10 Essential Social Media Tools for Sales People

Selling with social media works.  But it requires being genuine and engaging with those you want to build a professional relationship. Managing a diverse social media sales strategy isn’t easy. Managing multiple accounts on different platforms requires a lot of work in order for a strategy to succeed in its goals. To make the task more manageable, we put together a list of the 10 essential social media tools for sales people:

1. Buffer

You certainly have a life and responsibilities outside of tracking your social media everyday.  Fortunately there are scheduling tools like Buffer.  Buffer for scheduling social media is a social media tool that sales people can use to schedule and share posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn throughout the entire day, and that too at optimal times. Buffer is a very easy to use tool and offers comprehensive analytics to let you know what’s working where, when, and why.

2. Hootsuite

Just like Buffer, Hootsuite too handles the scheduling of your social media posts.  But one of the biggest benefits for sales people that Hootsuite offers is the ability to save a search (which they call “stream”) and track those tweets.  These streams give you the ability to  track your competitors, your top clients, hashtags or advance searches.  Now you can stay on top of topics that are important to your sales process.

Read More: How Sales People Get Started with Twitter

3. Canva

Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites and 150% more retweets. (Tweets with images engagement).  But not all sales people are creative enough to design those high-end and eye-catching graphics.  But now you can with Canva for social media images.  Canva is a desktop and iPad graphic design app that offers a surprisingly useful drag-and-drop interface. It also offers templates that make it easier for sales people to create the perfect social media image. We use the tool to create designs, including blog graphics, Facebook covers, and more.

4. Content Gems

To be meaningful and build up your followers one of your objectives is to share content that your audience wants to read.  But with  861,379,000 websites (as of January 2014) it could become a challenge to find the best content to read and share.  But now you can with Content Gems.  Content Gems is a tool for content curation. This is an excellent tool for anyone searching for top rated content related to their industry and audience. Content Gems searches various online sources, including blogs, news sources, and social media accounts to filter out results based on the chosen keywords or social signals.  As a user you can easily read and socially share these articles from the Content Gems website.

5. Drumup

In addition to Content Gems, Drumup is another content curation tool.  Although Content Gems seems to produce a larger selection of content, Drumpup has a mobile app for those sales people who are on the go.  It helps sales people discover and share interesting content ideas from their social media accounts.

6. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a tool that helps in finding key influencers for you to follow, engage with and promote content. The tool is frequently used to find engaging, most popular topics that are trending on the Internet, particularly on various social media platforms.

Sales people should use this tool to analyze which content performs the best for a specific competitor or topic.

7. Newsle.com

Newsle is all about helping you keep in touch with people who you follow in your networks.  The best thing about Newsle is that it doesn’t pick status messages or tweets; it presents real news whenever your colleagues or friends do something newsworthy.  Sales people should use this to track when their clients, prospects or friends are in the news so they can read and share.

8. Twitter Advanced Search

Twitter’s Advanced Search tool is a must for anyone searching for influencers or prospects in a particular area or by keyword. We use the tool for exactly the same purpose – the Advanced Search tool is extremely powerful and accurate with its results.

Read more: How to Use Twitter to Find Prospects

9. Commun.it

Nicknamed the social CRM, Commun.it is a community manager for Facebook and Twitter. It enables us to manage our relationships better and allows us to focus on our customers as well as influencers. Posts can be scheduled and multiple profiles can be managed. Free Facebook and Twitter analytics add to the value of this tool!  The reasons why sales people like Commun.it is because it recommends when you should engage with a follower, who to follow or unfollow, who are the top influencers and so much more.  The free edition is very good but the paid edition is well worth it.

10. RiteTag

RiteTag is a tool to help you find the right hashtags to include in your tweets or follow.  Although Twitter shows you the trends of certain hashtags, RiteTag will show you the relevant hashtags.  This tool is good for sales people because they can now make sure they are “hanging out” in the right area.

Sales people who effectively use social media close more deals.  These are the 10 social media tools we recommend for our sales team.  But I would love to hear if there are any other social media tools you might recommend for sales people.  If so, please include them in the comments below.

Also published on Medium.