Gone are the days when companies only had to worry about showcasing their brands on traditional channels like radio, television, and newspapers. In this new era, startups and established businesses are exploring the wider possibilities social media has to offer for connecting with their audience.
It’s essential to engage effectively on various platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. This engagement goes beyond advertising, focusing on building relationships and community presence.
To aid in navigating these diverse platforms, a variety of social media management tools have been developed. These tools help businesses efficiently manage their online presence, allowing them to tailor their approach to meet specific goals and fit within their budget.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite began its journey in 2008, originally crafted as an application for Twitter but since then has expanded its reach to encompass other popular social media platforms. As a pioneer in this market, Hootsuite has established itself as a primary player in the realm of social media management.
The platform’s dominance is largely attributed to its integration with major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. A key feature of Hootsuite is its search feature, which leverages Google’s robust search capabilities. This enables users to conduct optimised searches for usernames, keywords, and key phrases, essential for crafting rich and engaging content.
Buffer
A close contender to Hootsuite, Buffer is mostly a scheduling tool that allows for ease of queueing posts at certain times. It has two other products, Pablo which allows creation of social media images and Respond, a tool designed to allow easier response or reaction to followers engagement.
Buffer is more limited when it comes to searching capabilities, providing analytics reports and team collaboration but the ease of user interface and reasonable pricing makes it another favourite.
SocialOomph
A tool that lets you schedule updates on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, RSS feeds, Plurk, and even blogs. SocialOomph automates following back users who follow you and sending them a welcome DM or direct message. It also screens spam accounts so you follow “organic” users or real people and not spam bots.
AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a versatile tool that facilitates publishing across various social media profiles, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It’s designed for both individual users and professional teams.
The platform’s standout feature is its ability to generate analytical reports, which can be instrumental in devising more effective campaign strategies tailored to specific target markets or follower bases.
AgoraPulse places a strong emphasis on customer engagement, ensuring users are promptly notified of every comment, tweet, and message. This feature is crucial for maintaining active communication and never missing a chance to respond to interactions. Additionally, AgoraPulse supports scheduled content publishing and competitor analysis, offering a holistic tool for social media management.
SproutSocial
A promising social media management tool, SproutSocial combines engagement, publishing and analytics in a single platform. Its defining feature is a single-stream inbox that consolidates messages from various channels so them can be managed in a single place.
The platform enhances teamwork through its collaborative content calendar, enabling remote teams to review, edit, and contribute content seamlessly. This ensures a consistent and well-coordinated flow of social media posts. SproutSocial’s analytics capabilities, encompassing Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, provide valuable insights. These analytics enable content teams to deeply analyse the effectiveness of their marketing strategies, identifying strengths and weaknesses.
Everypost
A favorite among digital agencies and marketing professionals, Everypost is useful on managing content across multiple platforms including Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Flickr. It allows creating, scheduling and customizing of posts. Enabling posting of a wide range of formats for videos and images as well as texts without character, Everypost gives the content manager flexibility and a much needed room for product branding. They allow posting through e-mail and URL/Twitter shorteners which can come in handy. Other features include YouTube and Flickr posting, social media check-ins, iOS and Android support, and image manipulation. They offer personal plans which cost nothing while Pro accounts start at $9.99/month.
SocialFlow
More focused on online marketing campaigns, SocialFlow is designed to formulate an algorithm that will let you know which type of content is most likely to engage your audience, the percentage of users online, and the right time to publish your content for bigger chances of getting engagement. Package prices for SocialFlow are only available upon request but certain reviews claim that plans start at $99 a month.
MeetEdgar
This tool may come up as less complicated mainly because it focuses on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Promising to boost your audience and inspire growth, MeetEdgar is focused on recycling your old posts so you don’t have to worry about days when you just can’t come up with a fresh post. The logic is that as long as there is constant movement on your social media pages, traffic is boosted and this will get you new followers. You can set seasonal content to expire at a specific date so they are removed from the queue. Monthly fee is at $49.
ThoughtBuzz
ThoughtBuzz is a social media management platform that allows companies create custom feeds for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube using a single dashboard. Schedule your content to publish at a specific time to avoid the page engagement from dying completely. It has a feature that allows marketing teams to follow through topics that are hot and tailor their campaigns to respond to what most people are clamoring for. An integrated inbox allows for easier e-mail and message management. This tool also provides analytics related to influencer and competition insights, customer conversations, as well as data from forums, blogs, news, and RSS feeds. Relevant information like these are essential for businesses to help them make better targeted content and establish a stronger brand.
Iconosquare
Unlike other tools that integrate multiple platforms in one, Iconosquare is focused mainly on Instagram. Though you may find it interesting that a lot of businesses are flocking to Instagram to promote their products, attract followers, and conduct contests because of its massive user statistics. Iconosquare allows scheduled posting, real time feedback on follower engagement, comment tracking which includes marking comments you have replied to and deleting inappropriate ones.
Conclusion
In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, the use of social media management tools is essential for businesses. These tools streamline the management of social media activities, provide critical insights into consumer behavior, and enhance engagement strategies. They also significantly improve efficiency by automating tasks and organizing content schedules. Essential for maintaining a consistent online presence, these tools are crucial in managing brand reputation, enabling real-time response to customer feedback, and driving business growth in the digital age.