As Twitter surpasses 200 million Tweets sent each day, Google launches its own Social Network and Facebook continues to extend its reach, keeping up with everything isn't easy. I realized that many large companies, but also smaller businesses, have teams at work handling Social Media instead of doing it alone.
In the same way in my own startup we have started to heavily rely upon the help of some great tools that help us to cope with the amount of information and interactions.
Here are 5 timesaving and easy to use tools, which helped us greatly to deal with the increasing buzz in Social Media.
Social Base - Your Social Media To Do List
Only a few weeks back, OneForty launched a fantastic new way to handle your team efforts in Social Media. The tool Social Base offers you support on your daily to do's in Social Media. What I find particularly impressive is how the tools combines knowledge and functionality.
You are able to link up tasks corresponding tools, allowing you to create a more seamless workflow. The standard to do list features you would expect from such a tool is also nicely designed and integrates easily into your workflow.
Best bit: What I like best are the suggestions for which tasks and how often you should do them. Tapping right into the knowledge base from OneForty was never easier.
MarketMeSuite - Tweet together to provide better support
One of the big problems we found when working together, was the ability to tweet collaboratively from one account. Here MarketMeSuite offers you a set of great new features to make tweeting as a team a lot easier. You can easily handle who gets access to which accounts, including Twitter and Facebook.
You can assign everyone in the team a Tweeting time by being "on duty". To allow for great interaction with all team members internally, you can also assign individual tweets to others if they suit their knowledge base best.
Best bit: What I like best about MarketMeSuite is the display of recent conversations. So anyone can quickly catch up on past tweets with a certain person and continue it.
HelpScout - Collaborative email replies
One of the big problems we have seen with our business is how to handle support emails. After trying many things, the solution from HelpScout was the best we could find. The App gives you multiple team members that are able to respond to one email address.
The great part is that, if one person starts replying all others will see this, so there are no double replies. Similar to CoTweet you can assign emails to others and add little notes next to messages in order to make it clear to others what you mean.
Best bit: What I like best is the chance to categorize emails whether they are closed, pending or active. This makes managing them a lot easier.
TwitSprout- Full analytics for your Twitter account
Knowing exactly which impact your Twitter efforts have is crucial when handling efforts as a team. Whilst not being a specific team product, it makes it very easy to track as a team, as it is a public link about your analytics you can pass around.
The App displays all the most important figures about your Twitter account, including mentions, followers and retweets received. It is all displayed nicely on one page and beautifully designed too.
Best bit: What I like best is that you will see all of your metrics in overlay of each other so you can see whether you are actually growing organically.
Buffer - Keep a consistent and fresh stream of Tweets
The last tool, that we are using heavily for it's team member functionality is Buffer. The App allows you to simply drop Tweets into your Buffer and the App posts them for you throughout the day. You can do this from any page on the web with the handy browser extensions for Chrome, Safari or Firefox.
By adding team members you can collaboratively add tweets to the Buffer for your company's Twitter account. This allows you to spend a short amount of time each day on finding great content and having it send out these tweets well spaced out over the day.
Best bit: What helps me most is that you get detailed analytics for all Tweets sent via Buffer. The App gives you number of clicks, retweets and reach.
These are our top tools to use for handling our efforts in Social Media. I believe espeically in the team area there is still lots of potential there and some of our workflows aren't quite optimised yet.
How about you? Are some of these tools useful for the team you are working in?