Five Tools Every Social Media Professional Shouldn’t Live Without

As anyone who works in the social-media field knows, the Internet never sleeps. The world of social media is truly constant, putting increasing amounts of pressure on those of us working so hard to customize it to our brands. As this pressure adds up, the use of various marketing tools not only becomes helpful, but necessary. Below are tools that every social-media professional really shouldn’t live without; the benefits are endless.

1. Topsy: With this tool, brands are able to measure and analyze virtually any topic, keyword, hashtag or term that has been shared online across nearly every platform. The tool also provides specific metrics for your business to measure and predict potential contents’ success.

The use of Topsy is all in one; giving you the tools to research past trends, reveal potential new ideas for your campaign and predict how it will fare compared to what is popular in both history and in real-time.

2. Postplanner: This site brands itself as a time-saving, post-creating, reach-boosting tool to use for content creation specifically on Facebook. With one click of a button, Postplanner will generate a creative new status for you to directly send to your viewers. If you are short on time, as most social marketers are, this tool is essential for creating meaningful content in no time at all, always based on relevant keywords.

3. Mention: As social-media professionals, we understand the importance of just one simple mention online. Every single thing shared about your business should be monitored and recorded. We also know that it is nearly impossible to keep track on our own. For a reasonable price, Mention is a one-stop, shop-monitoring tool that tracks all mentions across the Web. Allowing for real-time updates across any device, you will certainly never miss another shout-out again.

4. GroupHigh: All of those shout-outs that you track through Mention wouldn’t exist without actually getting our content out there. As social marketers, we understand the importance of promoting our content through blogging relationships. GroupHigh is an excellent tool that streamlines these conversations, based on both the brand and blogger needs.

5. KISSmetrics: This final tool helps brands to identify some of the most important things for social marketers to measure; who was on your site, what they were doing there and why. KISSmetrics promotes itself as the tool to help brands truly understand their customers and what is important to them. Again, as social marketers, understanding this piece of information is truly essential to successfully doing our jobs. You can check out all sorts of metrics and see if you need to hire a web design company to make you a sweet Facebook landing page, or if you need to find better conversion rates.

As you consider which marketing tools and metrics are best for your business, remember that with social media there must always be a human voice behind everything. There is nothing worse than a clearly automated social-media presence for any brand. If you feel that you cannot provide this for every platform, work on making one presence amazing, rather than having a mediocre tone across multiple sites.

Scott Huntington is a writer, reporter, blogger, and social media marketer for CJ Pony Parts. Follow Scott at @SMHuntington