If you’re managing social media accounts for your multi-location business, you already know how difficult it can be to keep up with. Tweets, retweets, Facebook posts, comments, monitoring, tracking, reputation management, etc. – it can get overwhelming pretty quickly.
Fortunately, there are many tools available to choose from to help a social media manager effectively (and efficiently) manage the activity of every page for every business. There are tools that let you know when your brand is mentioned on the internet, tools that schedule your content, tools that create analytics to help you track the success of your accounts, and so on.
But the challenge is no longer finding social management tools, but choosing which tools will be most useful for your business in helping you achieve your social media marketing objectives, such as growing your fan base, increasing engagement, and driving more quality traffic to your location-specific websites.
To help you narrow down your options, and increase your productivity and social success, here are my top 7 recommended social media tools for businesses with multiple accounts:
1. SocialOomph – This platform is excellent for content you want to schedule for days, weeks, months ahead of time. It allows you to store content in “queues” and choose when you would like the content to go live. It also allows you to choose a time frame for each post and randomizes the schedule time, each time (so your accounts don’t feel like their managed by a robot).
2. Buffer – Buffer is a simple browser add-on. It’s very simple to use, yet it is so crucial to every social media campaign. Buffer is great to schedule highly relevant content. Let’s say your favorite blogger added some new content to their site. Buffer allows you to go to that article and share it right from your browser! You can also use buffer directly in social platforms to share others’ content.
3. Crowdbooster – It’s that time of the month again; reporting time. This tool is a must-have for analytics and reporting. It showcases account growth, shares, retweets, mentions – you name it. It’s incredibly user friendly and gives every statistic you’ll need, from when your audience is most engaged, to previous engagement, and everything in between.
4. SocialBro – SocialBro goes above and beyond when it comes to community insights. You can look at when competitors/community is tweeting and even what time there is most engagement – this tool is incredibly useful to help you get to know your audience, which is key if your managing social media accounts for more than one location.
You can really get into the nitty gritty in terms of finding information about your target audiences. You can search by specific job titles, keywords, etc.
5. SproutSocial – This tool is a total time-saver for multi-location businesses. It allows you to quickly and easily schedule and share content from multiple accounts. Let’s say your company is having a sale and you have 8 store fronts, each with their individual social pages. Instead of writing 8 different posts, you can write one and schedule the post for all accounts right on this platform. It is also really handy when it comes to Facebook analytics.
6. Feedly – Feedly might be my favorite tool the internet has to offer. It allows you to compile all your RSS feeds into one easy-to-use platform. It generates a feed of all the blogs you would ever want to follow for you. This is really useful when you have multiple business locations that are similar in their target demographic.
In addition to following industry-relevant blogs, you can search topics by article title and narrow your search until you find exactly what you want to share with your audience.
7. Mention – Mention is simple. It does exactly what the title says. Whenever your brand or your specific store locations are mentioned on the internet, it compiles that information within one platform. This is useful in both the PR world and social world.
All of these tools go above and beyond what I have explained, and they all have advanced options for multi-account accessibility, management and even reporting. With these tools, you can end the tedious tasks of clicking back and forth between each location’s account, and start increasing productivity while gaining more actionable, profitable insight into each of your location’s social media accounts and your target audience.
All the best,
Carly
Carly Cunningham is a Social Media Coordinator at Stream Companies, a Philadelphia area advertising agency.
