Finding the best 3rd party social media management platforms

The key aspect of using social media tools for entrepreneurs and businesses is to facilitate them in engaging their existing and potential customers. Social media provides an extension of physical conversations. It allows both consumers and producers to relate to their product and users. The instant nature of social media calls for a robust and scalable form of management.

Social media systems are constantly increasing. Users' interests are also shifting as people mature into different age groups and careers. To target a specific group of people, businesses have to rely on a host of tools for capturing all prevailing conversations.

While most social networks are free to join, management platform for the same may have a purchase or usage fee. The cost of the social media management platform often varies with the features that the tool gives its users.

Besides the general tapping into existing conversations with friends and follows, the management platforms extend the scope of the relationship. They allow users to tap into related conversation by people who are not their followers. This way, it is possible to find a potential customer through their conversations online without necessarily being their followers.
Social media platforms provide a shallow feedback scope and require the user to sign into each platform to obtain feedback. Social media management apps give rich feedback because they incorporate results from more than one platform. They are able to take parameters from conversations and engagements in more than one platform and yield a comprehensible report. The report allows users to influence the direction that their marketing messages, answers to customer queries and research initiatives online to take.
Based on the above understanding, several 3rd party social media management platforms best manage the interest of their users. In every regard, the usefulness of the 3rd party platform depends what the user wishes to receive.

There are different scenarios for using 3rd party platforms.


In the first case, one person or entity would like to manage more than one profile on the same social media channel. IN this case, the best tool has to support logging in into the same network with more than one profile.

The second need for a management tool is to customize business replies across all platforms. This is important for customer service so that every member of the organization assigned to the customer care department is aware of the conversations with clients. Using such a platform, different people can take over the duty of replying to business queries at certain periods.

Above all, the greatest interest for most business owners and managers is to find all they can about their audiences. 3rd party platforms can provide different views based on the conversation, the account, the network or even the keyword. They allow users to zoom into a particular story to get more insight or zoom out to a general perspective to spot trends.

 

The Best Social Media Platform (3rd Party)


With the above clarifications on the need for a 3rd party social media platform, it is now time to quote some of the best available tools for different jobs.

Almost all business sizes will need a monitoring tool that captures streams from more than one network. Hootsuite is the best monitoring platform for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress among others. It captures replies to previous conversations and allows the user to keep abreast with current engagements. With Hootsuite, it is hard to have a conversation go unanswered.

Engag.io is a recently developed platform that allows users to answer to all mentions in different social networks and blog systems. With it, the user receives all mentions, replies and questions in a simple to use email-like interface.

For analysis, trend spotting and overall message control, CoTweet, Hootsuite and SpredFast seem are the most capable platforms. For businesses that need to know their ROI for social media engagements, SpredFast is the best tool. While the premium version of Hootsuite will still integrate with Google Analytics, SpredFast has an in-build analytic engine. It keeps track of data coming from all social links that are on the user profile. It also tracks links in the bit.ly short form that spread through social media. Using it, agencies can pin point the scope of their marketing outreach. It also delivers results in an easy to grasp graph report format.

Some businesses are small and require tools that fit their individual needs. Their need ranges from engagement to management of replies. They need a platform like TweetDeck for managing more than one account on twitter to separate personal interests with business interests.

Lastly, the above-mentioned 3rd party social media management platforms will work with desktops, tablets and smartphones seamlessly. This is important for both productivity and mobility.

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