1.What is a social media management tool?
For those who may not know what a social media management tool is, it is software designed to allow the user (you) to publish to, monitor and manage one or more of your social media networks from one interface. This not only makes it easier for you to share and schedule to share content to your social networks from one place, it makes it easier for you to respond to customers who make a comment on something you post or message you direct. It can also make it easier for teams to work together in managing one or more social streams.
Some social media management tools are set up so you can manage most, if not all, of the major social networks from your account. Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social fall into this group.
Some social media management tools only support one social network, like TweetDeck, which is designed to work with Twitter alone and the Facebook Page Manager, which only works with a Facebook Page.
2. What are the benefits of using social media management tools?
Time Savings - Advanced scheduling across your social media platforms helps you maintain a consistent presence online. Your team can work more efficiently by batch scheduling posts at the most convenient time instead of rushing to publish content during peak times of the day through social media scheduling tool
Reputation Management - Social listening within your social media management tool allows your brand to act quickly to respond to negative customer comments, resolving issues quickly before the news spreads.
Increased Brand Awareness - A social media management tool can publish your content across multiple channels at once and during peak publishing times. Your chances of being discovered by your target audience increase significantly.
Boost Brand Awareness with Social Media Management Tool
Audience Insight - The analytics feature of Social media management tools give you deeper insight into your audience. Through the social media analytics feature, You'll know who's following you, their geographical location, and other relevant demographics, across all of your social networks. Leveraging this data within your overall marketing plan results in more informed marketing decisions.
Improved Customer Support - Monitoring and responding to questions from customers and prospects can help streamline their path to purchase. It also leads to increased customer satisfaction rates. Research published in Harvard Business Review shows that customers who receive a response to their inquiries on social media are more likely to remain a customer, spend more money with the brand, and recommend the company to others.
Faster Response Times - Not only is it essential to respond to customers' comments via social media, but it's also important to react quickly. The average customer expects companies to respond to them within one hour on social media. When your organization is juggling multiple social media platforms, this expectation will be difficult to meet. A social media management tool can streamline this process, making it much easier to see your comments and mentions, across all of your networks, from one central location.
How many type of social media marketing tools?
1. Social media scheduling tools
What can social media scheduling tools do?
• Share the same content to multiple profiles and networks with a single click.
• Use your unique social media data to automatically post content when your audience is most engaged.
• Queue and publish the same post across multiple profiles in one step.
• Plan and organize all of your social content with the help of a dynamic calendar.
2. Social media analytics tools
What can social media analytics tools do?
• Track the performance of all your social networks and profiles in a single place.
• Monitor the efficacy of social campaigns by tagging and reporting on them individually.
• See which messages resonate most in your audience to guide your social publishing strategy.
• Spy on the competition to see how their engagement and growth measures up to your own.
• Track how quickly and efficiently you’re responding to messages that require a response.
• See which of your team members are the most efficient and engaging and publishing content.
3. Social media engagement tools
What can social media engagement tools do?
•Unify all of the messages from every network and profile in a single inbox.
•Notify you when your profiles are seeing a sharp increase in mentions.
•Assign messages to individuals on your team who are most apt to answer questions.
•Show you the full social media history of someone reaching out to your handles.
4. Social media listening tools
What can social media listening tools do?
•Show you the general sentiment social users have to a specific topic or brand.
•Analyze entire campaigns quickly and enable you to create succinct reports.
•Identify trends in your industry long before they become the newest hot topic.
•Identify industry gaps, track share of voice and understand consumer attitudes toward competitors to uncover business opportunities.
5. Social media monitoring tools
What can social media monitoring tools do?
•Bring all your messages from your Twitter, Facebook and Instagram profiles into a single stream.
•Enhance your social media monitoring with Brand Keywords that uncover valuable social engagement opportunities.
•Configure the Smart Inbox with profile, message type, keyword and date filters to quickly find what you need.
•Create custom tags and apply them to incoming messages to better organize and report on social monitoring efforts.
