As per DataReportal, around 4.24 billion people out of 7.9 billion are using social media. With this huge data, social media offers businesses many opportunities to engage with customers and generate leads. An efficient social media management tool is important for businesses to manage and monitor their social media accounts to make the best use of them.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the process of developing your social media strategy, analyzing your audience, creating and distributing content to social media profiles, building awareness, generating leads, and more. It helps businesses analyze how to effectively participate on various social media platforms to generate desired results.
Social Media Management Tools
Social media management software helps you to manage multiple social media accounts in one place. There are multiple tools with various features and functionalities such as content creation, scheduling and auto-posting, social listening, content analyzing and comparing, and more. Let’s discuss some of the most popular social media management tools:
Later
Later, it first started as an Instagram management tool and has now extended to other platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and more. It is still one of the most popular Instagram management tools. Benefits:
It allows you to plan and schedule your Instagram content in batches.It provides a visual content calendar, which helps decide what your Instagram feed would look like.It offers tools to help you create user-generated content.
Unique Feature: Later, allow users to design a content calendar using its drag and drop images feature and schedule the contents. The platform offers a free link tool to add to your Instagram profile which directs you to a shoppable Instagram feed or another website.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a one-stop solution to manage all your social media platforms in one place. It is one of the most preferable platforms because of its comprehensive analytics and social media tracking tools. Benefits:
Hootsuite allows you to create, publish, or manage multiple social media accounts on various platforms.You can schedule your content on all platforms in advance and can also create an interactive calendar.It allows you to manage and respond to messages from the platform itself.It provides analytics reports to track the performance and update your social media strategy accordingly.It lets you analyze social media trends and engagement in real time.It helps you to customize your content for each social media platform separately.
Unique Feature: The platform allows you to monitor or manage over 30 social media networks from one place and bulk-schedule your content in advance. Hootsuite also offers customizable reports and team productivity reporting.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social supports all major social media platforms like Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. The platform helps businesses of all sizes with its usability, publishing features, and analytics tools. Benefits
It provides an easy-to-use user dashboard to manage social media platforms in one place.The platform has social media optimization tools.It allows seamless monitoring, scheduling, publishing, analytics, reporting, and more.It helps you identify the most relevant hashtags for your social media posts.
Unique Feature: Sprout Social’s ViralPost feature helps users to boost visibility, increase engagement, and reach. It also offers custom URL tracking to track post performance regarding conversions and referral traffic.
Plann
Plann started as an Instagram management, scheduling, and analytics software and now supports Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. It helps to schedule multiple posts in advance. It is ideal for Instagram influencers, bloggers, small business owners, and creatives. Benefits
Plann sends notifications to remind users when it’s time to post content.It helps store hashtags for posts, stories, themes, or Instagram campaigns.It provides valuable data like follower growth, engagement rates, and more.It sends weekly growth tips to help you grow your social media account.It supports multiple devices and team collaboration within the platform.
Unique Feature: The platform offers a drag-and-drop feature to customize and design your Instagram feed. It has a competition analysis to help you outrank your competition on social media.
Buffer
Buffer is among the best choices for small business owners and social media marketers. The platform supports Instagram Business, Facebook Group, Facebook Page, LinkedIn, Pinterest Business, and Twitter. It offers various tools for publishing, managing, monitoring, tracking, analytics, and team collaboration. Benefits:
It provides an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform.The platform’s excellent customer service provides support through email and the Buffer community.It provides access to the mobile app and two-factor authentication to secure your accounts.It allows you to respond to messages on all social media accounts in one place.
Unique Feature: Buffer offers a link shortener tool, browser extension, and optimization tools for hashtags, tags, and mentions across social media platforms. It allows you to create a landing page for lead generation, sales, etc.
