Sound n' Sight

8 can't-live-without tools for event social media management

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The following is a guest blog article by Kari Rippetoe of Tuvel Communications. If you are interested in guest blogging for Sound n' Sight, please read my guest blogging guidelines . And if you have any thoughts, please comment. Kari and I both would love to hear what you have to say!

In my last guest post, I offered my 10 tips to help you manage social media for events – all things that I’ve learned along the way while managing outposts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other platforms for conferences and expos. Thanks to everyone who read the post and shared it on Twitter – I’m really glad you found it valuable! If you have any tips of your own, I hope you’ll share them in the comments.

Today in part 2 of 2, I’m sharing 8 social media management tools (plus some bonuses) that I not only use for events, but on a regular basis. Do you use any of these?

• Hootsuite: My social media platform of choice. I love having multiple tabs with multiple columns, which allows me to create a dashboard of multiple accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare) and keywords to monitor (like event hashtags, missed @ replies, and other event mentions or relevant keywords). I also love the click analytics provided by ht.ly and ow.ly. I’ve yet to try Hootsuite’s new Google Analytics functionality, which allows you to connect your analytics account to Hootsuite; but I’m looking forward to trying it. Goes to show how Hootsuite really has businesses in mind and is at the top of their class (IMO).

• Google Alerts: I set up alerts on event-related keywords to catch mentions across the web, then create feeds of those alerts in Google Reader.

• SocialMention: SocialMention is a great way to find mentions across the social mediasphere, including Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and online forums. You can also set up alerts, which are emailed to you.

• BackTweets: This is my newest tool and one that I really love. Sometimes you might miss tweets of your content because they didn’t contain your Twitter name, company name, blog name, etc. Just input your URL into BackTweets, and Voila! You get a list of those tweets you may have missed! Great for finding new people to follow and engage. They will also have a low-cost Pro option, which is not available yet; but you can sign up to receive an alert when it is.

• Future Tweets: Scheduling tweets is a must for me, because it allows me to be more efficient with my Twitter management. I schedule tweets for things like upcoming sessions, book signings, and other goings-on at a conference (see my tips below for more on this). I use Future Tweets because you can schedule down to the second – which can be useful if you have two or more sessions starting at the same time.

Bonus tool: I’ve actually just discovered a nifty scheduling tool called Dynamic Tweets. While you can’t schedule down to the second, you can import a spreadsheet of tweets – which I think is very cool given that I usually plan out scheduled tweets in a spreadsheet. As of this writing, I haven’t used it yet – but I plan to!

• WTHashtag: I use this to track conversations linked to an event hashtag, but what I love most is I can pull up archives based on certain dates I input. It’s a handy way to see hashtag activity on a certain day or days.

• Twapper Keeper: I’ve found this to be a pretty good tool for archiving tweets by hashtag, keyword, or account name. Only downsides are reports don’t export easily, and the service sends out a tweet on your account each time you create an archive (and there’s no option available to avoid this).

Bonus tool: I’ve recently found out about another Twitter search tool that does allow you to export tweets into an Excel file – Searchtastic. And it works brilliantly! I exported a hashtag search, and it not only gave me the tweets, but data on the people who posted those tweets – account name, homepage, location, followers, following and total tweets. Now imagine how you could slice and dice that data – you could calculate metrics like approximate reach and gather demographic information like geographic location of the people tweeting about your keywords!

• Backupify: Another great way to archive tweets, Backupify will back up your social networking accounts (like Twitter and Facebook) and create PDFs with all your activity (sometimes going back a year or more).

What social media management tools do you use that you just can’t live without?

Kari Rippetoe is Social Media & Community Outreach Manager at Tuvel Communications, a Washington DC area-based digital marketing and communications firm specializing in social media and outreach campaigns for associations, events, non-profits and technology companies. She has managed social media and outreach campaigns for clients like the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB Show) and 1105 Government Information Group (FOSE and GovSec/U.S. Law Conference & Expo). Follow Kari on Twitter @KariRippetoe, as well as Tuvel Communications @TuvelComms.

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