6. Social media automation tools
What can social automation tools do?
•Create rules to automatically flag or archive inbound social messages to clear your inbox.
•Increase your response rate by showing you suggested replies based on your typical social behavior.
•Evaluate how effective your social marketing is with automated feedback requests.
7. Facebook marketing tools
What can Facebook marketing tools do?
• Simplify your Facebook posting by scheduling messages to automatically publish.
• Delegate or remove access to users to manage your Facebook presence as a team.
• Give access to a Facebook CRM, allowing you to cater messages to individuals.
• Report on your Facebook performance across all of your profiles.
•Dig into your Facebook competition to see how you stack up.
8. Twitter marketing tools
What can Twitter marketing tools do?
• Manage multiple Twitter profiles from a single location.
• Schedule months of Twitter content from a single social calendar.
• Provide historic data on interactions with your social media followers.
• Monitor all of Twitter for mentions of your brand or products.
• Run detailed reports on your Twitter marketing to showcase internally.
9. Instagram marketing tools
What can Instagram marketing tools do?
•Manage and publishing engaging content from a single place, including desktop.
•Benchmark your Instagram performance with deep analytics.
•Monitor the network for hashtags to leverage or messages that need a reply.
•Measure your overall performance to prove the value of Instagram internally.
3. What are some of the best social media management tools?
management to promotion to employee advocacy, Oktopost has all the tools most B2B marketers would want. To find out more, book a demo with their team.
+Brandwatch
The platform for every kind of social media marketer
Formerly Falcon.io, Brandwatch’s social media management tool combines all the things social media marketers would need in one single platform: social media management, engagement, and analytics, customer experience management, and DIY landing page builder. You can connect with the team by booking a demo.
+ HubSpot
All-in-one inbound marketing software
HubSpot’s social media management tools are part of their all-in-one marketing software, which starts at $50 per month. As HubSpot integrates all your marketing efforts (such as social media, email, SEO, and CRM) into a single platform, you can easily compare your results across your marketing channels and measure your social ROI. You can get a full demo of Hubspot’s marketing suite here.
+ Khoros
The platform for enterprise social
Khoros (formerly Spredfast) is social media software that’s used by some of the world’s biggest companies to handle all aspects of their social media management.
+ Reputation
The world’s most stunning social media marketing suite
Reputation (formerly NUVI) provides real-time data visualization and social media insights to help you make decisions on your social media strategy. It also provides you with the tools to publish and engage on social media efficiently.
1. eClincher.
Best Overall For Social Media Management
eClincher is great for those businesses that have a large need for social media management. It is an all-in-one solution that can help businesses manage many aspects of their social media marketing.
With built-in reputation management & brand monitoring, eClincher is a powerful tool for businesses to protect and grow their online presence, while ensuring their brand is front and center in the social media conversation.
Using an all-in-one smart inbox, eClincher gives businesses the ability to quickly and easily see all of their social media activity in one place.
This makes it easy to respond to comments, messages, and mentions quickly and efficiently.
Moreover, using a visual calendar, eClincher helps businesses to better organize and manage their content, so it’s easy to publish content that is timely and relevant to their audience.
Key Features:
Auto-post with RSS feeds allows you to easily and quickly post content to your social media accounts from anywhere, at any time.
Bulk upload & scheduling enables you to upload and schedule large amounts of content in one go, making it easy and quick to get your message out there.
Smart queues ensure that your content is always fresh and relevant, by automatically posting new content as soon as it’s published.
The visual calendar & scheduler makes it easy to see what’s coming up and plan your content accordingly, so you can be sure that everything is coordinated and runs smoothly.
Publishing & scheduling posts give you complete control over when and where your content is published, so you can make sure that it reaches your audience at the right time and in the right place.
Cons:
One small issue is that dropdown menus can sometimes get in the way of typing when using the desktop software.
Pricing:
There are three pricing plans available:
Basic: $59/mo
Premier: $119/mo
Agency: $219/mo
Get started with an eClincher Free Trial.