Hopper HQ
Hopper HQ helps your business to plan, schedule, and automate your posting on multiple social media networks. It is ideal for agencies, brands, freelancers, influencers, and content creators. Supported platforms by Hopper HQ are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Pinterest. Benefits
The platform provides analytics to analyze and improve your social media performance.It will help you grow your social media audience while managing the profiles.It helps you schedule and auto-post content from your desktop.It allows media bulk upload.It suggests hashtags for better reach.
Unique Feature: The software offers free stock images, supports medial bulk upload, and provides a drag-and-drop grid planner.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a simplified social media management platform that allows scheduling content and managing Twitter accounts. Benefits:
The platform provides recommendations to improve your social media performance.It also gives you everyday tasks customized as per your goals.It suggests articles for sharing.
Unique Feature: Crowdfire is a super smart social media management platform that will also help you drive traffic to the landing page or website. The platform allows you to connect to blogs, YouTube channels, and online shops and create posts on social media platforms for any updates on these sites.
Statusbrew
Statusbrew is a social media engagement and management tool designed to unify all social media profiles across various networks and effectively collaborate with teams. Benefits
The platform offers one of the best social media engagement features and tools.Users prefer it because of its ease of use, team collaboration workflows, notification system, and automation.
Unique Feature: The software unifies your social media inbox, creates automated workflows, and helps bring your team together.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an easy-to-use social media platform for scheduling, monitoring, and managing social media platforms. It supports Facebook Group, Facebook Page, Instagram Business, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Benefits:
It allows scheduling and posting to multiple social media accounts.It offers a single dashboard to reply to comments and messages across all social media accounts.It updates you when someone mentions your brand.It generates an in-depth performance report to keep you on track and improve performance.It helps identify active and engaged followers.
Unique Feature: The platform offers add-on tools such as Shared Calendars, Power Reports, Facebook Competitor Reports, and other free tools.
Social Pilot
Socialpilot is a budget-friendly curating, scheduling, and reporting social media management tool. The platform is ideal for social media marketers who don’t have much time to manage social media accounts. Benefits:
It provides suggestions for your social media post inspiration.It helps you organize social media accounts into different groups.It allows you to automate organic posts and paid ads.
Unique Feature: The platform offers a post composer to customize and optimize posts for different platforms.
Why is a social media management tool important?
Following are some reasons why you need a social media management tool:
Managing multiple social media accounts can be very complex and cumbersome unless we take the help of social media management tools.These tools ensure we do not miss anything important, like a mention from a customer.It helps to organize conversations and respond to customers’ comments and DMs.One of the most important features of social media management tools is creating social media calendars and scheduling posts in advance.It helps you to organize your results and get reports.It simplifies the whole content creation process.It provides your customer with a seamless experience and helps you to maintain your brand identity by being consistent and uniform.
How to choose the right Social Media Management Tool?
Finding the right social media tool helps you achieve your business goals in social media. Following are the steps which can help you find your ideal software:
Define your social media goals: First, you must know your business goals and what results you want to achieve from social media. Your social media goals can be to build awareness, connect with customers, generate leads, etc. Defining social media goals will help you to develop your social media strategy.Determine your must-have features: Use your social media goals to identify must-have features to execute your social media strategy effectively.Research: The next step is to do your research on Google or YouTube to find out what options are available; you can use the list given in this article.Shortlist social media tools: Now, shortlist your social media tools as per your social media goals and list of must-have features. You can select 2-4 tools and make sure all your essential features are present in each one of them.Test and Experiment: You can sign up for the free trials of this software and test if they are suitable for you or not. This way, you can select your business’s ideal social media tool.
You might ask what you should test in the shortlisted tools to help you choose the right software. Things to consider are User experience, Features, Customer support, Analytics and reporting Team collaboration tools, Supported social media platforms, and Pricing.
Final Words
After finding the right social media management tool that aligns perfectly with your business goals, it’s time to get your team on board. Plan out your social media strategy and how your team will use the tool effectively. These tools will help you save time and boost productivity and ROI. You may also explore the best social media listening tools for growing your business.
