Social Media Tools Can Help

You’re probably thinking: Social media tools–really? The answer is yes, really.

Posting to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (or any other social media platform) isn’t exactly rocket science. Log in, type or upload, and bam: your message is out there.

But social media marketing—well, that’s a little bit different.

You need quality content.

You need to know how to reach your followers.

You need to time it all correctly.

While this is still not rocket science, it’s not exactly an add-water-and-mix recipe, either. Fortunately, there are tons of useful social media tools out there that can simplify your insurance social media marketing. Here are our three faves.

A Social Media Tool for Quality Content: Topsy

You already know that curating content is a big way you can grow your social media following—and you already have some great ideas about sources where you can find content to share. But what if your top sources are a little dry—or what if you’re short on time? That’s where social media tools, and  Topsy, to be specific, comes in.

This is a search engine for social (very heavy on the Tweets), and there are a few ways you can use it in your insurance social media marketing:

• Type in a word or phrase, and up pops a list of social media posts that contain it.
• Click on Social Trends in the top menu, and you’ll be able to see at a glance the top topics for conversations happening right now.
• Identify new-to-you “influencers” by typing in a desired topic in the Social Search bar and clicking “Influencers.”

A Tool to Help You Reach Your Followers: SocialRank

If you’re low on Re-Tweets, you may need to devote some thought to exactly who your current followers are, so you can determine how best to reach them. SocialRank can help you figure it out.

Sign in with your Twitter account, and once SocialRank has assimilated all your followers, you can filter them by who has the most followers, who is the most engaged, even who is the “best” (most in-demand) follower. Your next step? Check out the Twitter accounts of your top five followers (using any filter you like), and see what those people Tweet and Re-Tweet. Get a feel for what interests them—and then you have a much better chance of creating content that they’ll engage with. (You can also focus on interacting with them by replying to and sharing their Tweets, which will lay the groundwork for a fruitful relationship!)

A Social Media Tool to Time Your Posts: Hootsuite

Having read this far, you must be seeing the value of social media tools. But we’re not done. When it comes to scheduling your social media posts, there is a full spectrum of social media tools available, but Hootsuite is at the top of our list. The free account allows you to add three social media accounts to your Hootsuite dashboard. Once your social media accounts have been added, you can choose the “streams” you’d like to see each time you click on an account’s tab. You can read other people’s Tweets or Google+ posts all from one handy application, instead of logging in to each social media account separately.

Best of all, Hootsuite offers scheduling capabilities, so you can prepare posts in advance and then set them up to go live when you want them to. And if you’re struggling with determining when’s the best time to reach your followers, it even offers an Autoschedule feature that will choose the best time to post.

Three Social Media Tools in One, Plus Some: InsuranceSocial.Media

Not to toot our own horn… but we’d be remiss, since we’re talking about social media tools, if we didn’t remind you that InsuranceSocial.Media actually provides all these services, and then some. You can post your own content whenever you like, and view what your network is posting. We can schedule posts so that they’ll go out to your network at the optimal time. And best of all, no searching for quality content to share: we’ve got you covered! Multiple times a week (how many depends on which plan you choose), informative posts and helpful tips will go out to your followers, building your reputation as a go-to resource, and keeping your social media accounts lively without you needing to take any time or energy to source and post content.

Want to learn more? Check out our video!

Photo by Todd Quackenbush.