Top 20 Apps For Managing Social Media

Some companies have a Facebook page, while others have thousands of them. When an organization has lots of local agents or representatives, all of whom want their own Facebook business page, putting out a coherent corporate message gets more difficult.

One approach is to try to provide a local touch by delegating responsibility to local agents or representatives within a set of guidelines, while monitoring their activity for compliance, as Farmers Insurance is doing with Hearsay Social. One to One Global's MessageMaker Social tries to tackle the same problem, but is geared to organizations that want to assert a greater degree of centralized control.

One to One is a Boston-based interactive agency that has entered the market for web-based marketing software with its MessageMaker product, which also includes modules for managing email campaigns and distribution of marketing applications for installation on mobile devices. The social media module was released in December. One to One also has a large insurance company as an early customer, one that is "outside the Fortune 70 but inside the Fortune 100" that it hopes to get approval to name as a reference customer, said Business Development Manager Eric Goldstein in an interview.

Hearsay's product, which launched in February, allows organizations to distribute content suggestions to local representatives who have the ability to choose which ones to promote on their own pages, personalizing them in the process. The organization can also monitor and archive posts and conversations that occur on a Facebook page (or on Twitter or LinkedIn)--something that's particularly important in regulated industries that must maintain rigorous compliance programs.

MessageMaker Social has the same goal of helping organizations manage lots of different pages, but in its model the central organization asserts sole administrative control over them. In other words, local insurance agents and financial advisors can be assigned their own pages, but before any of their posts can appear they must get an approval from headquarters.

One to One Director of Product Management T.J. Crawford said the software may eventually support something like the Hearsay workflow as an alternative, but that's not where the greatest demand is. "We saw we had a number of companies asking us for a more centralized model of managing pages," he said. "They're saying we are going to create these Facebook pages, but we want to have over them for our compliance and our risk team to sign off on social media activity."

One to One is also trying to centralize the management of Internet communications by having reports on the performance of social media campaigns available from within the same administration tool its customers use to manage their email and mobile marketing campaigns. Across Facebook and Twitter (the two networks MessageMaker has targeted for starters), the reporting tool also tries to normalize measures of engagement based on Facebook likes and comments, Twitter retweets and replies, boiling the activity down to common measures to the extent possible.