Imagine your company getting thousands of likes, comments, and direct messages across social media channels every day.
It’s a clear sign that your brand is impacting the market and people are loving it.
However, to capitalize, you must stay on top of the competition to build and maintain meaningful connections with your community, who will eventually be your best brand advocates on and offline.
According to Talkwalker’s Social Media Trends 2023 report, modern social media users are more focused on urgency than ever – increasingly using social media to reach customer support, and brands must accelerate their response times to seize those opportunities to showcase their proactivity in nurturing their customer base.
To do this, companies need to leverage social media engagement tools to stay ahead.
The best social media engagement tools offer a suite of automation and monitoring solutions that save you time and allow you to find critical business insights in conversations.
By leveraging the reporting capabilities of these tools, businesses can proactively connect with audiences and inform future content strategies across the organization, helping to bolster ROI.
Although this may sound like an impossible task for many businesses, there are a range of easy-to-use tools for measuring social media engagement, as well as managing channel insights to help govern your social media strategy.
Read on for more information about the best social media engagement tools and how they can help streamline your social media strategy.
The evolution of online conversations around ‘pizza’ and ‘burgers’ shows that consumers are far more likely to engage with pizza-related content, especially around lunch or dinner time.
What is social media engagement?
Social media engagement is a broad metric that encompasses interactions like:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Hashtags
- Retweeting, reposts, or mentions
- Saving a post for later
- Clicking on a post’s link
- Viewing a video
Engagement type and value can vary depending on the platform — meaning it’s more important to use the best tools to stay ahead of the competition and extract the most value from your marketing efforts.
For more information on social media engagement and how to track it, take a look at our social media measurement guide.
What are social media engagement tools?
A social media engagement tool is simply a platform that allows companies and marketing teams to track engagement metrics.
Marketers can monitor conversations, respond to customer requests, publish and schedule content, and even automate many of the monotonous tasks that free up time for content creation, networking, and community building.
The most successful social media teams leverage an array of tools to ensure they are constantly relevant, topical, and keeping their audience tuned in to their content.
A brand’s assortment of social media engagement tools — known commonly as a MarTech stack — should feature a healthy balance of engagement metrics, including a social listening tool to judge customer sentiment, and analytics and publishing tools to help generate visually appealing content.
Why are social media engagement tools important?
Organic reach is at its lowest in years, especially as more social media platforms are operating on a pay-to-play model. The average reach of an organic post from a Facebook page is now just 1.52% – declining every year.
The most effective way to increase reach and sales from social media is by boosting your advertising budget. And brands, as a result, have prioritized their advertising efforts over bolstering their organic marketing, given that the latter requires more work and nurturing.
However, it is evident that at the heart of every successful advertising campaign lies a robust social media community that organically increases reach and click rates, while creating long-lasting relationships and a sustainable brand.
Organic marketing and advertising must co-exist for success.
Plus, with ad budgets being down, brands are competing for organic reach, something that requires creativity and a human-centered approach.
Maintaining a high rate of organic social media engagement must be prioritized because:
- It gives signals to the algorithm that your content is valuable to the audience
- It allows your customers and fans to have a stronger connection to your brand
- It gives you a signal to know what content performs better
People love brands that are similar to them. According to Talkwalker’s Brand Love Story, the key to a relatable social media engagement strategy is to talk with your audience as friends, and the rest will follow.
This will result in increased brand advocacy and loyalty.
Answering customer complaints on social media is one way to show that your brand actually cares about their needs. By publicly acknowledging your shortcomings and responding to them in a timely manner, people will react positively.
The health and wellness brand Fitbit recently had to recall all its Ionic watches due to a technical error, and the community was flaring up until Fitbit responded to their concerns.
One key reason why social media engagement is critical for a brand’s sustainability is that it creates better relationships.
Brands can leverage listening to social media conversations to learn from the audience and improve the experience. Also, having a direct and transparent relationship showcases your empathetic side to your audience.
Lastly, having an engaged audience means that they’ll do a lot of the work on your behalf. Then your community will become self-fulfilling where they answer each other’s questions and help with known issues.
This becomes easier and faster as more of your audience engages with your social media content.
Talkwalker’s Social Listening tool makes social media engagement monitoring simple.
Track the success of your campaigns across all your social media accounts, and find out what your customers and audience are saying about you, with extensive coverage monitoring and sentiment analysis, plus many other intuitive automated features.
7 must-have social media engagement tools
Below we’ve listed some of the best social media engagement tools on the market for improving your online presence and helping you adapt your strategy to changing needs.
Talkwalker – Consumer intelligence for the world’s most impactful brands
Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform helps see what demographics engage with your content, so help identify lost opportunities
Talkwalker offers social media managers a great opportunity to have a holistic view of what their audience is saying online. The platform gives visibility across 187 languages, in 190 countries —making it a powerful tool for international brands aiming to maximize their impact.
An exciting feature that Talkwalker offers is the ‘image recognition’ solution which lets social media managers track any hidden brand mentions in videos and photos. For example, brand managers can keep an eye on where their logo is appearing even when their brand isn’t mentioned.
Image analysis can be used to understand which images garner the most social media engagement. Helping you plan future content.
Talkwalker also offers AI-powered sentiment analysis – enabling social media managers to not only understand the sentiment of their audience around a particular campaign but to do so at scale.
