FreshNetworks Blog

Following on from our social media management tools wiki we thought it would be nice to catch up with our friend Joshua March, CEO and co-founder of Conversocial about his tool, social media management and the value to brands and businesses.

What do you feel is the most accurate definition of a social media management tool?

Social media management covers quite a wide area. Conversocial focuses on the core communication management through social channels, in terms of team workflow, content publishing and engagement analytics. We call Conversocial a social-media-management-system.

It’s also important to differentiate monitoring tools, that look at what people are saying about you, to management tools, which help with what people are saying to you. In our opinion, if people are saying something directly to you it’s much more business critical than if they’re talking about you generally on the web.

Why do you think they are valuable to brands or businesses (ie, time savers etc)?

Social channels like Facebook and Twitter are different from other marketing channels in two important ways. First, distribution is largely governed by fan engagement. No matter how many fans or followers you have, if they don’t like your content, it won’t be seen.

Almost all engagement with brands happens in the newsfeed – fans rarely go to a Facebook page directly. Facebook explicitly holds updates in the newsfeed for longer if they get more engagement such as comments and likes; and in Twitter, @replies and re-tweets directly increase visibility in the feed. So engagement with content is key – but how do you know how to increase this? Measuring and analysing engagement is therefore key – otherwise brands risk losing out of most of the value in social channels. If they’ve spent a lot of money to build up their fan base, this value can be huge.

Secondly, the nature of social channels is two way. Companies are used to having separate marketing and customer support channels – but in social these are the same. The more you push a Facebook page or a Twitter account for marketing, the more customers will use it to ask questions or grieve their complaints. But, responses from the brand are usually public, and directly from the brand – not a private email from Jenny in customer services. This means that new tools and processes are needed to manage this relationship between the two functions; without it, companies are at series risk of jeopardizing both the marketing value of social channels, and their customer relationships.

Social media management systems like Conversocial also of course save time and make team management easier; but this is secondary to ensuring the marketing and customer services are managed effectively for maximum value.

What do you think is the most accurate way of tracking social media activity without using a tool?

The key metrics are to compare not just fan growth, but also the engagement with content. There’s no use in increasing your fan base if they’re ignoring what you’re saying – unengaged fans have no value.

Explain how Conversocial works and why it is an effective tool for social media management.

Conversocial is a website that connects to your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. It provides tools to help publish content, measures the engagement with content via our own metric – IPM (interactions per thousand fans)- and makes it very easy for a team of people to manage all the incoming comments from fans in terms of moderation and community management workflow.

We work really hard to keep the system as simple and intuitive as possible to allow minimal training, with the tool being very fast to use. One of the moderation teams for a large media brand who use Conversocial for all their fan pages state that they can moderate 1,000 comments an hour using our system, which is pretty fast!

For reporting, we also try and just focus on the most important and useful data – ie the key engagement stats – rather than overwhelming users with everything available. We want to give real actionable data that allows customers to straight away start enhancing the content they publish and increase the engagement with fans, as well as making it easy to generate reports.

What platforms does Conversocial cover?

Right now it covers Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and Facebook comment wall plugins on third party websites. Coming up we have plans to integrate YouTube.

How are you different from other social media management tools on the market?

Our key differentiator is our focus on increasing engagement and large-scale moderation of Facebook pages. There are quite a few tools out there that help with general management of Facebook and Twitter, but none that provide the engagement analysis we do, or that make it so fast and effective to moderate.

Who do you see as your main competitors?

We view CoTweet as our primary competitor; however Vitrue, Buddy Media, and Hootsuite are all in similar spaces, depending on the client requirements.

Social media management tools can help businesses listen to, manage, measure and respond to conversations about their brand on the social web.

With more and more social media management tools springing up on the market, it’s hard to keep track of what’s out there. So we’ve come up with a list…

Please think of this list as a kind of “wiki” which we will add to over time. We hope it will eventually become a useful social media management tool resource.

