What Tools Should you Use for Social Media Management
Introduction to Social Media Management Tools
Social media marketing is using social media platforms to connect an audience in order to build a brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves posting social media content, listening to and engaging followers, analyzing results, and operating social media advertisements. Creating and posting content for analytics can be tedious for social media marketers everyday. Luckily, there are various social media management tools that can be a time saver and make sure content is reached out to the right audience at the right time.
Scheduling and Publishing Tools
One of the key factors in posting content is scheduling certain posts at a specific date and time. Some reasons could be that your audience may come from different time zones that are different from you. Another is that you can post real-time without having to remember to post. For example, you can post about a grand opening of a place without turning attention away from opening day. Here are some tools that are great for scheduling posts:
- Buffer
Buffer is trusted by small businesses and creators to help drive valuable content and results on social media. The tool comes with features like scheduling posts, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration.
- CoSchedule
Great tool when you want a social media calendar. This is where the calendar displays upcoming social media posts organized by date and time. You can manage and collaborate with your team to create social media posts, content, events, and tasks. CoSchedule is a tool that has its features in one place.
- Post Planner
The goals of Post Planner are to find high-quality content, plan the best calendar, and post consistently. It has its Find tool where it can easily find content with ease. Also, instead of just choosing your own time slots in your schedule, you can choose the content type in each slot and Post Planner will fill the slots with your chosen content.
Social Media Analytics and Reporting
Social media analytics is collecting and going over data points that help you measure the performance of your social media accounts. For social media reporting, it is simply all about data and analytics. Tools that are good for analytics and reporting are as follows:
- Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media management tool designed for businesses to manage their social media presence within a single dashboard. It has features such as social media analytics, scheduling, monitoring, and team collaboration.
- Sprout Social
Sprout Social combines other social media tools into one platform, from social media scheduling to its analytics tool for better reporting. This is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features, which is managing all of your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.
- SocialPilot
SocialPilot is another tool that combines many other social media management tools like scheduling and analytics into a simple dashboard. It suggests content from several industries (e.g. tech, education, etc.), which can be useful if you want to find relevant content easily.
Community Engagement and Monitoring
Social media engagement is a great way for followers of your business to engage with your content. You can also monitor how a certain post is doing based on factors such as likes, comments, saves, clicks, and even mentions. This determines whether that content is doing a good job resonating with your audience.
- Sprinklr
Sprinklr helps companies connect and serve their customers through any channel. It also allows teams to collaborate effectively and to reach, listen to, and engage their customers on more than 25 social channels.
- MavSocial
This tool focuses more on visual content. On top of the common features like scheduling, monitoring, and reporting, MavSocial has a digital library where you can manage, use, and edit your content for your posts, in addition to a search engine where you can look through many stock photos.
A tool for Pinterest and Instagram. Aside from it helping you schedule posts, monitor conversations, and measure results, Tailwind provides recommendations for improving your Pinterest and Instagram performance. Good for marketers that use Pinterest and Instagram as they can access several features specific to either two visual platforms.
Content Creation and Design Tools
Content creation is creating different types of media that appeal to your target audience. The media forms can be mostly pictures, infographics, or videos.
- Sendible
Sendible allows you to create dashboards customized based on your preferences according to your branding in order to attract new clients. It also has good integrations like Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search, allowing you to search for any picture, create a graphics design, or simply look for a video on YouTube.
Collaboration and Team Management
- Slack
Although it is not really a tool for social media management, it is still functional for collaboration purposes. Slack can be used for any project needs you have in mind like adding your social media team, creating different channels to share files, assigning tasks, and more importantly, collaborating with your team. Group messages or personal messages can also be done as a form of contact to your colleagues, as well as voice or video calls.
Monday is a platform designed to help you manage all of your work, giving you the ability to automate tasks and monitor processes. Work optimization ranges from task management, client projects, business operations, resource management, portfolio management, and much more. The best part about Monday.com is that you can get started for free without any credit card payment required!
Choosing the Right Tools For Your Business
Before choosing the right tools for your business, there are some factors that you should consider if you want to keep your business flowing in the right direction.
- Defining your social media goals
You should have social media goals planned if you want to accomplish something. Otherwise, there would be no point in finding the right tool if you do not know your intentions of using it. You can think of how you can use social media to achieve these goals, and outline what metrics you want to track. It could be running an awareness campaign or communicating with customers.
- Scheduling features
You want to be able to plan your social media posts for weeks. Rather than posting almost every day, you can spend a few hours and schedule posts for a whole week. Make sure the tool you are choosing to use has other features present like content creation, post queue management, and a calendar to schedule when you want to post future content at a specific date and time.
- Collaboration
If you work with clients or in a social media team, collaboration is a must-have in your social media management tool. This is so you can assign tasks to different team members and you want clients to see your social media calendar, view posts, and approve them.
- Ease of use
This really falls more into personal preference. You can believe a tool is easy to use, but your team members might beg to differ. However, if you plan on collaborating with team members or clients, you have to consider their technical skills while choosing a tool. If they don’t find a certain tool easy to use, they will not use it. Some tools offer free trials so you can test run a tool and if it is to your liking, you can pay for it.
As there are plenty more social media management tools that have not been discussed here, these are the list of tools that we feel have a balanced number of features that can benefit your business or brand. Although we do have honorary mentions of two more tools that you can also consider when it comes to social media management. One is called HubSpot, which has several specific functions designed to help increase sales or leads in order to create a great customer experience. Another is called Envato, a website where you can look through design templates and customize them to your branding.
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