Today I’m going to talk to you about my favourite Social Media tool – MarketMeSuite. But before we get under-way I’m keen to point out that I’m in no way affiliated with them, I’m just a web professional who offers Web Development & SEO services and benefits from their product. So, lets begin.

It seems that any progressive business must operate on a social media platform, or multiple ones. You only have to watch TV for 5 minutes to see an advert and somewhere on that advert it reference a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account or even a hashtag (#). The power of social media is well and truly upon us, but managing this marketing aspect is a tall order, especially as you’ll probably be busy doing your own actual work. But so much of the marketing world is taking the time to reach people in all areas, across all mediums (not just online) and demographs.  On top of this if we look at the way of Social Media, so much of this is building up relationships and responding to queries, comments, providing social worth. It in some cases could easily become a full time job, depending on the nature and size of your business and following. So how do we make it easier? In my opinion MarketMeSuite.

MarketMeSuite is a business orientated Social Media DashBoard and my easily my favourite, I have used others for short periods and none of them have captured me quite like MarketMeSuite, so I’m going to give you a good overview of its key points.

Twitter: The jewel in it’s crown is certainly its compatibility with Twitter, it has a high twitter API rate which is great for those serious SEO or Social Media Marketing guys. However what’s probably more impressive it that you can host unlimited Twitter accounts, with an unlimited team structure, the team structure allows you to manage who of your employees have access to which Twitter accounts. I can only imagine that this is extremely useful for the larger organisations who own perhaps stores nationwide but have separate Twitter accounts for each store. You don’t need any additional licenes with MarketMeSuite, so essentially you can have several members of staff managing several different Twitter accounts individually, but through the same MarketMeSuite. Which is great and something I’m sure some larger software firms wouldn’t allow, meaning you’d need additional licenses to use on those same accounts.

So already we’ve established that it’s a great value for money tool, before we’ve even got to its features.

Branding: A Term synonymous with Twitter, branding shows a link back to your chosen website like:

As the eagle-eyed viewer among you will notice next to the timestamp shows “iwebconsultancy”, this links back to my SEO & Social Media Marketing Website. Obviously the more tweets you tweet through the console, the more back-links you create. I should just mention a couple of things, the automated tweets are not brandable and recently twitter has changed where the branding appears. In earlier Twitter editions the brand was visible in your feed of tweets, now unfortunately Twitter has moved the brand so it is only visible if you actually go into the tweet itself. What effect that has on backlinks to your site, I’m not sure currently, only time will tell. Backlinks are great obviously, but would Google treat 100s of links from the same website (i.e -Twitter) better than a couple of inbound links from other relevant websites any better? I’m not sure they would. But it looks nice and reinforces your brand to the human eye which is what marketing is isn’t it? Branding isn’t confined to twitter though, you can also brand your Facebook statuses or comments, again more visual representation of your brand.

Dashboard: The Twitter MarketMeSuite dashboard is built in panes of which there are a lot to choose from. I personally show, my home timeline which is essentially your Twitter home page, I also choose to see a list of all my tweets, mentions and followings, so there is no dashing between various pages to find what you want. You can also have messages, favourites, retweets, friends and more all have their own pane (if you want). With each pane lists all the tweets and there’s also additional options to  reply, replyall, follow, direct message, favourite, block, report spam. It’s all very compact and provides a really clean overview of options available. Helping you to perform what ever Twitter related job, you want to do. It’s also integrated with Klout, which I really like, Every Tweet shows who it’s from and what their Klout score is. You can then chose to view their Klout score at Klout and read about them. I’m apparently a “Networker” with a score of 40. Something I’d probably agree with.

Sending a Tweet or Status: There isn’t really much to this as you’d expect, but all URLs are shortened which is a nice feature built into the tool and there is the option to provide a signature (not to be confused with a brand) at the end of the status, further more, you can opt to update this status to not only Twitter, but your Facebook profile, Facebook Page, LinkedIn profile and LinkedIn Groups. The ease of this is really what helps you manage multiple platforms efficiently. I can even reply to comments on my Facebook page all within one tool that brands my responses at the same time. You can also however upload an image, which is very in keeping with Twitter who recently released this facility in the browser.

