Social media marketing has a ton of moving pieces: producing, publishing, monitoring, engaging, and so on. That is why having a social media management solution that can help you streamline all of your responsibilities in a single interface is essential.
Fortunately, there is a limitless list of tools to use for any aspect of your social media strategy.
Throughout this post, we’ll go through some of the industry’s best social media management tools and their key features, so you can pick which software is best for your team.
But first…
In its most basic form, a social media management tool is software that allows a user or users to manage one or more social media profiles across one or more networks from a single dashboard or program.
It simplifies all parts of social media administration, including creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, participating, and collaborating.
What Is the Purpose of a Social Media Management Tool?
When marketers look for a new product, they want one that adds value to their marketing tech stack instead of adding to it. Here are some things to think about if you’re picking between tools.
Budget and Pricing
The size and scope of your organization will determine whether you can get by with completely free social media management solutions. Free or freemium tools may be a stepping stone to paid resources for solo businesses and new agencies.
However, “you get what you pay for” is often accurate. That’s why it’s essential to figure out which features are most important to your business and which ones can’t be changed.
When in doubt, testing tools (such as Sprout’s 30-day free trial) and seeing what they can achieve is always a safe bet. Sprout is also the only tool on this list that offers a 30-day free trial, whereas most of the rest only provide a 14-day sample.
Time-Saving and Automation Features
“How would this tool save me time?”
Any tool you add to your tech stack should be able to provide you and your organization with an answer to this issue.
You can save time with features like posting and scheduling, a social media calendar, automated answers, and content brainstorming.
Another essential factor to examine is if your preferred tool integrates with the rest of your marketing stack. This can be a huge time saver in and of itself.
Features for Collaboration
The best social media management tools make it easy to work together on things like scheduling posts and responding to customers in real-time.
So you should ask questions like, “How many users can work in the tool simultaneously?” Is it simple to set up permissions for new social team members?
The number of seats available in a social media management application is critical, especially if you plan to outsource some of your social or scale your workforce.
Analytics and Reporting
We cannot emphasize how vital analytics are.
The easier it is to highlight your performance and key performance indicators, the better. Whether you’re reporting on behalf of clients or presenting data to stakeholders, detailed and easy-to-read reports are essential.
Furthermore, reporting can help highlight what works and what doesn’t in terms of your social presence. Before investing in any technology, ensure that it monitors the social indicators that are most important to your company.
Best Tools for General Social Media Management
The tools listed below are appropriate for all social media management teams; you may tailor them to meet your individual needs and goals.
Sprout Social
SproutSocial is a social media management application that can help with social listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis. The technology automates the procedures of posting relevant material on social platforms and producing and sending personalized messages to prospects, customers, and followers; all of this assistance saves social media managers the necessary time.
There are tools for customer service that can help you help customers on social media when they want or need it. Sprout Social will help you better understand who your audience members are, what they want from you on social media, and how you can improve your present strategy.
HubSpot Social Media Management Tool
HubSpot tracks all of your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn interactions, conversations, and audiences. It enables you to effectively target specific audiences with customized content by leveraging context from your CRM’s contact database as well as data from your marketing software. In other words, HubSpot lets you plan, share, and analyze your entire social media strategy from a single, central location.
You can also use HubSpot’s Social Media Management tools to turn your content offers into social posts, schedule posts up to a week in advance, and keep track of keywords that are popular among your audience and related to your brand.
Falcon.io
Falcon.io is a social media marketing platform with a social media management solution that saves you time by helping you increase your audience’s reach, impact, and engagement.
The software includes social listening capabilities to assist you in identifying target audience members and prospects, understanding what people are saying about your brand on social media, identifying opportunities for engagement, and responding efficiently to customer comments or concerns.
There’s also a content calendar to help with cross-platform social media planning. Also, you can see and answer all messages and questions from clients on a single dashboard. This makes sure that no questions are left unanswered.
(Note: Falcon.io connects with HubSpot, allowing you to sync customer data for campaigns, develop custom audiences, and provide excellent social media customer care.)
Planable
Planable is a social media content collaboration software that assists teams in creating, planning, scheduling, and approving content in real-time.
Planable’s collaborative approach sets it apart from other social media management systems. You may develop interesting visual material with your team all at once, tag people in comments for feedback, and choose to send notifications to the appropriate people. This makes criticism, editing, and cooperation much easier and more accessible.
Planable lets you manage your collaboration process, no matter how big your team is. You can choose one of four approval levels: none, optional, required, or multi-level. This way, you can keep half-done material from going online and keep everyone—clients and team members – on the same page.
Best Social Media Management Tools for Free
Here are a few useful free social media management tools. It’s pretty uncommon for products to feature a free and premium version that you may upgrade to if your needs change and you demand more capability from your tool.
