Social media is a key tool for companies providing content writing services in the UK.  Indeed, social media is arguably important for every business.  Keeping control of social media is a challenging and potentially costly part of any business due to the resources that may need to be invested in it to simply keep up with it.  Fortunately though, there are online tools available to help you keep track of it all.

The Importance of Social Media

Brand awareness can be analyzed, maintained, created or destroyed by what is said on social media, however keeping up with everything that is said is a difficult task.  Social media is essentially digitised word of mouth.  While it can be tracked online unlike face to face word of mouth on the street, it is still produced in huge volumes that are not easy to keep up with.

Companies use social media to try and address negative word of mouth online, while also stimulating further positive word of mouth.  A poor review of a hotel can put potential customers off unless the hotel is seen to be remedying any problems in other reviews.

Making mistakes on social media can also be costly.  Knowing what you should be saying and who to say it to are other challenges of social media that a variety of online tools aim to help social media managers with.

Social media tools have a variety of purposes.  Some will help you maintain an overview of your brands presence across multiple social networks, others will provide useful data and there are also tools to help you generate content for your target audience.

Keeping up with the Chatter

First of all, the simplest yet most monumentally sized task is keeping track of your brand in cyberspace.  This can be in blogs, news articles, YouTube videos and even down to individual tweets.  However there are tools to help monitor all of this, and even give you alerts when new mentions are made.

Google Alerts is one of the most famous tools. It makes use of the Google search engine to pull in all different mentions of a name or keyword to help you track your company’s progress.  This can be especially useful for YouTube video content, as Google owns YouTube, or for forum and blog content that are not covered by traditional social media trackers.

Social Mention is another site that focuses more on social sites like blogs and microblogs (Twitter) to find all mentions on a given subject.  The search data is especially useful as it gives a variety of data about the results such as reach, authors, average mentions per minute and even whether the comments are positive, negative or neutral.

Managing Multiple Accounts

Many may feel that the best social media plan is to just choose one social media account and stick to it, saving time monitoring and posting to multiple social media accounts.  ‘Facebook has the most users, therefore it must be the most effective.’

That attitude will lose a lot of potential social engagement.  Many users have much higher engagement on Twitter and other social media sites due to the different form of content.  Users of Digg or Reddit are much more likely to read an article posted there than Facebook users are to read an article posted on Facebook, as Digg and Reddit’s purpose is to share content, while article sharing is just one of many uses of Facebook.

Similarly Twitter could be viewed as a stripped down version of Facebook, focusing only on the ‘microblogs’.  Facebook has taken on a huge variety of social media activities, whereas sites like instagram and Twitter focus on elements that are on Facebook, but perhaps perform them better.  The differences between the social networks make their purposes different, which also in turn affect their user base and the way they interact with content.

All in One Tool

Fortunately, developers have realised companies desire to utilise more than one social media site at once, and have developed online tools to enable users to post on multiple social media accounts at once.

Hootsuite is one leading tool to manage all social media platforms at once.  Described as a social media ‘dashboard’, Hootsuite offers plenty of analytics, scheduling features and multiple postings to take on all your social media accounts from one easy interface.

The name ‘Hootsuite’ was primarily inspired by Owly, the owl used as the company’s logo on the dashboard, however it is also intended as a play on words on the French expression ‘tout de suite’, which means all at once.

Essentially, Hootsuite will replace your need to use the Facebook Page Manager application or the Tweet Deck Twitter application, and allow you to control both at once, along with other sites such as Wikipedia, Tumblr, Reddit, LinkedIn and many more.  Only using one tool, rather than four or five, you can save valuable time on your social media management.

Analytics

Another important social media tool is assessing the value of what you are doing online.  Simply counting your followers or likes is a very limited way of assessing the value of your social media presence.

Analytics are an important measure of social media performance.  Rather than simply show how many people follow your page or like your post, analytics will show the engagement with the brand.  Facebook page manager gives a number of insights into user interaction with a page.  Such insights include total number of interactions with the brand per week, new users gained and more.

Google Analytics is one of the most famous analytics programs.  Google analytics mostly focuses on websites featured in its searches, and while it does take into account social media channels, there are other analytics tools that focus primarily on social media, and build on the insights offered by Page manager on Facebook or Tweet Deck on Twitter and allow you to view your entire social media output at once.

Crowdbooster is one such tool that will analyse your social media performance.  Not only does it provide analytics which measure individual users engagement with a brand, but also gives suggestions to improve your social media output.  This can be from suggestions on who to engage with and follow, to what to post and even at what time to post it.

Timing posts can be very useful for content writing and marketing to the UK, as this will allow them to know what time their users are most likely to engage with their content.  Presumably this would be sometime in the evening, however many are known to be engaging with social media while they are at work!

You can even analyse your followers individually to find out who is your biggest fan by the number of interactions they have with your brand.

Does your Brand have Social ‘Klout’?

There are a variety of other methods to obtain analytical data about social media usage, however one that stands out as unique is the Klout score.  The Klout score, on a scale from 1 to 100 will rank your social media influence.  A top score of 100 has been obtained by such influential celebrities as Barack Obama.

The Klout score measures everything about your online presence, such as Facebook likes, retweets of your posts on Twitter, even the hits your Wikipedia page receives.  This ranks Barack Obama 4 points ahead of Justin Bieber, who while having the biggest social media presence on Twitter and Facebook, does not receive the same level of hits on his Wikipedia page.

Creating Content for Content Writing Services

For content writing services, tools that make creating content easier are very useful.  Social media is a great way to get your content seen by sharing it across various social media platforms for the world to see.

Social media can also help inspire your content.  While you may want many of your followers to see your content, you can also make use of the content that they post to motivate your own content creation ideas.  Blogs and news are very useful to see what is current in social media and what people are interested in.  Furthermore, anything interesting and relevant to your brand can be shared among your followers, helping engagement.

ContentGems is a service which brings together lots of different content for you to work with.  You can choose topics that you wish to receive content on, matching keywords or content from influential people across their social media.  Choosing the right people can be very useful for content writing services, as social media influencers in the UK will be providing content relevant to people in that territory.

ContentGems can be integrated with Hootsuite to direct content from your chosen sources to your social media dashboard, from where you can then easily share this content across your various social media channels to increase engagement.

A More Effective and Efficient Social Output

With these tools to help aid the development of your social media, you will save hours per day on needlessly examining social media sites to check the latest trends and mentions of your brands and potentially your competitors and other key stakeholders.

Analytics allow you to better understand your audience, how to improve your output and assist you in directing your content to your target audience thereby building your following and loyalty.

Does it all still seem like a mammoth task? Well, we may be able to help. Our content writing services can provide you with all the material you need and with the tools mentioned above, you can just slot into an automated system and have content, tweets and posts being delivered to your clients and target audience all day, every week, 365 days a year.