5 Best Social Network Tools That Every Business Should Know About!

When the idea of social customer relationship management (CRM) was first mooted, it was treated with a great deal of skepticism. Indeed, it was seen as something of a gimmick but eventually, marketing experts realized they had potential gold at their fingertips.

Thanks to social CRM and other fantastic tools, it is possible to track the social media activity of existing customers, leads and prospects and combine your findings with the information you already have. If a customer contacts you on social media, it is possible to track and manage the conversation in much the same way as you would with email or phone queries. Some tools even allow you to pick up on conversations that your brand name is mentioned in.

Sure, social CRM seems a lot like stalking but customers don’t care so long as you give them great service!

Without further ado, let’s look at 5 of the best Social Tools that every business should know about.

1 – Nimble

This is a pretty easy to use CRM as it automatically updates itself with relevant customer and prospect information from a host of data sources. You can import contact from sources such as Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Outlook and many more. The cool ‘Relationship Intelligence’ feature helps to quickly and easily identify key targets and you can turn conversations with prospects into cold, hard cash.

It also utilizes ‘social listening’ to ensure customer profiles are updated so you can track any mentions of your brand on social media among your contacts. It also means you can discover who is ‘following’ you or engaging with you and it even helps you keep tabs on customer milestones such as birthdays. This gives you a great opportunity to personalize content; you could offer someone a birthday discount for example.

You can benefit from a Free 14 day trial but Nimble costs $25 per user per month. For this you get up to 2GB of storage and up to 25,000 contacts.

Our View: Nimble is nice and simple to use and is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses.

2 – Mention

This CRM allows you to track mentions of your brand all over the Internet. With its Real Time Monitoring feature, you can quickly engage and respond to customers. Remember, the quicker you can solve a customer’s problem or deal with a complaint, the better your reputation will be.

The Competitive Analysis tool lets you compare key metrics with your biggest competitor. Finally, you can analyze your rivals and capitalize on any areas where they are weak. The role of online Influencers has become ever more important and with Mention, you can locate and engage with these important people/companies. You can even customize your data by selecting key metrics and refine your results.

There are three packages; Solo for $29 a month, Starter for $99 a month and a Custom option called the Company package.

Our View: The different packages means Mention can be used by all types of companies but we feel the Company package is ideal for large corporations or NPOs looking to make a splash on social media.

3 – Tagboard

Tagboard uses hashtags in order to collect relevant social media information. This means you can have almost instant notification when a follower or customer mentions your brand on Facebook or Twitter. This is crucial because in the social media age, every second counts! Customers who are social media savvy don’t take too kindly to tardy replies!

You can easily moderate offensive or negative content and also use keyword filters to promote or remove posts as you see fit. As a result, you can embrace public conversation while still maintaining control over how your brand is perceived on social media. You can even reply, comment or retweet directly from your tagboard; how convenient is that?|

You can sign up for a demo and packages start from $49 a month.

Our View: As Tagboard helps you manage your online reputation from the get-go, we believe it is ideal for Start-Ups.

4 – Circloscope

Circloscope is specifically designed to work with Google+ and promises to help you find the engagers that give your brand a much needed online boost. Once you find these ‘influencers’, you should see engagement levels improve dramatically which could lead to a significant increase in followers and revenue.

If you have created an Event, Circloscope allows you to track those who made comments about it while also helping you find out who said Yes, No or Maybe. You can find out who is following you instantly and discover data about how active they are. Clearly, your goal is to find active individuals who are likely to spread your brand name around.

You will cover one Google+ personal profile and three business pages for just $47 a year or you could pay $178 for a Pro Package annual license.

Our View: Obviously, Circloscope is only for businesses interested in expanding their Google+ reach but it is cheap enough to be used with other CRMs.

5 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social promises to provide users with quicker and more efficient social media communications across a wide range of platforms. It targets four of the most crucial elements of social media CRM which are Monitoring, Measurement, Engagement and Growth.

Its Engagement Report enables you to discover social media trends among your users during the day and night. Its social monitoring feature combines every alert and message from every profile into one easy to filter stream. When it comes to measurement, you can request a simplistic or complex report and you get instant access to the full conversation history every time you respond to a customer message.

The cheapest package (Deluxe) is $59 a month, the Premium package is $99 a month and the Team package is $500 a month but it does allow up to three users.

Our View: Sprout Social is an excellent choice for larger businesses; especially the Team package which allows up to 30 profiles.

Final Words

With a social CRM, it is possible to place the customer right at the centre of your organization. No longer will you have to guess what your social media followers want; with the information gathered by your CRM, you will have everything you need to meet all their demands.