Finding leads, converting traffic, and driving sales is easier than ever with social media. But without the best social media management tools, you’re likely to drain your creativity.
Social media management is an effective way to grow your brand online, but it is also overwhelming. Given the competition, the sheer creativity social media marketers garner is commendable. You need to analyze your progress, keep the crowd engaged, and provide quality content to keep the graph from falling. However, you’ll barely catch up with your competitors without the right social media management tools.
What Are Social Media Management Tools?
Being in charge of social media management is to lead a hectic life. You need to implement a solid marketing strategy for multiple social media accounts. Also, you’re on the lookout for new opportunities to boost your brand and make performance reports. All with the clock ticking over your head!
Social media management is to:
- Analyze the crowd on social media
- Come up with strategies tailored to your crowd
- Create and update quality content across all social platforms
- Engage conversations with your audience via messages, comments, and posts
- Connect with influencers
- Analyze performance and Return On Investment
Social media management tools help you cover the above chores under one roof. An efficient social media software compiles posts, messages, comments, and likes from all your social media accounts and displays them together.
Unlike the older social media management apps, the new ones are much more specific. Meaning they handle one or two social media platforms with many more options and features.
Best Social Media Management Tools
Using efficient social media management software halves your time and investment. Not only that, it makes interacting with your audience much faster and easier.
Now that you’re acquainted with what social media management and tools do let’s move into some of our top picks for you!
Facebook is the largest social platform today, and it pays off to grow your engagement there. However, social media management tools may still come in handy even when you’re designated to a single platform.
1. Hootsuite
HootSuite is probably the most well-known free social media management tool out there. Although it isn’t entirely free, it does have a limited free plan to get you up and running.
It is especially useful when creating and running effective social media marketing campaigns. It is a one-stop shop for all your social media accounts and profiles. Moreover, one of this tool’s standout features is that it offers free courses to acquaint you with its use.
You can:
- Schedule messages
- Manage social media profiles
- Track social activities
- Monitor Conversations
- Schedule campaigns for different platforms from a single dashboard.
2. Buffer
If posting regular content keeps you from implementing your marketing strategy, Buffer is the top pick for you. It is specifically a social media scheduler. Social media scheduling tools allow you to choose a time and platform for post-updates and do them accordingly.
Buffer offers support to only one profile from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on the free version. But if you want to share your content even more effortlessly, subscribing to the paid version is well worth the price.
Timing your posts is a proven strategy to build brand loyalty and keep your audience engaged. Also, it drives more traffic and offers a better ROI over manual input.
3. Revive Social
Even though sharing compelling content is the best way to keep your audience glued, reviving old posts also offers some benefits for your marketing campaign. It is a great way to increase your audience for an existing post. And that’s why Revive Old Posts makes its place in our top picks for social media management tools.
Revive Social, as the name suggests, allows you to re-post or re-publish old content. Also, you can set specific times and intervals at which you want your posts to be shared.
The free version of the tool only supports Twitter and Facebook. But if you have a larger suite of social media profiles, the premium version offers access across all platforms.
3. Canva
Utilizing graphics in your content is a key part of social media management. You need either an infographic, image, video, or thumbnail to complement your posts. However finding the right fit of graphics for your content is not always so easy.
But with Canva, you can design and create your own visuals for free. Use it to create exciting YouTube thumbnails, Facebook ads, LinkedIn banners, Pinterest visuals, and Twitter posts.
Canva has a plethora of pre-made design templates that you can choose from. Also, it has a vast gallery of images that match every niche. And lastly, it allows you to create unique content without knowing the basics of graphic designing.
4. Sendible
Managing multiple clients has never been easier with Sendible. It allows you to share posts across various social media platforms and even add them to Slack to smoothen communications. It is a powerful social media management tool that goes as well with social media platforms as it does with blogs and social sharing websites.
With Sendible, you can organize a calendar for your blog monitor your brand mentions. Especially with the mobile app it has, you can get notifications about your brand’s mentions and keep track of your social progress even when away from the office.
Manage multiple marketing campaigns across social media and improve your team’s communication with Sendible.
6. SharedCount
Tracking, monitoring, and analyzing data are key elements of an effective marketing strategy. If you’re creating quality content regularly, you’ll also want to know how well it’s doing. And that’s where SharedCount comes in.
SharedCount is a precise social media management platform that helps you track the number of shares on a post. The basic plan is free, so you have room to practice and extract results. However, subscribing to the premium version unlocks features like email support and domain whitelisting, which are very useful for branding agencies.
As much as you want to drive traffic and improve conversions, you also want to know how you’re doing it. SharedCount allows you to monitor your strategy so you can build around your weak points.
7. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another one of the popular social media managing apps on our list. It is most suitable for the social media marketing of big agencies and teams. It combines the best features of scheduling, analytics, and reporting on a single screen.
The key feature of Sprout Social is its thorough analytics and accurate reporting. Some users find the reporting so precise that they even mention forwarding it to clients without proofreading. Now that’s something you don’t hear quite often!
It also features a Customer Relationship Management feature, provided by a few other tools. It keeps a complete record of your customers to help you interact in a personalized manner. This is specifically useful for building brand loyalty and driving more traffic.
8. Meet Edgar
Uploading content to their respective niche is an important, commonly ignored aspect. Unlike other scheduling and content-sharing tools, MeetEdgar is a social media planner that allows you to time uploads for posts in their respective categories.
Where you add all of your pending content in ques on other tools, you add it on separate tabs on Edgar. Each tab is for a different category and can be timed to your social media profiles.
This unique feature helps you cover ground in every niche you’re writing content for. Also, Edgar re-posts content automatically to get you more views, clicks, and traffic. Although it doesn’t support all social media platforms, it extensively covers your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn engagement.
9. Social Pilot
Social Pilot is a social media scheduler with analytics, which is found in most other tools. But the attractive thing about this social media manager app is that it offers these services at quite a lower price than the others.
Although Social Pilot does not include a necessary monitoring feature, it still makes up for it by aligning scheduling and analysis on a single dashboard.
However, the most amazing social pilot feature is that it suggests relevant content from a few basic niches. So, suppose you’re running a campaign related to technology, health and fitness, or education. In that case, you will benefit from seeing relevant content from different industries.
10. SocialBee
SocialBee is an extensive social media management software that supports many popular platforms from a single dash. It is best suitable for social media marketers that have to cover outreach through many different profiles.
Here are platforms and profiles supported by SocialBee:
- Facebook Business Pages & Facebook Groups
- Facebook Profiles
- Twitter Profiles
- LinkedIn Profiles
- LinkedIn Pages
- Pinterest Boards
- Instagram Profiles
Access to so many platform profiles from a single menu simplifies posting, tracking, monitoring, and analyzing data. Moreover, it integrates with Buffer. So, if you’re using Buffer for your social media management already, this will be an easier platform to walk into.
However, the most highlighted feature of SocialBee is how it recycles old content to generate more views. And it does so by making changes to the context it is re-posted in so it doesn’t go out of style.
Conclusion
The apps we have reviewed rank in no particular order. As you may have already noticed, all of the social media management tools are different from each other. There are free and paid versions. And versions that support few or most of the platforms.
So, to choose the best social media management tools, you must clarify your marketing strategy first. When you make out what platforms you’ll use for your promotion, how often you’ll use them, and how you interact with your audience, then you’ll easily find a unique tool in the list above.
Boost your marketing campaign by integrating tools in your way of work. It will not only speed things up, but you’ll have a much clearer look at the trends and responses of your strategy.
