Managing multiple social media accounts, especially if you’re doing it for multiple brands, can be a pain; things can easily get confusing and you’re going to lose a lot of time if you don’t have the right tools to help. That’s why social media management tools are so helpful – they simplify the whole process, they save you time, and they help you generate better results from your social media; or, at least, that’s what they should do. But when you work with multiple brands and accounts, you need a special tool to help – one that’s designed with teams in mind. In this blog post, I’ll tell you all about Zoho Social and Zoho Social for Agencies, a better way to collaborate on social media marketing.

What is Zoho Social for Agencies?

I am a big fan of all the Zoho tools I’ve tried so far, so it came as no surprise that I’m also loving Zoho Social – as well as their newer product, Zoho Social for Agencies. These are basically two versions of the same platform, the former being for people managing the social presences of one brand and the latter including some handy extra features to help people managing the social presences of multiple brands.

However, there’s more to Zoho Social for Agencies than that; the really big draw is that clients (i.e. businesses and brands) can get involved in the process of managing their social accounts – and I’ll explain all about it in a bit.

Zoho Social works with most major social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google+. You can use it to manage all of your accounts (up to 25 different accounts, which you can bundle into brand-specific “groups” with the Agency option) and add up to five different team members to track and help manage these presences.

Managing your brands

One of the ways you can use Zoho Social is to track all engagement, comments, and mentions across your social media channels and respond to relevant conversations.

On the main screen of your dashboard, you can see a snapshot of your overall stats, recent posts, as well as a live stream of any mentions or comments you’ve got.

When you click on a mention, for example, you can reply to it, but also see some very useful information:

As you can see, the tool lets me know about our history of engagement, as well as a few facts about the user (how many people they follow, how many follow them back). And if I want to know about more about the user, I can click on their name to see a complete profile and a history of interactions, and I can also add any personal information about them to store it all in one place.

If I want, I can sync this information with my Zoho CRM account, which opens up all kinds of use cases for funnel tracking, segmenting and cross-channel automation.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Zoho Social for Agencies: a better way to collaborate on #socialmedia @zohosocial” quote=”Zoho Social for Agencies: a better way to collaborate on #socialmedia @zohosocial”]

Publishing and scheduling posts with Zoho Social

Apart from managing your social accounts, you also have multiple publishing and scheduling options.

Post something directly, schedule the update for a later time, or use the SmartQ feature to see a list of the best times to post based on engagement levels (in other words, when the biggest percentage of your audience is active).

When you schedule an update the regular way, it even tells you how likely it is to reach your top engagers at those times – a super useful feature for making sure you don’t post social media updates in vain.

Another option is to repeat certain posts with recurring schedules:

The post can be re-shared automatically as many times as you want, on the days you want and can also be stopped automatically by adding an expiry date for the update.

If you want to save even more time, you can also upload a .csv file with all of your updates to schedule them directly.

Another very useful feature is that you can see – and easily filter through – all of your published and scheduled updates, as well as drafts; but what’s really cool here is that you can also see all of your promoted posts in one place, and you can even connect your Facebook Page to set up lead ads. With “pay to play” and lead capture playing an increasingly important role in social media marketing, especially on Facebook, this feature helps give you a clearer picture of your social media marketing efforts and makes it easier to manage everything from one place.

Also worth mentioning, you can check all of your planned and scheduled social media updates using the calendar:

Consolidated messaging and monitoring features

Social media has been moving in recent years away from “broadcasting” use cases and more into the realm of one-to-one conversations. As opposed to other social media management platforms, Zoho Social provides great support for these discussions with its consolidated direct messaging inbox, which aggregates all of the messages you’ve received across all channels in a consolidated stream. You can even use this feature to reply directly to people, just like you would with your email inbox, complementing the mention tracking features described above nicely.

Apart from messaging and tracking your mentions and comments, you can also use Zoho Social to set up other monitoring streams:

Search for relevant keywords and add other relevant columns, such as a column for all your likes, monitor specific users, or keep an eye on Twitter lists.

Social CRM tool

Earlier, I showed you how you can store and organise your connections; this is a part of the ‘connections’ feature, which is pretty a social media CRM tool.

Here, you can see all of your connections and browse through them:

You can filter your connections in different ways, such as ‘most engaged users’, ‘recently engaged uses’, or by following/followers.

Then, simply click on any user you want to get more information: their bio, location, recent updates, history of interactions, and other relevant information.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Zoho Social for Agencies: a better way to collaborate on #socialmedia @zohosocial” quote=”Zoho Social for Agencies: a better way to collaborate on #socialmedia @zohosocial”]

Collaboration tools

One of the standout features of Zoho Social for Agencies is the fact that you can easily collaborate on social media marketing with multiple team members and your clients, all from one place.

Users can share reports, manage messaging assets, hold conversations, and tag users so that all of your social media marketing conversations are done in one dashboard thus eliminating the need for back and forth emails, Skype messages, and last minute phone calls.

Everyone can then check the Team Notifications board to see exactly what’s happening at any given time, respond to discussions, and act on different tasks that need doing.

Basically, everything social media-related is kept in one place for easy access by anyone of your team and the clients you’re working with.

Reporting and analytics

Another strong feature is that you can analyse your social media presence at any moment, as well as create as many reports as you want.

Any of the stats on your accounts can easily be emailed to other teammates or clients, and you can also embed them or export them as PDF or PNG – or, even cooler, you can share the specific stat or report with your team members to discuss your findings.

You can also create your own custom reports; just add the items you want to build your report:

Zoho Social offers a large array of stats and analytics so that you can easily create professional, reports that show a clear picture of your social media marketing efforts; once created, the reports can also be scheduled.

The fact that you can customize reports to this degree can come in very handy. Everyone has different goals from their social media marketing, and by customising the report you can provide them with the exact information they need to establish whether they’re on track with that goal or not.

Another bonus: you can also white label your reports.

Conclusion

Overall, I am absolutely loving the features that Zoho Social and Zoho Social for Agencies have, along with the easy to use and intuitive platform. It pretty much has all of the features you could look for in a social media management tool and then some: especially the collaboration tools (and the fact that you can collaborate with clients as well!) and the very powerful reporting.

Have you tried Zoho Social yet? What social media management tools are you using? Leave your comments below, and please share if you enjoyed the post 🙂