Required social media tech know-how for digital sales people 2014/05/28 Samuel-f Parent Social Listening, Media Sales, Competitive Intelligence social media aggregators, social listening

I’ve been recently covering the various technologies digital media salespeople need to be familiar with. So far I’ve covered marketing tech, ad tech,  real-time bidding tech, presentation tech, file hosting & sharing tech, and news-gathering tech.

Today I’m covering social media tech as they pertain to your news gathering and reading. These will split into social media aggregators and social listening tech.

Article updated 18 November 2020

Social media aggregators

Social media aggregators also called a social hub and social media management, are tools that help you manage multiple social media accounts through one interface. Some of these only manage multiple Twitter accounts, without having to logout and back in under another, simultaneously. Others allow the management of multiple different social network accounts including multiple Facebook pages & profiles, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, Vine, Tumblr, and accounts on other networks.

This single dashboard approach to social media communications management saves precious time and allows you to share or respond faster to communications or messages. Imagine being able to see your public timeline/feed/wall next to personal messages next to your professional page and maybe even the page of the little league team you manage.

Further, many of these tools also offer scheduled post-management – in other words, you can schedule new posts to appear on a Twitter account and your Facebook Page at future dates and times. Some of these solutions also have a web-based version while others are software either on your desktop or mobile device.

Among the better known social media aggregators, you’ll find Hootsuite (includes Seesmic), TweetDeck (Twitter), Tint, Stackla, Alternion, TwineSocial, Tradable bits, Zoomph to name but a few.

Social Listening tech

Social listening tools abound online and it isn’t easy to differentiate what’s actually of any use. Many social media aggregators include some listening options. This means there’s an active search on a particular word/brand or phrase. Many solutions gather tons of information but leave the analysis up to you. These are usually free, such as Alerti and Google Alerts. A sales person’s job is very demanding time-wise. He/she needs a solution that can do some analysis.

Why use these solutions is a no brainer. If you want to know all the news or mentions about a particular individual (client or prospect), company, or brand name, all you need to do is to set up an alert or active search thread for those words to then be alerted when it comes up. Better yet, you can simply set up that search or alert to send the information through an RSS feed. You can then receive the info in a newsreader. It then becomes part of your regular news reading routine as opposed to an extra step or tool to use. I’m always striving to find the solutions that save time to get more done.

Principal social listening technologies include Social Mention, Mention, Topsy, Trackur, Alerti, PeopleBrowsr, Semeon, MediaMiser, Engagor, SDL SM2, Simply Measured, and Radian6 (Salesforce), Postano, Sprout Social to name more than a few. It must be noted that social media aggregators can also act as social listening with their active search function.

A report here from Adviso presents a great analysis of available listening tech.

TRAINING

I am available to provide full digital media sales training for your team or customized training based on your needs. Visit my training service offer page here for more details and then contact me for more information.

Here’s a final resource where your customer experience situation is concerned. The CX Lead has put together 10 Best Customer Experience Management Software Of 2020.

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