Enterprise businesses face a particular challenge in managing social media effectively. With scale comes complexity, including multiple people and multiple tools to manage. Viralheat aims to support enterprises with a comprehensive tool that is strong on team and workflow management and which has best in class predictive analytics. We take a look in this week's SMToolbox.
Background
Viralheat is a full social media management suite that has particularly strong monitoring and predictive intent features for identifying warm leads. The tool is focused on enterprise businesses to help them listen, engage and build relationships and connections across multiple social networks. The tool is popular with brands, with over 25,000 brands using Viralheat, managing over different 100,000 social accounts.
The team at Viralheat also provide consultancy support to help users get the most out of the tool such as how to extend their reach or create more qualified leads.
A Comprehensive Tool
Social media teams frequently use many tools to manage their activity. Some of these tools such as Hootsuite, Spredfast and Sprout Social which are strong on social media management including scheduling, publishing and tracking. Other tools that focus more on the social listening and analytics side of things such as Brandwatch or Bottlenose. You can often use two or more tools in tandem for example Brandwatch integrates with Hootsuite and Spredfast.
Viralheat is a tool that offers a comprehensive social media suite that includes management and scheduling but also strong monitoring and analytics. Viralheat provides an opportunity to rationalize the number of tools you use.
Creation, Publishing and Scheduling
The creation of streams and topics in Viralheat follows a standard form for social management tools and its publishing platform gives you the ability to create posts, select accounts and schedule posts.
The tool has a browser extension, called Flint, which makes it easy to share and schedule content when you browsing the web. The extension is similar to the Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social extensions and becoming a standard with social media tools.
The tool also has its own link shortener but you can also use shorteners such as Bit.ly. The tool has some nice new features such as audience targeting in Facebook where you can target based on say location or gender.
Viralheat covers all of the main social platforms including Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. Unlike some of the other tools Viralheat provides LinkedIn management and analytics for company pages and groups. This allows you to monitor, manage and track personal pages, company pages and groups. Personally I think LinkedIn is growing in importance, particularly for business to business companies, so this is a valuable feature.
Viralheat integrates with a wide range of software platforms including Salesforce, Sugar, Google Analytics and support platforms as outlined below.
Team and Workflow Management
The tool really excels in areas such as team management. Many of the tools allow you to manage team members, allocate tasks and give publishing responsibilities. Viralheat goes further in allowing you to set up specific role permissions that fit with the way you work. You can then allocate these roles to members of your team. Thus you can have a standard intern profile which fits the way you work and allocate this to all new interns.
The integrations with product such as ZenDesk and Desk.com mean you can also create a flow through to your support team. You can create support tickets for mentions on social media, assign these to a team member and monitor the tickets for specific actions taken and updates.
Analytics and Insights
Viralheat's monitoring and social listening is strong and includes predictive analytics and sentiment analysis. Viralheat has a patented Human Intent feature which identifies the users that are most likely to make a purchase. It allows users to capture sales leads from promising and positive social mentions. You can refine your intent stream over time by removing words or adding words to generate better qualified leads. Brands such as Deutsche Telekom speak highly of the benefits of Viralheat's intent technology.
You can create multiple dashboards in Viralheat for specific profiles and topics. You can also create filters within the dashboards including location based filters to target your areas of interest.
The tool is useful for reputation management as you can monitor all mentions around your brand. Viralheat monitoring also includes sentiment analysis. I personally feel we are still in the early days of sentiment analysis but it is a helpful feature in social listening. With Viralheat you can easily see the positive and negative posts to decide if you want to take action on them.
You can monitor competitor profiles and monitor their influence, keywords and positive or negative mentions.
I am not sure the analysis goes as far as specialist tools, such Brandwatch or Bottlenose, in the way you can cut data by gender, age etc., but it does a very good job for a comprehensive social media management tool.
Reporting
Reporting in Viralheat is strong. I particularly like the interactive charts where you can change layouts or remove networks to analyze your data.
The tool also has a nice suite of formatted reports that you can use. Like other tools Viralheat recognizes the pressure on internal teams and agencies to prove their value. Reporting covers multiple number of formats and analysis including word clouds and top influencer lists.
Summary
If you are looking for a comprehensive social media management tool that has strong social listening and analytics then Viralheat could be the tool you are after. Prices start from $1,500 per month.
If you want to find out more about Viralheat they run a weekly demo which you can attend, you can book a place here: https://www.viralheat.com/see-viralheat-in-action-2/
You can also contact the team for a custom demo at [email protected].