• Argyle social: Social media marketing platform that helps marketers measure and justify the social channel. The system is built on a tracking and URL-shortener giving the user the ability to track social conversions on Twitter and Facebook.
• Awareness : On-demand social marketing software  to help brands publish, manage and measure across social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, foursquare, and WordPress.
• Buddy Media: platform of tools allows for Facebook page management and engagement.
• Context Optional: cross-platform social marketing solution to efficiently build, manage, monitor and measure brand presence across the social web.
• Conversocial:  helps increase engagement, manage interactions and respond to customers on Twitter and Facebook. It also helps plan  updates and enables you to assess what type of content resonates the most with your fans and followers.
• CoTweet: enables companies to engage in marketing and response-driven customer service activities on Twitter.
• Expion: a unified database that aggregates and tracks all employee and customer social interactions to help profile customers, identify advocates and critics, track behaviors and create best employee practices.
• Hootsuite: one of the few tools that currently allows users to integrate and update across 10 social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare etc .
• Involver: provides marketers with a “social markup language”, SML™, an engagement platform and customizable social applications from which to create and monitor content.
• MediaFunnel: offers offers brand monitoring, scheduling, multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts.
• Objective Marketer: a social media marketing and campaign management solution to engage and reach users on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and other social channels, it aims to make it easy f to manage multi-channel communication while providing comprehensive analytics and reporting.
• Postling: allows for  blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts to be managed from a single system.
• Shoutlet: offers a multi-user application that helps build, engage, and measure social media marketing communication via one platform.
• SocialTalk: provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and MoveableType.
• SocialVolt: a complete social media management platform that integrates the tools needed to engage with clients on the social web.
• SpredFast : according to Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, (a great resource for finding out more about some of these management tools) SpredFast aim to position their product as collaborative campaign management and offer features such as scheduling content, and features that integrate with events and social stream like features similar to Friendfeed.
• Sprinklr: Sprinklr’s SIREn (Social Intent Revelation Engine) platform is a comprehensive enterprise grade SaaS social media management system.
• Strongmail:a traditional email marketing platform that tracks the multi-stage sharing activity of a campaign all the way to conversion and provides feedback on Facebook fan page wall posts.
• Syncapse: product portfolio includes SocialTALK, a hosted SaaS solution that helps enterprises create, publish and measure their social media content strategy and posting schedule.
• This moment Distributed Engagement Channel: the system allows you to publish content, moderate user-generated comments and track and optimize channel performance.  They also have features such as ID integration, media handling, and reporting.
• Vitrue:  integration with Facebook and Twitter, they offer scheduling features, and the ability to link multiple Facebook pages together.

Additions to the list since the post was made:

• Datasift: enables filtering and augmentation of social data to help you filter out the noise and find the information that is valuable to your business and customers.
• MutualMind: Primarily to help PR and marketing teams analyse and monitor the social web, the tool also has an engagement platform with an integrated response system.
• Assistly: social media management tool aimed to help with real-time customer service via email, self service FAQs, chat, and social networks.
• Sendible: sendible is a platform for engaging with customers, measuring results and monitoring your brand across multiple social media channels at once.
• Get Satisfaction: gives a better social support experience, increases SEO and improves customer loyalty.
• Offerpop: end-to-end, white label campaign tools for Facebook and Twitter.
• Hyper Alerts: sends an email when comments are posted on Facebook fan pages.
• Posthelpers: an enterprise social selling platform for localizing news, deals and offers across an organization’s multiple Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and LinkedIn profiles.
• eCairn: Aggregate conversations, trending topics and bookmark insights to help with your engagement strategy.
• Stuzo: Dachis group owned social media management tool that enables  cross-platform (Facebook,Twitter, YouTube, etc.) social experiences and allows  clients to manage multiple social programs from one unified interface.
• Valuevine: social media and location-based marketing and analytics software for multi-location brands.
• Sprout social: cross-platform social media management tools that enable you to find new customers and to grow your business.
• Skyttle: Facebook analytics for community insights and measurement
• Zeitgeist & Coffee: a real-time marketing collaboration and management platform which includes idea exchange, content development environment, assignment and approval dashboard, posting hub, and monitoring and an analysis tool.