Try eClincher
2. Planable.
Best For Speed.
Planable was made for those that want to create social media content fast, with as much as 6x faster content creation.
The collaboration tools are great for team communication, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
With end-to-end workflow, you can say bye-bye to spreadsheets that do more harm than good.
You can also wave tedious and repetitive tasks goodbye with various features that help you make the most out of your social media content strategy.
Key Features:
Round-the-clock support ensures that you’re never left in the dark.
Unlimited users & workspaces ensure that everyone has a seat at the table.
A dedicated account manager helps you get the most out of your subscription.
Team onboarding & training makes sure that everyone is up to speed on how to use Planable efficiently.
Robust security keeps your data safe
Easy-to-use social media calendar ensures that you’re always organized.
An intuitive social media scheduler makes publishing a breeze.
Cons:
Customizing posts is sometimes challenging when bulk posting content
Pricing:
You can test out the system for free (you get 50 total posts) to ensure that it’s a good fit for you.
When you’re ready to move to a paid plan, these are the prices:
Basic: $11/user
Pro: $22/user
Enterprise: Custom quote
Get started with Planable.
Try Planable
3. Crowdfire.
Launched in 2010 as ‘JustUnfollow,’ this social media management tool refurbished itself and became Crowdfire in 2015.
With over 20 million global users, including artists, freelancers, e-sellers, and bloggers, it is one of the largest social media management platforms on the market right now.
Crowdfire is a complete social media management tool with features ranging from content curation, scheduling, analytics to Social listening.
Best For: It works the best for individuals, small businesses and digital agencies who want to optimize engagement, dive deep into their analytics tools and listen to what’s being said on topics related to them.
Key Features:
Discover relevant content – You can discover videos and infographics based on your interests to find content your audience will love.
Pre-schedule content – Pre-schedule all of your relevant content and publish at pre-determined, scheduled times.
Social listening – Listen to everything that’s being said about your brand and perform competitor analysis.
Get extensions – With Crowdfire, you can add various add-ons like Google Chrome extensions.
Free usage – It offers one free account every for every social media site and a 14-day free trial to get its premium features.
Cons:
It only recommends videos or infographics posted by other members
There is limited ability for blog promotion
The focus is more on quantity than quality
Pricing:
It offers one account for every social media site for free and a 14-day free trial for the top plan. Other than that, it has three paid plans.
The ‘Plus’ program costs $7.48 per month, the ‘Premium’ plan is $37.48 per month, and the ‘VIP’ plan is $74.98 per month.
Overall, Crowdfire is a great social media management tool with broad functionality for those individuals and small businesses that want to increase their post count, improve engagement with followers, and perform social listening.
4. Rebrandly.
Rebrandly is a popular link management tool so that you can shorten your long URLs to share them more easily on social media and make social media posting seamless.
Their link manager lets you tag links, create customizable URLs, perform fast redirects, and expire links at certain times.
Best For: Rebrandly is a must-have for large brands that post often on multiple social channels and social media apps that need short, branded links.
It is also a much more advanced tool compared to Linktree and its alternatives.
Key Features:
Traffic routing – Create deep links, route traffic, and create 301 redirects to have complete control over your social media links.
Team collaboration – Have extra user seats for your team, multiple access levels single sign-on (SSO), and two-factor authentication (2FA).
Link analytics – A custom URL and report builder tracks all of your link clicks and actions based on your social media links.
Training and support – Rebrandly offers email support, a knowledge base, direct training, video tutorials, and account management.
Cons:
Doesn’t include all of the social media post scheduling features like other tools on this list.
Pricing:
They offer four pricing plans and a custom enterprise pricing plan.
The Free Plan offers unlimited redirects, 5,000 clicks, and 500 branded links per month.
Their Starter Plan is $29/month and provides 25,000 clicks and 5,000 branded links.
The Pro Plan is $89/month and offers 150,000 clicks and 15,000 branded links.
The Premium Plan is $499/month and gives you 1,500,000 clicks and 150,000 branded links.