Reporting and data visualization are also strong features of Talkwalker’s platform. The image above shows a bubble graph surrounding the top themes on Bitcoin and Dogecoin — in this case the bigger the circle the more recurrent it is. The platform offers a multitude of ways to visualize data to extract insights like conversation clusters, geographical heat maps, and bar charts.
Hootsuite – Social is your superpower
Hootsuite’s social media engagement platform, enables you to respond to customers’ requests from all channels.
Hootsuite is a multipurpose social media management platform that helps teams maximize their impact and engage their community.
The platform offers a centralized suite of tools that allow teams to better schedule their social media content, as well as analyze their performance.
One of its strongest features is the ability to promote organic content and manage paid ads. However, what social media managers love the most about Hootsuite is its ability to offer personalized customer care efficiently, without risking the dismissal of any request.
Khoros – Unified, enterprise platform for digital contact centers
Screenshot of Khoros’ data dashboard, giving social media managers a holistic view of their performance KPIs.
Khoros is a centralized social media engagement platform that allows marketers to establish and maintain a human connection with their community.
It helps brands to modernize their customer support experience and makes it easier to use social media as a support channel.
As a customer engagement platform, Khoros gives teams the ability to personalize and humanize each touchpoint a customer could have with a brand.
Social media teams can leverage Khoros’ tools to create AI-enhanced agents to auto-respond to DMs, streamline conversational marketing, and optimize the overall customer journey.
Buffer – Chart your path. Share your story.
Buffer’s publishing tool, where social media managers can schedule Instagram stories to go live at a certain time.
Buffer is a versatile tool that allows businesses to publish content, analyze its performance, and engage the audience.
Its minimalistic UI makes it an attractive tool for beginners and professionals who prefer a streamlined, easy-to-use interface.
The platform actively recommends which content had better engagement and the factors that contributed to that success — things like the time it was posted, type of content (video, images or audio), and messaging.
Movavi Video Editor - Transform your social media presence with engaging videos
Movavi Video Editor's intuitive interface provides brands with the tools to effortlessly create captivating video content.
With Movavi Video Editor, brands can create visually stunning videos that capture attention and resonate with their audience.
The tool redefines the editing experience by incorporating a user-friendly interface, an expansive effects library, and pre-built templates, simplifying video editing and optimizing time utilization.
While the other tools focus on managing and monitoring social media activities, Movavi Video Editor complements them by enabling the creation of distinctive and captivating video content. From product showcases to compelling storytelling, leverage visual content to enhance your social media presence, drive higher engagement, and foster loyalty. Empower your brand with endless possibilities.
Sprout Social – A powerful solution for social media management
Sprout Social’s publishing platform allows teams to manage their content pipeline across channels.
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media marketing solution that allows teams to increase audience engagement and have a better understanding of the target audience.
The platform allows you to track your social media ROI, monitor customer feedback, measure audience sentiment across time, identify trending stories as they happen, and analyze all this in real-time.
Facelift Data Studio – Solving data and reporting challenges with precise analytics
Facelift Data Studio – formerly Quintly – is a comprehensive social media reporting tool that tracks performance across over 100 social channels.
It offers over 350 metrics, allowing users to customize their social media engagement reporting process and benchmark performance against competitors. This makes it easier than ever to achieve accurate forecasting and take inspiration from competitor content.
The tool also has an extensive and reliable API, allowing brands to link it to their own business intelligence solutions to access and view data in their own dashboards.
How to compare social media engagement tools
The seven social media engagement tools covered above each offer unique applications and benefits for brands looking to track and improve their social media engagement efforts.
So, how do you know which tool is right for you? In this section, we break down the key features to look for in a tool to help you make the right decision for your business:
- Customer support: The best social media tools offer round-the-clock support via live chat or chatbot to help marketers find answers and resolve issues quickly.
- Suitability: Each business has its own distinct pain points, so the right social media engagement tool with the most suitable features is needed for each purpose.
- Data security: When using a social media engagement tool, you’re often required to connect your accounts to that platform, which can give them access to private conversations and sensitive information. It’s vital that companies screen third-party social media engagement tools for robust data protection policies and infrastructure.
- Features: When you’re optimizing your social strategy, you need an engagement tool that has the right features for you. For example, if you’re a smaller organization with staffing constraints, a social media engagement tool that focuses on scheduling content is more beneficial than ones that focus on design elements. Make sure your solutions give you a centralized view of customer conversations, analyze and visualize trends in a way that you can extract insights from, and any specific features you might need for your business.
- User interface: An important factor is how easy the platform is to use on a daily basis. Marketers tracking social media engagement don’t want to have to sift through endless menus and operate complicated interfaces — especially when time is of the essence. Make sure whatever solutions you have in your MarTech stack are easy-to-use — if they’re difficult, it can hinder your team’s ability to produce engaging content quickly.
- Price: With marketing budgets being decreased in recent years, price to benefit ratio is also a critical factor to consider while choosing which social media engagement platform to buy.
The key thing to understand is what value the tool will bring to your business and how it will maximize the impact of your community-building efforts.
Improve your social media engagement today
Talkwalker’s industry-leading Social Listening software helps your marketing team bolster its social media engagement strategy with world-leading insights and data.
Bring your social media data to life on an intuitive dashboard, featuring data visualizations, instant AI summaries, and real-time alerts – giving you everything you need to manage your brand reputation effortlessly across social media. Learn more by clicking below.
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