A LinkedIn Management Tool For B2B Social Media?

Social media management software solutions are pretty predictable. They go where the money is, which means enterprise on the client focus side and Facebook and Twitter on the social channel side. What that creates, however, is opportunity for a smaller player to enter the marketplace and serve the needs of those left out.

Oktopost is a social media publishing, engagement and lead generation system that is built around LinkedIn and the needs of the B2B business. With its focus on LinkedIn interaction (mainly around group posting and responses), the Israel-based software fills a gap other SMMS providers either ignore or struggle with.

Oktopost does provide similar social media conversation management (publishing and engagement functionality) with Facebook and Twitter as well. It also integrates with Salesforce and Marketo for lead capture.

Posts are brought into a “Social Inbox” where you can read and respond to your posts. But the tool focuses on listening to “what matters,” in their words, which is conversations pointed toward you — those in your groups or groups you belong to and those posted on your pages. While the ability to monitor conversations in LinkedIn groups is strong, Oktopost does not have a traditional monitoring functionality (one that searches for keywords or phrases from around the web), so you’ll need a listening platform on top of the service.

The activity within the tool is built around campaigns as well. This is good for organizing your content and lead activity around certain focused efforts, but can be frustrating if you want to see an overall picture of your social communications. The data is there, though, so that would be a minor consideration.

One neat feature is the publishing dialog boxes for each social network are build custom to that network. You can add groups in the LinkedIn post box, but not in the one for Facebook. This user-experience design element reminds you that messages shouldn’t be copy-pasted or blasted to multiple networks. Rather, you should ensure you’re writing content for each community within its own nomenclature, etc. (i.e. – LinkedIn users get frustrated with Twitter hashtags and “@” symbols because they don’t understand them, provided they aren’t Twitter users also.)

With the focus on LinkedIn, Oktopost does stand out a bit. But it’s not holistically different that the functionality provided by HootSuite, Seesmic Desktop or even some more robust tools like Sprout Social or even a Spredfast. Still, if you’re a B2B company with a LinkedIn focus and you’d rather manage your content, engagement and leads in one, clean interface, Oktopost is worth looking into.

Oktopost starts at $24 per month and allows unlimited company users and posts for around $100 per month. The more social profiles you need tracked and incorporated, the more money you’ll pay and there’s an additional fee for the CRM system integration.

Franky, for the price, it’s not a bad investment, based on the steep prices of most tools on the market, which are enterprise focused.