They also offer an enterprise plan with custom pricing.
5. Agorapulse.
Founded in 2011, Agorapulse helps individuals and businesses easily manage social media.
It effectively allows users to engage in meaningful conversations online.
As per Agorapulse’s website, over 17,000 social media managers use it daily to scale up their social media marketing efforts. It also provides a 28-day free trial.
Best For: Agorapulse is excellent for medium-sized businesses and agencies that need multiple users managing at least a dozen different social media profiles.
Key Features:
Flexible scheduling – Take advantage of the flexible scheduling tools to schedule, reschedule, queue, or upload your posts in bulk.
Social Inbox – Easily find, filter, and manage specific mentions and essential messages.
Instant reports – Unlimited reports help determine the ROI of engagement and social content in terms of your social media strategies.
Collaboration features – Easy assignments of inbox items and draft posts keep social moving fast and smoothly.
Cons:
One of the most expensive mid-tier plans in the market. (We’re told a free plan is in the works.)
Listening feature needs to be improved
Low diversity in emoticons
No option to search through inbox
Pricing:
It offers four pricing plans to suit the need of every business type.
The Pro plan is $79 per month
The Premium plan is priced at $199 per month
The Enterprise plan is priced at a custom rate.
All the plans offer a nearly 20% discount with annual payment.
6. Buffer.
If you know anything about digital marketing and social media strategy, then you’re probably already aware of Buffer.
Released in 2010, Buffer is one of the best tools on the internet to help you manage your social media accounts.
It offers a range of services, including social listening, data analytics and insights into user posting frequency on different platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
They also have a mobile app for iOS and Android for team collaboration on the go.
Best For: Buffer is suited explicitly for scheduling and publishing content on all your different social media platforms.
Key Features:
Publish content – You can publish and share content at the click of a button on numerous social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Free image tool creation – With the help of ‘Pablo,’ an in-built image creation tool, you can create images instantly for various social media websites.
Extension for Chrome – You can install its extension for Chrome, which allows you to share links, publish blogs, or post pictures from any location.
Insightful analytics – With Buffer’s analytics social media tool, you can now measure your social media performance based on a variety of metrics. Furthermore, you can create reports, get recommendations, and extract actionable insights for better marketing.
Cons:
Instagram integration is not up to par
No tool to selectively search for hashtags or searches
Pricing:
Buffer offers three pricing plans.
With a free plan that gives you the ability to publish on up to three channels, there are also the following plans:
Essentials: $5/month/social channel
Team: $10/month/social channel
Agency: $100/month/social channel
7. Sendible.
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Sendible is one of the best social media tools in the market.
It has a lot of amazing features that many of its counterparts lack.
For instance, it can measure ROI from the very same dashboard that you use to manage your social media so that you don’t have to flip multiple times.
On top of that, it is fully integrated with different social media platforms and other social media management apps.
Trusted by more than 10,000 businesses, it also offers an attractive 30-day free trial.
Best For: Sendible is excellent for lead generation, scheduling posts, and managing multiple clients. It can be used by businesses (small, medium, and large) as well as self-employed businessmen.
Key Features:
Preview social media posts – You can now see beforehand how your posts will look after posting them on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter.
Plan your content calendar – It lets you schedule posts individually or in bulk, or queue them.
Collaboration – Set up individual dashboards for clients to better segregate and organize work.
360-degree brand building – Now develop your brands inclusive of all KPIs with enhanced reputation building and monitoring.
Cons:
Inbox interface can be a bit confusing to handle
Posting multiple images in a single Instagram post is difficult
Limited social media analytics features
Pricing:
Sendible comes with four pricing plans.
Starter is at $25 per month.
Traction is at $76 per month.
Scale is at $170 per month.
Expansion is at $340 per month.
All the plans provide a 15% discount for annual payment.
8. Hootsuite.
Created in 2008 and headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, Hootsuite is another popular social media platform.
With more than 16 million global users, it offers a variety of integrations with social networks like Reddit, Tumblr, and Marketo, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and other popular sites.
