Three social media marketing tools to use – today

Effective social media marketing is something my clients in Bristol, Bath and London are heavily focused upon – and indeed they should be. It’s at the heart of much of the social media content I deliver on their behalf. The inexorable rise and rise of social media engagement seems to be continuing unabated in 2012 – I couldn’t have predicted the meteoric growth of social media marketing when I started blogging for myself and clients back in 2005. But here we are – and social media marketing seems to be stepping up its game, in terms of monitoring and measuring. I’ve got no financial link or commercial connection with them, but three tools I’ve come across which will transform your social media marketing today are: * Social Flow Having had a catchup with Cardiff-based social media consultant – and all-round good guy – Allan Blair Beaton recently, he pointed me to a brilliant social media monitoring and measurement tool, in the form of Social Flow. It looks absolutely awesome, too. Why? This tool is smart with a capital S. It monitors the audience, and highlights the best times to publish across different social media platforms to gain the best engagement, based on previous audience behaviour. Super-charged social media engagement. * Planspot I blogged about this event promotion platform last week, and it’s good to see these Holland-based guys delivering an incredible (and free to use) combination of event promotion and social media integration in their current Planspot offering. If you have an event, seminar, exhibition, workshop or similar to get out there, and you want to seriously connect with an audience via social media engagement at the same time, Planspot is a must-try. This is definitely one to watch – and to use now. * Hootsuite Pro This is, for me, the best social media content management platform out there – by a long way. The Hootsuite basic package is free, and is perfectly adequate in its own right. The Pro package, however, gives insights, analytics, and statistical feedback which adds a huge amount of value to any serious social media marketing. Expensive? No – far from it. Less than £5 per month, in fact. The Hootsuite team have also developed and recently-launched a business-focused package called Enterprise, too. The Hootsuite Pro package integrates all social media platforms with ease. Are you taking your social media marketing seriously? These tools make it incredibly easy and manageable to devise and deliver powerful and professional social media marketing Campaigns across multiple social media platforms. As with all marketing, it takes an investment of time, energy and cash to get the best results. For me, these three tools help reduce the guesswork around social media ROI – and also make sure that social media marketing is being taken seriously.