Social Media Marketing Tools

Everything About Social Media Marketing Tools

Using social media as a marketing tool can expand your client base and build your brand with businesses and consumers. As of 2012, 20 percent of law firms have hired a full-time staffer to monitor and expand their social media presence. Social media marketing tools can make it easier for your company to manage several different accounts, monitor your reputation, and make sure you're getting the return on investment you need. What kind of social media marketing tool can help your law firm thrive? Keep reading to find out.

Managing Social Media as a Marketing Tool

In order to get the most out of social media as a marketing tool, you'll need to diversify your social media presence across multiple websites. One social media marketing tool that almost every social media specialist will use is a management system. These social media marketing tools can log you in to a wide range of websites with just a single username and password, and help you aggregate recent activity from people and businesses you're following.

Some social media marketing tools of this type also include mobile and email marketing features, and will allow you to share your links in a wide variety of ways simultaneously. When using this type of social media marketing tool, be careful not to share too often—the key rule of using social media as a marketing tool is getting new followers, not scaring them away.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Reputation Management

So you've used social media marketing tools that helped you put together great looking, well-functioning pages on major social media networks. The next step to using social media as a marketing tool is finding out exactly how you're perceived in the online world. Do people love your Twitter feed, or hate it? Do people think your blog entries are fascinating or failures? That's where a new kind of social media marketing tool comes in: the reputation management tool.

Tracking and monitoring programs for reputation management help you effectively use social media as a marketing tool by keeping track of what the rest of the web is saying about you. If your other social media marketing tools have been successful, you may have generated comments and blog posts all over the web. To make sure you're reaching the right people, you may want to use a social media marketing tool that also identifies Klout scores or other measures of online influence for those linking to you.

One of the best ways to use social media as a marketing tool is to engage with people when they talk about your brand online. Some social media marketing tools offer integrated functionality that lets you comment and post with a single interface. Because time can be of the essence, especially if you're dealing with a potential public relations headache, this type of social media marketing tool is a must-have when you're a legal professional.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Social Bookmarking

Using social media as a marketing tool is easier when you can spread your message far and wide. Today, a large number of social bookmarking sites exist that base their content on user submissions. If you use the right social media marketing tools, you can submit to a large number of these sites at once.

For example, you might want to use a social media marketing tool so that you can simultaneously post to Reddit, Digg, or StumbleUpon—all sites that can generate great web traffic. However, if you use social media marketing tools in this way, make sure you're observing website rules. If you try to use social media as a marketing tool without learning the etiquette for the websites you're using, your links will languish in obscurity or become the target of mockery.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Measurement

Even if your social media feeds are regularly updated, you can't just assume that your business is effectively using social media as a marketing tool. To find out how effective your outreach efforts have been, you need to download a social media marketing tool that can measure how your web traffic is being affected by your social media presence.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Analytics

In some cases, you may find out that in spite of trying to use social media as a marketing tool, you aren't getting the measurement results you want. Measurement tools can't always help you figure out why this is happening—for that, you need an analytical social media marketing tool. Analytics can crunch the numbers so that you see exactly what parts of your social media strategy are succeeding and which may need revision.

This kind of social media marketing tool works best when you use it continuously and try to make repeated incremental improvements to your strategy. Using analytics, not just measurement, ensures that you're able to fix mistakes promptly so that using social media as a marketing tool keeps being effective.

Social Media Marketing Tools for Campaign Creation

A final type of social media marketing tool is often underused by law firms, especially smaller firms and solo practitioners. Campaign creation lets you use social media as a marketing tool by creating contests, quizzes, and other types of content that go beyond graphics, video, and blog entries. The types of content you can create with many of these tools is interactive and designed to promote conversions—if you've ever wanted to make a video game about your law firm, now's the time to try it, and there are tools to get you started.

The type of social media marketing tool you'll need to create your campaign depends on what kind of content you're hoping to create. Most of these tools also allow you to track the results of any campaign that you create, integrating measurement and analytics for specific campaign actions. If your company thrives on cooperative work, you may want to choose a social media marketing tool for campaign creation that allows multiple authors to edit campaigns at the same time.