TweetDeck
Even though TweetDeck is only for Twitter users, it is a valuable tool for managing social media if you use Twitter. This free tool allows you to manage several Twitter profiles from a single dashboard.
You can schedule tweets ahead of time, keep an eye on your competition, create notifications for your most essential tweets and Twitter activity, and easily manage your lists. You can also use your dashboard to customize your timelines and see and respond to conversations and Tweets in real-time.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a platform for social media marketing and administration. It has a dashboard that allows you to control all parts of your social media campaign. Hootsuite offers a free plan that is good enough for small businesses, even though there are paid plans with more features. You can schedule up to 30 social posts in advance with the free plan.
With a free Hootsuite account, you can manage up to three different social media accounts from your dashboard. Finally, this solution is appropriate for small organizations because just one person has access to the account.
Buffer
After your free trial of the software, you can switch to the free plan Buffer offers. Buffer’s free plan, like Hootsuite’s, is ideal for small businesses with a limited social media presence. This plan allows you to manage three social channels. You can schedule up to ten articles ahead of time, and only one person can access your dashboard.
Best Small Business Social Media Management Tools
Here are some social media management solutions designed specifically for small businesses.
SocialBee
SocialBee is a social networking application that lets you produce, categorize, and publish content on all leading social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google My Business, and TikTok.
It is ideal for solopreneurs, startups, small enterprises, freelancers, and agencies. You can use this app to track how well your accounts are doing, recycle evergreen content and let time-sensitive posts expire, curate content through RSS feeds, create designs using the Canva integration in the post editor, see a real-time preview of your upcoming posts, use URL shorteners to track your links, and have multiple workspaces and team collaboration features.
With SocialBee, you can manage your social media in one place and for a low price.
TweetDeck
Everypost is a social media management application that lets you manage several profiles and accounts simultaneously. Customize your social media posts, schedule them ahead of time, and share them on a single platform.
To make it easier to share content across profiles, customize social content for different platforms and then cross-post it from Everypost. Use the tool to work with people on your team and keep track of their roles. This lets you give information to specific team members when you need to.
Agorapulse 3.0
Agorapulse is a social media management application that assists you in increasing social engagement and relationship-building across all your social platforms.
You can use this tool to schedule content, communicate with followers, and receive reports to determine the success of your strategy and the ROI of your involvement. You can also see, share, and respond to consumer comments and questions in a single inbox.
Real-time collaboration makes it simple to forward client inquiries to other team members and collaborate on content. Schedule individual posts or bulk schedule posts using the flexible scheduling capabilities.
Furthermore, the Agorapulse CRM that comes standard with this product tracks followers and their interactions with your business, allowing you to learn from those conversations and refer to them in the future.
ContentCal
ContentCal is a social media management application for content planning and publishing. A visual calendar that is easy to use can be paired with approval processes to ensure that specific posts are shared at the right time.
To share on social media, import content from other tools such as Facebook, Slack, Google Drive, or Dropbox. You may also quickly engage with team members and get feedback from them by using the tool’s comments function.
Best Social Media Management Software for Businesses
The social media management solutions listed below are great for agencies.
Sendible
Sendible is a social media management application created exclusively for agencies. The platform includes an interactive and configurable content calendar, allowing you and your team to watch and collaborate on all social posts made, planned, and shared.
Use the content suggestion feature to develop new ideas for your client’s target audience. There’s also a single-view inbox where you can see all client messages at once and a priority filter that lets you filter and prioritize chats.
Finally, create user hierarchies and procedures to assign permissions to specific team members – this way, certain people must approve client content before it goes online.
Nuvi
Nuvi is a platform for social media management, marketing, and customer experience (CX). It has tools for managing social listening, planning, posting, interacting, reporting, and more, so you can give your customers and clients a great experience. Add permissions to your processes so that your agency’s team members can collaborate and the appropriate people can vet all content before it goes public.
Create, prepare, and schedule your material so that it is available when it is needed. Then, track success and keep an eye on competitors to see which social media methods are most effective for them.
The engagement tool makes it easy to set priorities for social media interactions and lets you organize, rank, and share these interactions with the right team members. Also, social listening tools will make sure you don’t miss anything on any of your accounts.
HeyOrca!
HeyOrca! is a social media management platform for businesses. The platform makes it easy to keep track of all your social content and clients in one place, giving your customers a consistent and memorable experience.
The content calendar lets you share your plans for content with your team or clients. To keep things organized, create numerous content calendars for your clients, each with its own team members and social profiles.
Make mockups of all the social media content you want to share so that your team and clients can approve it before it goes live. You can also quickly share your material with clients via HeyOrca! And get comments from them (and you can choose which versions of that content you want your clients to be able to see or not see).
Finally, provide them with simple reports that indicate how successful the material you’re providing for their social media sites is.
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