The Management of Social Media

With Social Media being recognized as a valuable voice for businesses and brands, the question that is being asked now is – “how do we make this social investment effective?”

In other words, how do make our Social Media work reliable, repeatable, measurable and managed?

This will depend largely on your business and strategy, but in order to gather the information which you will necessitate, you will inevitably need a social tool to assist you.

Again, there are dozens of tools floating around in the market. These Social Media monitoring tools will mainly fall into one of two categories: Online Reputation Management Systems (ORMS) and Social Media Management Systems (SMMS).

Both systems may prove useful for gathering comments, measuring sentiment, providing analytics and reporting. However, since most social discussions take place in broken English (slang, tech jargon and many others), these sentiments which are meant to provide an indication as to positive, neutral or negative feelings towards your brand carry very little weight, if any.

This is where I feel the SMMS differentiates itself from the ORMS. Instead of just listening, responding and reporting, the SMMS also provides a complete management aspect – which is a great help in remaining organized and managing all appointed content tasks (current and future) within a team environment, or even for managing yourself.

The management feature, with approval paths and specified roles, can be predefined in the Social Strategy and then allows you to plan, schedule and approve all content. Whether this be previously selected topics which have been assigned to various individuals in the SM team, or responses to comments and questions received. An appointed individual may have the authority to designate, screen and approve any communication from within the organization before publishing thereby ensuring a consistent and professional voice representing your brand at all times.

Please bear in mind that not all ORMS and SMMS have the same functionality and that you should choose wisely in selecting a system to fit your unique social requirements.

Once you have selected a suited system, this will surely assist you greatly in mastering your Social Media goals.

During my research, I have found the following to be some of the most popular, useful and professional Social Media Tools available, and with good reason.

4Dots, Multimedia Solutions SMMS, Spredfast, Objective Marketer, Radian6, Lithium, Brandseye, Vitrue, Swixhq, Socialreport and SocialMention.

Best of luck with your decisions and pleasant Social Media Management!