It also comes with a 30-day free trial period.
Best For: Hootsuite is a great addition to a set of marketing tools for social media listening, managing customer service, monitoring multiple social media simultaneously, and easy scheduling of posts.
Key Features:
A wide range of social media support – Using Hootsuite, you can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts without installing any software.
Manage multiple accounts – Tailor-made to manage multiple accounts together.
Scheduler with automatic posting – makes it very simple to auto-schedule different posts on social media.
Robust analytics – Provides extensive and in-depth analytics reports.
Track performance – You can pull data based on over 70 different metrics into customizable reports and make better data-backed decisions.
Cons:
Auto-scheduling may sometimes take some time to process due to software issues
Some apps require extra fees to work
Thumbnails and summary previews on Facebook are missing
Expensive custom URL shorteners
Facebook reach and engagement is low
Pricing:
Sprout Social is a go-to social media management tool and CRM on the market.
This social media management platform is built on the idea of fostering deep, meaningful relationships between individuals, communities, businesses, and brands.
Although it is priced a little higher than most of its counterparts, the value it provides more than makes up for the hefty price tag.
Best For: Sprout Social is best suited for small and large businesses.
However, it is also quite useful in the enterprise sector for social media strategy.
Key Features:
User-friendly dashboard – One of the significant advantages of Sprout Social is its intuitive and user-friendly dashboard.
Organized messaging area – Also called ‘Smart Inbox,’ this area displays all of the messages from all connected social media sites in a single marketing platform.
Message scheduling – It allows users to schedule messages. Moreover, with Sprout Social, you can queue up your posts for sending out at a pre-determined time schedule.
Discovery – A unique feature, ‘Discovery,’ is an in-built platform that allows you to monitor a list of people with whom you have interacted and who’ve mentioned you in a tweet.
30-day free trial – the free trial allows you to test the compatibility of your business with a plan of your choice.
Pricing:
Social Sprout has three pricing plans.
The Standard plan starts at $89 per month and provides 5 social profiles.
The Professional plan starts at $149 per month and provides 10 social profiles.
The Advanced plan starts at $249 per month, and also includes 10 social profiles.
All the plans come with a 30-day free trial
10. SocialPilot.
With more than 100,000 businesses worldwide trusting it for their social media management, customer engagement, and detailed analytical insights, SocialPilot is one of the best software available in the market right now.
It offers a lot of value at low, reasonable prices, making it a top choice all around the globe.
Best For: SocialPilot is designed to increase your social media marketing efforts and save time.
It is aimed at social media professionals and small to medium agencies but is equally useful for individual entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Key Features:
Priority email support – Customer support is one of the strongest points of SocialPilot. It is always there to help you out.
Content suggestion – A unique feature; it also offers content suggestions so that you are never short of content to post. You can also couple this tool with graphic design software like Canva to create social post templates.
Highly customizable – It can be explicitly customized to suit all your needs. For example, you can add an RSS Feed URL and let their tool automatically publish your custom posts.
User-friendly dashboard – A single dashboard that pools all your needs and brings them on to a single platform for maximum efficiency.
Cons:
Video feature limited only to uploading
The free trial is not available in all countries
Pricing:
Social Pilot has three pricing plans.
The Professional plan is $30 per month ($25.5 per month if billed annually).
The Small Team plan is $50 per month ($42.5 per month if billed annually).
The Studio plan is $100 per month ($85 per month if billed annually).
The Agency plan is $150 per month ($127.5 per month if billed annually) and provides 75 social media accounts.
All three plans have a 14-day free trial period. You can contact them is you want a customized plan to suit your specific requirements.
11. Meet Edgar.
Meet Edgar of the most popular social media management tools available in the market right now.
From scheduling posts to curating and repurposing content, this social media management platform provides you with a wide range of services.
The best part is that it generates content for prolonged periods even when you are out of content so that you never have to worry about your customers getting busy elsewhere.
