7 Things to Look for When Shopping for Twitter Management Tools

[[updated December 8, 2016]]

With a gazillion Twitter management tools out there, how do you find the perfect match for you and your business?

You don’t have time trying out each one you hear about and spending time using an ill-fitting tool will:

• Slow you down
• Create miscommunication in your team
• Disrupt your workflow
• Cause you to lose leads and customers
• Make you more inefficient than you were before

That’s why we decided to build our own Twitter management tool to accomplish the following “must-have” tasks for social media managers.

1. Track tweets with relevant-to-you keywords
2. Assign tweets to the right person for follow up
3. Submit tweets for approval before publishing
4. Identify your most important followers
5. Make sure all the mentions and DMs are replied to
6. Schedule tweets efficiently
7. Gain actionable analytics to improve results

1. Track tweets containing important keywords

A key edge Twitter holds over all other social media platforms is the ability to listen to what people are saying and monitor those conversations.

If we aren’t monitoring the tweets in that pie that are relevant to our business, you will most likely:

• lose customers who have unresolved complaints
• never connect with potential customers who are influenced by those upset tweeters
• miss a chance to gain valuable feedback on your product or service.

If you want a tool that will notify you when a tweet containing specific keywords you care about is published, you’ll need a social media management tool like Agorapulse.

To set up an alert using Agorapulse:

• Go to the monitoring dashboard
• Click on the “Searches” button on the right sidebar
• Click on the button that says “New Search”
• Enter a search name that’s meaningful to you, the keywords you want to search for, and the ones you want to ignore, the language and/or location. Then click on the button that says “Preview.”
  
• Look at your alert preview and confirm it by clicking the “Add” button.

2. Assign  tweets to the right person for follow up

Many businesses have a handful (or two!) employees with access to the corporate Twitter account. These kinds of businesses need the ability for anyone with access to the Twitter account to assign tweets to another. So if any team member sees a tweet and he knows who to assign it to follow up, they easily can do it.

Assigning tweets to people is simple:

• Click on any tweet you want to assign to someone and a sidebar will appear on the right;
• Finally, click on the “Assign” button to reveal the list of people in your team and choose who to assign the tweet to
• Add a note to put the tweet and context
• Feel good knowing that a teammate will take care of replying to that tweet!

3.  Submit tweets for approval before publishing

If you’re working in the in-house social media team of a medium size business, you may want to submit a tweet for your account lead’s review before publishing it.

If you’re working in an agency, you may want to review a team member’s tweet before you let it go “live”. This is especially true if you have a new team member who is in charge of composing tweets.

If you need examples on just how prevalent a Twitter-led PR crisis is, look at the comments in these “Oopsie” post from Razer and KFC Australia:

We apologize for the SD reader joke. To those who were offended, it was intended as a lighthearted turn of phrase that missed the mark.

— RΛZΞR (@Razer) November 2, 2016

We are very sorry for our earlier tweet on H&S – we didn’t mean to offend and removed it when we realised we’d made an error in judgment.

— KFC Australia (@KFCAustralia) April 15, 2016

Submitting content for approval is an integral control process within reputable organizations these days. It’s both a pre-emptive and preventive measure in case of a potential PR crisis.

A tool like Agorapulse can save you and your company tons of embarrassment (and sales) with its draft and approve feature.

4. Identify our most important followers

Engaging with followers on Twitter is a must and we invest a lot of time into getting it done. But why not spend less time engaging with better results?

Agorapulse’s user management feature automatically assigns badges to your most engaged users. When someone interacts with your Twitter account, you know who they are and why they matter to your business.

The tool assigns 3 types of badges to Twitter followers:

• Engaged User (green comment bubble icon in the below screenshot)
• Ambassador (retweets me or tweets links to my website), and
• Influencer (details in the screenshot below)

These badges and your (totally customizeable) tags are priceless tools for prioritizing your engagement time!

If say, agencies are important to your business, add an “agency” custom tag to your users tab. When you filter all Twitter users and followers who have interacted with you using that tag, you’ll immediately see the ones who have already engaged, retweeted you or tweeted links to your website.

This makes it so easy to spend your scarcest resource- time -engaging with users who are the most likely to respond positively!

5. Make sure all mentions and DMs are replied to

One of the biggest challenges with Twitter is the volume of tweets that we all have to manage.

If managing social media isn’t your only role, you can quickly get lost in the ever growing noise of your social media feeds.

Agorapulse has developed a unique solution that allows us to focus on the “new” tweets and review them. It’s like reading your new email messages — a system built to quickly and easily get you to what we call Inbox Zero!

The first component is a very clear dashboard that shows us how many new items you need to check for each account:

Then, we see one unified Inbox for each account. No more stressing over multiple tabs that are hard to read:

Finally, it’s easy to “review” tweets.  We can review each tweet manually (replies to tweets automatically mark them as reviewed), or all at once. Once reviewed, tweets are taken off the “to review” filter and you get that fresh, fulfilling feeling of “Inbox Zero” 🙂

6. Schedule your tweets ahead of time

Although much of Twitter communication is in real time, many tweets can be scheduled ahead of time. To schedule tweets with Agorapulse’s all-in-one Twitter app:

1. Click “Publish” on your dashboard
2. Choose the Twitter accounts you want to send the tweet from.
3. Decide if you want to publish the tweet now, schedule it for a particular time, or add it to a queue of content you’ve built up for each account.

And set it free!

If it’s a tweet that considered evergreen content, add it to be “requeued” multiple times in your Twitter queue.

There’s also a calendar view to schedule tweets and view past or future content.

7. Actionable Analytics

We can find loads of information on impressions and engagement in Twitter’s native analytics.

Or you can use a Twitter management tool that has analytics built in — like say, Agorapulse?

Agorapulse reports are included in all plans and provide actionable insights on your Twitter audience, engagement, awareness, and community management. Either review your Twitter metrics online or download a handy, editable PowerPoint deck with your Twitter stats built in!

Conclusion

We understand the difficulties you face when it comes to choosing a Twitter management tool – they’re so many out there! I hope we’ve narrowed the field for you a bit in your search.

Agorapulse’s Twitter management tool was built to meet our needs and the needs stated by our customers- social media managers from across the globe. It’s the way we use Twitter to interact with our users, provide valuable information and customer service.

If there’s something you’re looking out for that we haven’t already covered, please let us know what it is in the comments below. If you would like to share your experience about a tool you’re currently using we’d love to hear it!