Productivity Zone

Business solutions with a twist of social media

#016 – Find The Best Social Media Tool For Your Business

by

Kimba helps you with your quest to find the best tool to manage social media for your business.

Glen revisits SumoMe and the changes in services and pricing since their rebranding as Sumo. Bottom line: all their apps are available for free, albeit with limits not found on their paid plan.
Rate us on iTunes

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | RSS

Listen to Stitcher Listen on Google Play Music

Show Notes

Topic

How do you find the best social media tool for your business?

Research research research!

1. What are you looking to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts?

2. What prompted you to start looking for a new tool?

3. What experience do you want your social team to have with the tool?

Step 1: Write down the 25 most important social media features that you think you might need

Here are some important considerations to help you brainstorm:

  • What caused you to start searching for a new tool? Like I mentioned previously, there was likely something you wanted to do but weren t able to. What was that?
  • Social networks Which social networks do you need to be able to share to?
  • Scheduling posts Do you need to be able to schedule your posts in advance?
  • Custom posting times How should scheduling work? Do you need to choose your own custom posting times?
  • Scheduling tool vs. all-in-one platform Are you looking for an awesome scheduling tool, or are you looking for an all-in-one social media management platform?
  • Analytics Do you need analytics? Which metrics do you need to track? How in-depth do your reports need to be?
  • Paid social campaigns Do you need the ability to manage paid social campaigns? (FB ads, Twitter ads, etc)
  • Engagement Do you need to be able to pull in, interact with, and respond to incoming social conversations?
  • Social listening Do you need social listening/brand monitoring capabilities?
  • Team collaboration tools Will you need to be able to add team members, review posts, and manage your team s workflow?
  • UTMs Do you need the ability to set UTM parameters on a per channel basis? or a per post basis?
  • Integrations Are there any other tools you d need to integrate with?

Step 2: Review the list and circle your top 5 features

Step 3: Use these two lists to evaluate potential tools

 

Sumo (was SumoMe)

New name, new service tiers. ALL their apps are available for free. There’s still a premium level with advanced features.

Sumo.com Apps
Boy, do they have a bunch of apps.

Most of the apps deal with growing your email list. This is a solid strategy to growing your business, so it makes sense that they’d focus on this technique. The apps are:

Email

  • List Builder 3 (your standard pop-up subscription box)
  • Scroll Box (appears when scrolling)
  • Smart Bar (top of screen message)
  • Welcome Mat (full-screen opt-in when first visiting)
  • Leads (incentives for signups)
  • Autoresponder (new feature. Works with List Builder 3)
  • Contact Form (the standard contact form)

Analytics

  • Google Analytics (how many visits, how long they stay, how many pages they go to, where did they come from, etc.)
  • Content Analytics (analyze the appeal of your content – works best with A/B testing)
  • Heatmaps (see where people click and how far they scroll down)
  • Dashboard (see stats and reporting)

Sharing

  • Highlighter (select text to share)
  • Image Sharer (share and image from your post)
  • Share (share posts and articles)

A/B testing (also called split testing) is now part of the free plan. This lets you create two versions of an opt-in form or your content, and tracks the performance of each version. Pick the one that works better and go with it. Make another change and test it against the one you kept. Lather, rinse, repeat, getting a bit better results each time you test.

And of course, Integrations. Sumo plays with 32 different services. That’s a huge number for one service to work with. Just about any email/mailing list service is supported, and of course, they have Zapier integration. However, you need to be on a Pro plan to take advantage of these integrations.

Pricing

If you go Pro, it’s $29/month provided you pay annually; otherwise, it’s $49/month.

So what else do you get with Pro? More styles and themes for those email forms. Advanced filters and longer data retention for your reporting. No Sumo branding. If your site gets more visitors than the free tier allows, you’ll need to upgrade.

 

Links from the Show

Sumo – sumo.com

The post #016 – Find The Best Social Media Tool For Your Business appeared first on Productivity Zone.

Newsletter