Web professionals are putting a lot of resources into social media marketing with the hopes of increasing their brands' visibility and influencing sales.
The challenge, however, is correlating social actions like retweets and shares to website actions like conversions. Luckily, the Web is full of social media management platforms that can help Web professionals not only track the performance of their social initiatives, but also engage a variety of audiences from one central location. Learn more about 18 of these platforms below:
Brandwatch
Klout: 63
The Brandwatch Analytics platform enables users to monitor and analyze worldwide online conversations about their brand, competitors and topics of interest. The platform comes with a robust set of features that can help brands examine consumer sentiment, be used to pinpoint the location of consumer mentions as well as identify a brand's top influencers.
Buffer
Klout: 72
Buffer for Business enables brands to share social updates across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and App.net. Through the platform, businesses can designate team members as admins, schedule social updates in advance as well as monitor analytics such as likes, shares and retweets.
Crimson Hexagon
Klout: 58
Crimson Hexagon's ForSight platform helps brands measure and analyze social data. For example, users can leverage the platform's topic clustering technology to identify popular topics on social networks as well as analyze demographic information through the platform's author location maps.
Crowdbooster
Klout: 58
Crowdbooster not only offers insights into a brand's social media performance, but also enables marketers to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts directly from the platform. In addition, Crowdbooster features real-time visual feedback, tracks the growth of a user's audience base, provides detailed metrics for every Facebook and Twitter post as well as identifies a brand's social advocates.
Curalate
Klout: 63
The Curalate platform helps users identify the most engaging images for better performance on image-based social networks. Curalate offers analytics for both Pinterest and Instagram, can be used to monitor the competition on social networks and offers "pin-to-purchase" tracking. Moreover, users can respond to Instagram and Pinterest interactions directly from Curalate as well as share popular images to other social channels.
Engagor
Klout: 65
Engagor's all-in-one social media management tool enables brands to monitor the social Web for brand-related and competitor-related conversations. Social teams can also leverage the platform's collaboration tools in order to provide better customer service to consumers on social networks. Plus, Engagor features scheduling and publishing tools, which allows teams to promote content across a variety of social channels.
HootSuite
Klout: 84
HootSuite enables users to schedule social posts as well as monitor social analytics. Through the platform, brands can publish updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare and more. It is also important to note that the platform offers a feature called "Conversations," which enables organizations to communicate internally through the HootSuite dashboard.
Piqora
Klout: 49
Piqora offers marketing and analytics for Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram. Through the platform, brands can deploy and track social contests, as well as monitor metrics like reach and virality of content.
Salesforce
Klout: 88
The Salesforce marketing cloud enables brands to manage social through multiple platforms, including Radian6 and Buddy Media. Radian6, for example, allows marketers to monitor social conversations from more than 650 million sources as well as respond to brand advocates and critics through the dashboard in real-time. Conversely, Buddy Media offers social analytics that help brands identify their best performing content, in addition to publishing tools that can be used to create and post content across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Shoutlet
Klout: 61
Shoutlet is a social relationship platform for enterprise-level companies. The platform leverages "Relationship Intelligence" technology to provide brands with actionable insights so that marketing campaigns can be optimized in all channels. Users can schedule and publish content to social networks from the platform, as well as monitor success metrics like brand awareness, customer care and product conversions.
Sprinklr
Klout: 65
Sprinklr's social experience management solution can help brands improve their social initiatives. Digital companies can leverage Sprinklr to identify and nurture their strongest advocate communities, publish content across social channels and measure content effectiveness across social networks.
Sprout Social
Klout: 71
Brands can leverage the Sprout Social platform to post updates to social networks and monitor social performance. Messages can be scheduled and published on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn. The platform also features a technology called "ViralPost," which determines the best times for content to be delivered to a specific audience.
Sysomos
Klout: 64
The Sysomos product suite helps brands measure, monitor and engage on social. The platform's real-time monitoring tool, dubbed Heartbeat, measures key metrics around buzz and sentiment, while the platform's engagement tool enables brands to communicate with audiences on both Facebook and Twitter. It is also important to note that Sysomos connects with Google Analytics, which allows marketers to view real-time social metrics next to real-time Web visitor data.
Trackur
Klout: 48
Trackur helps businesses monitor the performance of their social channels. The platform can be leveraged to identify influencers and to determine audience sentiment around a brand. Trackur monitors "hundreds of millions" of social sources, including news, blogs, reviews, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and forums.
Viralheat
Klout: 55
The Viralheat platform helps users monitor social performance and publish social updates. The publishing suite enables users to schedule and post status updates to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+. Conversely, Viralheat's social analytics provide insights into popular topics, audience sentiment and more.
Visible Technologies
Klout: N/A
Brands can leverage the Visible Intelligence platform to dive deep into social analytics. The platform can help brands identify key influencers, measure campaign performance and schedule social posts for Facebook and Twitter in one location. Plus, users can set up alerts to be notified when there is a spike in social conversation.
Wildfire (Acquired by Google; no longer available)
Klout: 87
Wildfire, which is a division of Google, offers a variety of social services, including social media publishing, analytics and monitoring. The platform enables users to post updates across Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Plus, the platform's integrations with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager helps brands measure ROI by providing a full view of each customer's journey.