Tools essentially make our lives easier. Just as certain garden appliances allow us to move dirt more effectively, there are social media instruments that enable more efficient management of certain platforms.
The following tools make the overall planning and marketing process easier as it pertains to social media. After all, social is still one of the best ways to market your event, keep attendees updated and introduce yourself to thousands of prospective
meeting-goers from across the globe. The real trick here is finding the entities that work best for your processes and sticking with them.
If you are not yet taking advantage of social streamlining services, any on this list are helpful starting points.
Top Social Media Tools for Planners
Known far and wide, Google Analytics lets its users measure advertising ROI as well as track Flash, video and social networking sites and applications. First and foremost, it's a free platform for users. But GA also helps its users better understand which
tactics are working (and which aren't) when it comes to driving an audience to a website.
BuzzSumo provides a space for researching, amplifying and monitoring the content that truly resonates with your ideal audience. Outside of your own site's offerings, you can use the platform to find out what resonates best for a general topic or a direct
competitor.
Buffer provides a simple solution for scheduling posts and tracking the performance of your content over time. The program provides a single space for organizing all social profiles (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and scheduling robust posts up to months
in advance.
Hootsuite dashboard Photo Credit: HootSuiteHootsuite helps enhance the overall social management process. The system's user interface takes the form of a dashboard and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube. The
outlet allows users to manage these networks and profiles at once, and provides a means for measuring particular campaign results.
As a paid feature, Facebook can customize and target ads to a niche audience based on how, why and when they engage with Facebook content. Furthermore, Facebook Ads creates an experience relevant to where the audience member personally is in terms of
investigating your products, services and events.
TweetDeck makes it easier for publishers and social media managers to track real-time conversations they care about. Essentially, TweetDeck is able to run numerous Twitter feeds on a single screen at one time, categorized by attributes of the user's choosing
(e.g., by hashtag, username, group, topic, etc.).
Sprout Social helps brands communicate with customers on social channels, collaborate across teams and measure the effectiveness of their efforts.
Quuu is a hand-curated content-suggestion platform that connects to a Buffer (previously mentioned) queue, allowing you to grow a relevant social media following across the entire social landscape of your company.
Feedly dashboard Photo Credit: FeedlyFeedly is a news-aggregator application for various web browsers and mobile devices running. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others. And with more than 15 million users,
it's the most popular RSS and blog reader to date.
Agorapulse, much like Buffer, is an "all-inclusive" social media management tool that works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube. More or less, it's a customer-relationship management platform for small/medium businesses and
agencies.
A graphic design tool, Design Wizard allows you to drag and drop already-inputed templates and images to make it easier and more efficient to create endless designs and share them across the user's social media outlets.
Hubspot is an inbound marketing and sales platform tasked with helping companies attract visitors, convert leads and seal the deal with potential meeting attendees. Its various functions aim to provide tools for social media marketing, content management,
web analytics and search engine optimization.
ManageFlitter assists Twitter users in gaining insight into their account. The system provides a set of tools that allows users to effectively curate, prune and grow their Twitter account into something larger than it already is.
CoSchedule dashboard Photo Credit: CoScheduleCoSchedule is a virtual, all-in-one editorial calendar for planning, promoting and executing your marketing strategy (with arms for both your print and digital approaches).
IFTT (for "if this, then that") is a service for creating chains of simple conditional statements, called applets. An applet is triggered by changes that occur within your various social profiles like Gmail, Facebook, Telegram, Instagram or Pinterest.
It enables all of your apps and devices to better work together.