Five free social-media tools you should know about
Being social-media savvy doesn't have to cost the earth. Dubai-based DigitALL consultant Paul Parsons reveals five online tools that cost nothing but can help make your life easier and your social media activity more effective.
Click through to the following pages for details of the five tools....
1. HootSuite: www.hootsuite.com [FREE]
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard allowing hotels to monitor, respond and manage their social media accounts form a single online website. The platform allows companies to utilise the built-in link shortening and tracking, as well as providing the ability to be able to pre-schedule posts at a time of convenience. Its inbuilt reporting functionality provides a great way for hotels to be able to see what is working for them across their different social media accounts.
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2. Social Mention: http://www.socialmention.com [FREE]
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.
It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web's social media landscape in real-time. You will then be able to setup free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, or on a competitor. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
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3. Facebook Insights: http://www.facebook.com/insights [FREE]
Facebook insights are an analytics tool for your Facebook page. The free analytics tool provides the fan page admin’s with the ability to be able to review your page demographic, number of engagements per post, like source, page visits and much more. Using this type of tool will allow you to monitor the response of your Facebook Page posts and all data can be exported in time frames you need.
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4. Customised Facebook Updates: [FREE]
When updating a status on your hotel’s fan page, Facebook provide the ability to be able to customize who sees that post. You will be able to select by country, city and by language who sees your post in their newsfeed. This is a great tool for hotels when they want to post content about region specific offers, or for targeting fans that live in specific countries. To customise a post, simply press the button which says public / with a lock underneath the status box and then press ‘location / language’. This post will then only be seen by fans that match the specified filtered criteria.
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5. Reach.ly: http://www.reach.ly [FREE]
Reach.ly is pioneering real-time text mining and filtering for social media such as Twitter. With 200 million tweets being sent daily, clearly most businesses have no chance of identifying marketing opportunities among the deluge of information on Twitter. The complex algorithms they have developed enable hotels to filter streams and produce a neatly packaged and manageable number of tweets from consumers specifically expressing an interest in traveling to a specific city. Hotels can communicate immediately using the Reach.ly interface. Their test results show that 9% of guests receiving a message actually make a booking! About 20% more respond that they appreciate the direct communication.