Here are some of the toolkits in social media space that will make your task that much simpler

Making the decision for your organisation to be on the social media bandwagon is really the easy part these days, a no-brainer even. It’s when you get down to business do you come across one of the most unrecognised hurdles of social media management—picking the right tools to manage your social media efforts. Too often have I seen folks getting hung up on evaluating tools to figure out what is the best tool for the job… and before they know it, days (if not weeks) have passed, and they’re no further down the road than the day they started! To remedy this situation exactly, we have compiled a list of tools—a social media toolkit, if you will—to get you started down the path.

HOOTSUITE:

HootSuite does two things, and does them extremely well—monitor all your social media feeds in one application and schedule your posts across a range of platforms and from a number of accounts in advance. Start using HootSuite and you can preprogramme your posts to follow a structured, automated and efficient workflow. Clearly, the ability to structure your post frequency means that HootSuite works better for businesses focused on pushing out content and “thought leadership” style posts to their audience. The product by itself has multiple levels of membership—both free and paid—but you can probably get away with the free version for a while, at least. Just keep in mind—this tool is clearly foroutbound communication, and does not replace good ol’ human interaction with your audience!

SOCIAL MENTION:

One-way conversations rarely work, right? It is equally important you are listening not only to your audiences but also to the social web at large, and Social Mention lets you do just that—monitor news sources, web sites, blogs or microblogs and a lot more—for key terms that may relate to your brand or industry segment. Each of these terms is measured in terms of the sentiment associated with the mention and who or what the source of these mentions was. Not only does this tool give you a high-level view of how your brand is perceived socially, it also gives you direct insight into opportunities where your brand can engage with individual influencers to set right misconceptions or quell rumors before they gain traction. Naturally, Social Mention suits businesses with some degree of social media presence—if you’re just starting out on the social media journey, none of the metrics will show any meaningful data. The best part? This is a free tool, so you can start using it from day one with no additional outlay.

TWEETREACH:

Active on twitter, and plan to run contests and other user engagement campaigns on the micro-blogging service? Tweetreach can then identify the reach and exposure for the hashtag you’ve selected for the contest/event —what this will do is show you not only what size audience the contest has reached, but the ability to see who has interacted with your hashtag or brand (i.e. retweeted and mentioned).

For a similar monitoring service for Facebook/ LinkedIn, consider Social Bakers, which offers competitive social media intelligence at substantial cost saving compared with a dedicated social media research agency.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS:

Your website is a key component to your social media measurement, and the level of insights that Google Analytics reveals about your site, your categories/sections and the audience is unparalleled, and not just because this tool is a free offering.

With Google Analytics, you can create custom reports and even track specific customers, and gather valuable information about which posts or pages attract the most visitors, and get social analytics for insight on how they interact, and more critically, whether your social media efforts are paying off! Of course, if you’re advertising on the web, the tool can also measure how much you are selling online and how well your ads are performing.

And that’s it—with this pick of tools, you have enough to get started to interact, listen and monitor your social channels. Of course, you can look at the excellent compilations in the links below for further tools for your specific needs once you’ve gotten your own social media workflow in place.