Best For: Managing multiple social media accounts at one go, despite you not having the time to devote to it.
It’s great for businesses that require social media scheduling at regular intervals of time, preferably via automation.
Key Features:
Auto-variations – It can write posts for you. To summarize, it automatically finds quote-worthy text, mined from articles and blogs, at the click of a button.
Extensions – Offers extensions like Google Chrome browser extension, Safari, or Bookmarklet.
Continuous posting – Unique feature that doesn’t let you run out of posts even when you don’t have content.
Great support response – You’ll get a guaranteed response from the support team within 48 hours of raising a request.
A/B Test Social Messaging – Allows you to run A/B tests and derive actionable insights and rethink your strategy.
Cons:
No integration with Pinterest
A little expensive
Pricing:
Meet Edgar’s costs are as follows:
Edgar Lite: $24.91 per month for five social accounts
Edgar: $41.58 per month for twenty five social accounts.
12. CoSchedule.
Established in 2014 and based out of the US, CoSchedule is a top-rated social media management software, catering to more than 10,000 satisfied customers globally.
With features like a Chrome extension and built-in headline analyzer, you can organize and track all your content, integrate with various tools, and gain actionable insights in one click.
Best For: This software is best used in the case of small businesses and enterprises and for creating case studies for future reference. It is also useful for individuals who create and track blogs.
Key Features:
Streamlined marketing – Add tasks on centralized calendars for ready reference of employees.
Read-only view – Share your calendar in read-only mode so there are no unwanted edits.
Platform integration – It integrates with tools like MailChimp, Zapier, Google analytics, and so forth.
Use extensions – Chrome extension is available to cater to a wide range of needs.
Co-schedule content – It allows you to schedule and share content marketing efforts across multiple platforms at the same time.
Cons:
The user interface is not very intuitive
Extra payment to use the re-queue feature
Pricing:
There are three pricing plans, including:
The Marketing Calendar Pro Plan costs $29 per user per month (billed annually).
For the Marketing Suite Business Plan, you need to get a customized quote from the company.
All the plans come with a 14-day free trial.
13. MavSocial.
MavSocial is another impressive and feature-rich social media management tool on this list. Its USP is its focus on visual appeal.
Apart from usual features similar to that of other tools on this list, it also provides you with an in-built digital content library to manage and edit your content.
You also get a 7-day free trial.
Best For: Due to its focus on visual aesthetics, MavSocial is ideal for companies with a huge brand name. Since it offers millions of free images, it is perfect for SMEs that require seamless social media publishing.
Key Features:
Track social media – Discover trending topics or track a campaign’s success.
Filter content – Easily filter through tons of data with filters like exclusion, retweets, and more.
View history – View all your engagement history, messages, and comments.
Monitor and analyze – Track developments on social media with real-time data, and generate actionable insights for guided marketing strategy.
Scheduling and automation – Use a superior automation characteristic to schedule and publish your content.
Cons:
The interface is not very user-friendly and intuitive
There’s no basic, free version
May contain bugs due to frequent changing of API
Pricing:
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MavSocial comes with four pricing plans:
The Advanced plan costs $19 per month (1 user, 10 profiles).
The Pro plan is $78 per month (3 users, 30 profiles).
The Business plan is $199 per month (5 users, 50 profiles).
The Enterprise plan comes in at a custom price.
All the plans offer a 14-day free trial.
Note: other tools not yet reviewed for this list include Tailwind, Buzzsumo, HubSpot, and TweetDeck.
Free Social Media Marketing Tools You Should Try
1. AdsReport
2. Facebook Barometer
3. Bit.ly
4. Canva
5. Easel.ly
6. Easy Advocacy
7. Feedly
9. Loom
4. How can businesses improve their social media management skills?
Small businesses around the world know that social media is here to stay. You only need to look at the social media demographics across platforms to know that! But that doesn’t mean you have had the chance to put in the time or effort necessary to cultivate a proper presence on the right networks.