Dotted Tweets: Moving back towards larger organisations and multiple team members, Dotted Tweets simply colour a tweet so that its easily recognisable who is responsible for it. It’s little touches like this that really set it apart in terms of organisational prowess.

That pretty much covers the management of MarketMeSuite, there is more that could be delved into, such as Google integration but the overview I’ve given is a good account of my experiences with the tool. Now we move the the Marketing side, which is pretty neat.

There are a couple of really great aspects to this tool, firstly;

Reply Campaigns: They take a bit of time to make mainly because to get the best out of them you should be taking the time to research the area your getting into. But MarketMeSuite believe that there is a follow-back rate of up to 80% when used properly. You can intertwine this with local GEO specific searching, meaning building a brand for your local business is easy and often a great way to get in touch with people who could be after your services. Simply add a host of keywords to target people who may be in the niche you’re after, add some replies, i’e a host of different replies to try and find which ones are more beneficial to starting up conversations, you may have for instance “What do you think of HTML5?” or “Do you use HTML5 yet?”. Each tweet sent out will select either of those replies to use, the more replies you create the more variety – but maybe you’ve already got a killer tweet. Much like Google Adwords you can also select negative keywords to refine your search a very helpful feature as anyone with any SEO or PPC experience will tell you. Once your search is completed, you can custom reply or used your saved replies, you can also follow the user if you so wish.

Scheduled Tweets: Anyone who uses Twitter and wants followers surely understands the importance of striking a balance between visibility and nuisance. If you tweet once a day, you’ll most likely find only a few people will follow you (unless your famous), this is due to the vast amount of tweets plunged in twitter every second. Your brilliant tweet will be lost inside an hour, 2 hours maybe, what would be good was if you could schedule tweets every x minutes, whatever you felt was appropriate. Obviously you can do this with MarketMeSuite, it’s really simple, either paste a section of tweets into the scheduled tweet section and give them a time delay (The time delay is broken down into intervals of 10 minutes), or you can use Google Calendar to import them. This means you can be forever tweeting, keeping your visibility up and hopefully not tweeting too frequently to be a nuisance to your followers. Even when you’re sound asleep.

RSS Feed Management: Maybe you don’t tweet a lot or you love a particular RSS feed, you can set up your MarketMeSuite to follow your favourite RSS feeds and then post them to your respective twitter, facebook, facebook pages accounts. You can add your own prefix or suffix to the RSS feed such as “Latest Google Blog” and a selection of hastags #Google #SEO.

Keyword Following: As easy as it sounds, put your keywords in, select a language and go, use this tool to find people in your industry or people who may need something you have to offer, it’s really simple and a really effective way to network, even if your just looking for more followers, which brings me to a couple more great features.

AutoFollow: Someone follows you, automatically follow them back, this is great for holding on to followers, many many people use tools like this and people who don’t follow back often themselves get un-followed (bar celebrities).

Direct Message: Once someone follows you, you can set it up to even send a “Thank you for following reply”, you can just as the reply campaign lets you, list a host of replies to greet your new follower with, which is a nice personal touch, to anyone who uses tools like this its obvious that it’s automated, but for people who don’t use these tools it’s a nice gesture, whether you actually mean it or not.

Unfollow User: Simply this tool finds all the people who are not following you back, this means should you feel that your following someone and they aren’t following you and it rubs you up the wrong way or you don’t want to appear to be following too many compared to the number of followers, whatever your reason, you can unfollow them. Just select the number of people to unfollow and click unfollow. I should also add there is a whitelist so you can add people who you don’t mind not following you back, maybe a celebrity or world expert in your field.

Cost: Currently it’s retail prive is $5.99 per month so $72 a year. Although when I purchased mine I got it at half this cost if you paid for a year in full. Maybe this is not an option now, but $72 is hardly breaking the bank is it.

Support: Great support, the guys are really helpful with enquiries and seem to genuinely want you to get the very best out of the tool. That comes through in the responses, they also freely advocate feature requests and have a strong documentation on getting up and ready on all the features available, although some of the tutorials show images from older MarketMeSuite editions that could confuse a newbie. Although they are first to admit it that they need updating on occasions, but the tutorials remain very helpful and useful.

So that’s about it, my review on a brilliant tool with lots of features at a near steal. Hope you enjoyed the post.

Jonathon