money you’d otherwise be spending without a concrete plan.

Intrigued yet? Read on to find out why exactly should your brand be using a social media management tool like the big players out there.

1. To help you schedule posts in advance

A good social media strategy requires consistency and regular posting across all your social platforms. Imagine how much time you’re wasting by manually posting to each social platform at a particular time you decided.

With the help of a social media tool, you can now schedule your posts hours, days, weeks, and months in advance! This helps you save tons of time and also helps you plan a well-balanced social calendar for your business in advance. When it’s time to post, your social media management tool will automatically publish these posts to the specified social accounts.

Your social content might also overlap across different social media platforms a lot of times. Using a management tool, you can schedule the same posts across, say Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. in the same step.

Social media management tools even help you choose a good time to post for you to help you gain maximum engagement on your content, usually a time when most of your followers are most active. So you no longer have to waste time calculating the best time to post yourselves!

2. To help you manage multiple channels

Social media doesn’t just mean Twitter and Facebook. There are Facebook pages, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn account and Linkedin pages, Youtube, Tumblr, and many other blogging platforms! If you’re spending time logging into each platform during the day and posting content on each one of them separately, then I can tell you right away that you’re wasting loads of valuable time.

Social media apps help you connect all of your social media accounts and manage them ALL from the same dashboard. You can now simply log into your management tool’s dashboard and get important data for all of your accounts for you to compare key metrics in the same place. Hundreds of open tabs for each social media platforms are a thing of the past, my friend!

3. To provide quick customer support

Customer service is one of the biggest cogs in the wheel to run your business smoothly. With so many potential and real customers on social media, it’ll be almost perilous to direct these customers to another platform such as e-mail or phone call just to get in touch with you. With the real time benefit of social media, instant gratification has become a necessity rather than a luxury to customers. So, you’ll always find users publicly demanding help with your service or product. Time is always key with such users. A public request on social media doesn’t just involve you and the user, but also thousands of your followers and theirs. So, each customer interaction can make or break your company’s reputation.

With the help of a good social media tool, you’ll now be able to simplify customer support for your brand. A tool will help you keep track of all your social conversations like tweets, direct messages, Facebook comments and a lot more, within a single dashboard so that you don’t miss out on any of your mentions. A missed support query is worse than delayed support for sure. These tools help perform actions such as reply and close a conversation so that it moves out of your main view, and you don’t have to look at it until the user replies. You’ll also be able to assign conversation to particular team members so that no two people commit the error of replying to the same message at once.

A good support experience will go a long way in earning long-term loyal customers and you’ll see some of these users become the torchbearers for your brand.

4. To keep an eye out on the competitors

Keeping an eye on your competitor’s marketing strategy has always been one of the most common marketing hacks and the social media space should be no different. Since they’re your competitors, you’ll find your target audience always overlapping. So, it’s important to analyse your competitors’ strategy to see how your own brand stacks against them.
Social media apps help you get insights such as:

? how your competitors’ content is performing,
? which type of content works better for them,
? who’s following them,
? who’s talking about them,
? which platforms are your competitors most active on,
? their posting patterns,
? and a lot more!

All of these detailed insights will help you adapt your social media better so that you can one up their own strategy and gain a competitive advantage!

5. To understand how effective your own social media strategy is

Putting all of that time and effort into your social media campaigns will amount to nothing if you don’t have any results to compare. It’s super important to have a set of metrics to chase in order to plan successful social media strategies.

Social media tools help you monitor your own posts so that you have a tight hold on your social media campaigns. If something’s not working, you can always adapt and change your strategy if you have detailed analytics to review. It’s also important to have concrete numbers to report while justifying your social investments. A social media tool will help provide detailed metrics and absolute numbers with just a few clicks, eliminating the need for manual labour. Using the information you derive from these tools, you can plan better strategies for the future.

Social media management doesn’t have to be scary and time-consuming, it’s all about smart work. Social media tools will help you save tons of time which you could put to better use by strategising your campaigns and creating good content instead. Leave the labour and execution to these tools, and you have a recipe for success!

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Nischal Shetty is the founder and CEO of Crowdfire, and has been featured on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.

Featured image credit: Today Testing