Written by ContentPowered.com
Social media can no longer be ignored, and a study of Fortune 500 companies proves it. Here are some interesting data points in a study of the Fortune 500:
- In 2012, Twitter usage was at 73%. By 2014, it rose to 83%. Facebook, over that time, went from 66% to 80% adoption.
- In 2012, just 2% of the Fortune 500 used Pinterest. Last year, that number rose to 36%.
- Linkedin wasn’t use at all, by any of the Fortune 500, prior to 2014. In 2014, 97% had adopted it.
Of course, these brands are all too large to use Facebook the way it’s presented to everyone. They use special tools to manage their brand presence. Here are some of those tools.
Gremln
As a personal user, entrepreneur, or small business owner, you might not think of the day to day legalities of the things you do. It’s part of why so many small businesses end up accused of copyright violations, content theft and other relatively minor issues. Gremln is a tool for large companies that scans and maintains your Facebook and other social pages with one specific goal in mind; make sure everything is legal and compliant with various laws and regulations. Fortune 500s don’t have the luxury of being able to fly under the radar, and they’re not too big to stop.
Cadence9
This tool is a bit niche, so it doesn’t work for all Fortune 500s or for all small businesses, for that matter. It’s a tool specifically designed for franchises or multi-unit social presences. If you’re a restaurant or hotel chain, for example, you can use this to manage a social presence that is at once unified, but individualized enough that each branch has its own freedom to grow and make decisions.
Marketing AI
Marketing AI isn’t so much a Facebook tool as it is a generally collaborative marketing tool. It’s not geared for posting or analytics like many of the other tools on this list. Rather, it’s specifically a tool that works to manage and engage collaborative marketing teams. Managers can assign tasks, authors and designers complete them, deadlines are managed, brainstorming is compiled, and everything is stored in a secure cloud that allows for remote collaboration anywhere.
ContentDJ
One trend we’ve seen in the last year or so is the push away from constantly posting content produced by your company. Content curation has become increasingly important. ContentDJ is a tool that allows companies to amass and curate content within their industry, using a combination of social listening, trend monitoring, RSS feeds and content library compilation.
Shoutlet
Don’t read the diminutive –let and think Shoutlet is a minor application. Used by Best Buy, 3M, Canon and a host of other companies, Shoutlet is firmly an enterprise tool, through and through. It’s specifically designed to help enterprises post to social networks with scheduling, team management, reporting and more. On top of all of that, it allows you to build a library of content, including images, logos, coupons and other such content. The tool then determines whether or not that content will work on the given social networks – with size constraints being most prominent – and helps guide the company to the right content every time.
Bottlenose
Named after the aquatic mammals that use sonar to help communicate and navigate under water, Bottlenose applies the sonar concept to the web. Specifically, it’s a massive and useful content discovery and listening tool. Use it to listen for user sentiment about your company, your industry, your keywords, your hashtags, your promotions and even your competitors. It produces reports in a unique real-time graph, and it uses associated keywords to help you discover new targets for trend capitalization. Not only does it do all of this in real time; it also has historical data so you can see how these trends change over time.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce is one of those suites you only really see in the higher end companies, simply due to the price point that excludes many small businesses and individual owners. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a suite for managing total marketing across the Internet, and it’s particularly geared towards large scale promotions. It integrates Radian6, which is a comprehensive sentiment analysis tool that hooks into every conceivable communications channel. It also uses Buddy Media, which is a tool specifically designed to help you create specific social campaigns using templates and a host of unique tools.
UberVU
UberVU is an enterprise-level marketing tool that takes a unique approach that, while not the greatest for everyone, works exceptionally well for the people who like it. They offer a lot of analytics and dashboard tools, but perhaps one of their best features are the spikes. This is a sort of social monitoring that keeps an ear to the ground looking for social mentions and trends. If your brand or a keyword in your industry is trending, you want to know why. UberVU lets you know immediately and hooks you into the feed so you can see why, and in what context, the trend is happening. Plus, the suite is now part of HootSuite, which many companies use to manage other parts of their web presence already.
Raven Tools
Raven Tools is one of the most potent third party analytics suites available today. It hooks into all of your various social platforms, and it helps with analytics and SEO, to keep your marketing unified across all platforms. It helps automate most of the basic tasks that need doing. It can even hook into your blog and give you an understanding of your content marketing with a detailed analysis. The best part about Raven Tools, however, is the reporting. Fortune 500s are notorious for their bureaucracy – TPS reports, anyone? – and Raven Tools makes it quick and easy to generate great looking and impactful reports.
Power Editor
Okay, so this one is almost a bit of a cop-out. Power Editor isn’t necessarily even used by Fortune 500s themselves; rather, their marketing agencies probably use it. The thing is, Power Editor is simply the best ad creation tool available for Facebook. The fact that it’s maintained by Facebook only makes it that much better. It always supports the latest features, it’s always available, and it’s guaranteed to work. It’s also free and available for small businesses just as well as the cream of the crop.