Aren’t we all looking for that one perfect social media tool?
Social media is a big, messy, time-consuming and attention-sucking business.
The right tools can streamline your efforts, cut down on your time spent and help you measure success.
The one thing a tool can’t do is build a relationship for you. That process has to happen at human scale, with human intentions. It can be a long process, but tools can help you keep up with your new friends as you nurture your biggest fans, build your community and deepen your connections.
Here are 10 of my favorite social media tools for finding your fans and building deeper relationships.
FIND YOUR FANS
1. Crowdbooster
A multi-purpose social media tool, Crowdbooster really shines in the “Top Fans” and “Top Retweeters” sections, which sift though your Facebook fans and Twitter followers to bring those who frequently engage with you to the top of the pile so you can focus on them.
2. Buffer
Primarily know as a post scheduling tool, Buffer also offers per-post analytics that allow you to dig into which of your fans and followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are most active in sharing your content and commenting on your posts.
3. Commun.it
Building community through Twitter is Commun.it’s whole purpose. This tool is great for its continually updated lists including segments like “most engaged members” and “consider to follow.” You can also enter any Twitter user’s handle to see all the past interaction you’ve had with that user.
4. Topsy
Paste your site or a link from your blog into Topsy.com to find out who’s sharing your content – these are your people to cultivate. Click the “show influential only” checkbox to narrow down the list to just those Topsy considers influential or highly influential.
5. SocialBro
This heavy-duty Twitter tool gets high marks for the many ways it allows a user to filter results focusing on just the element you’re interested in. SocialBro offers filtering by new followers, influential followers, number of followers and friends, number of lists, followers/friends ratio, even number of tweets per day.
NURTURE YOUR FANS
6. Twitter lists
It’s great to follow hundreds of friends, businesses, thinkers and influencers on Twitter, but most of can’t possibly keep up with that amount of information coming at us every day. Once you’ve used some of the above tools to ferret out your most engaged fans, take advantage of Twitter’s list function to create smaller, more tailored lists of updates you don’t want to miss. Don’t forget you can make private lists, too!
7. CRM
Once you’ve identified some people you’d like to get to know better, you have to keep up with them. Most know the acronym CRM to mean “customer relationship management” but I prefer contact relationship manager – as in, managing all the contacts you’re making and nurturing. Did they blog about you? Jot down the link here. Did you have a great Twitter conversation you want to remember? Put it here. Your CRM can be as simple as a spreadsheet or part of a larger tool system – whatever works for you.
8. Cloze
Between email and a million social media accounts, things can get confusing. Cloze calms the chaos by automatically organizing all your contacts and conversations across all platforms into one place. You can set particular contacts as targets when you want to make sure you don’t miss anything going on with them, and Cloze also helps make introductions by recommending the right person to make it happen.
9. Rapportive
This handy little add-on for Gmail sits right in your inbox and provides useful information on everyone you talk with throughout the day. Rapportive’s data include a photo, job information and up-to-date social media posts. So even once the conversation has gone to email, you can still stay in the loop with your contacts socially.
10. Taskforce
Working in social media can make email seem so painfully slow and inefficient – but hey, it has to be done. Make it better with one last Gmail add-on. Taskforce lets you easily convert emails into tasks, so you can make sure you’re getting back to your contacts quickly and moving the relationship forward.
What social media tools help you build better relationships? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
Courtney Seiter is the community manager at Raven Tools.