Even if you haven't optimized your social media presence, there’s still time, and the benefits will be worth the effort. There are many advantages to cultivating your brand on social media. It can help improve your brand’s social customer service, allow you to communicate with customers and prospects on a new level, help engage and reach new audiences, build authority, and drive traffic to your website.
In short, creating a practical social media strategy can drive growth for your small business by fostering lasting and loyal relationships with prospects and customers. To ensure your brand’s presence on social media is managed with quality and consistency, use a social media style guide to keep track of the many different elements.
1. Choose the Right Networks
Social media has exploded since Facebook went public back in 2012, and there are thousands of networks dedicated to anything from connecting old classmates to social activism.
So with all these options, how does a business pick the right ones? The advice from most experts is to join the most popular, and choosing the right ones comes down to your audience and your goals. Here's some information to help get you started:
• Facebook: the largest platform, has 2.89 billion active monthly users, and the site is ideal for businesses that want to generate leads and build relationships. If you’re a beginner to the network, check out this guide to advertising on Facebook!
• LinkedIn: the platform for business networking can be used by both B2B and B2C businesses to create trust, build authority, and engage audiences.
• Twitter: whose platform is immediacy, is perfect for businesses whose major audience is under 50 and who need to stay on top of time-sensitive information like breaking news, announcements, and trending topics.
•Pinterest: the photo sharing site, is a fantastic platform for businesses with visual appeal (think restaurants, fashion, art, travel, and weddings). It’s more for social discovery than social networking, and is great for driving sales because so many users look to the site to plan purchases.
• Snapchat: the expiring-content platform, is one of the fastest growing social networking sites despite rumours of the parent company Snap being in trouble a few years ago. Businesses can leverage Snapchat by offering promotions, providing personalized content, giving exclusive access, and building relationships with influencers to drive brand recognition and loyalty.
• Instagram: Instagram was so successful that just 2 years after launching it was bought by Facebook, in 2012. Its success is rooted in staying true to its original goal - allowing users to post photos and videos from their mobile. The creation of Instagram Stories (an idea stolen from Snapchat!) featuring content that expires in 24 hours has enabled it to amass nearly 1 billion global users.
• TikTok: A phenomenon in the social media world, TikTok is a force to be reckoned with, seeing rapid growth during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is the first app not owned by Facebook to have reached 3 billion installs due to its popularity amongst influencers and celebrities. The usability of the platform, huge music directory, and unique filters attract an engaged younger demographic.
2. Set a Goal
Being active on social media has a number of benefits for your business, and there are many things you can accomplish with a social presence. This includes performing customer service, engaging customers, generating leads, expanding your audience, driving sales, increasing web traffic, gaining valuable insights and feedback, and much more.
But in order to achieve these with any measure of success, you must have a goal to work towards because you'll need to take steps to create a social media strategy and get there. Your techniques for driving sales, for instance, will be different from your approach to improve your customer service offering. So it’s important to know what you want to accomplish.
Free E-Book: The Future of Marketing: A Marketer’s Vision 2023 & Beyond
3. Come up with a Strategy
Having a goal for improving your social media presence is great, but it’s only the beginning. Once you know what you want to achieve, you have to come up with a plan to get there.
Start by designating the person or people who will be part of the social media team, and break up their roles and responsibilities so everybody knows what's expected and when.
You should also decide on your posting frequency, and create a content calendar that will help you plan posts and don’t miss days. This approach to scheduling is a big part of your strategy and there are great social media calendar templates you can use that lay out:
•Who your audience is
•What topics and subjects your audience is interested in
•The usable content you already have
•What kind of content you still need to create or curate
•When and on what platforms content will be published
The most effective way to develop a strategy for your business is to learn from the best. Consider a social media and marketing course that focuses on social research and social strategy so you find your audience and know how to engage them.
4. Make a Content Creation or Curation Plan with Your Audience in Mind
Knowing your audience is critical when it comes to finding success with social media engagement. This is because the interests and needs of your audience will determine the type of content you should share and the way you engage your followers.
For instance, if you’re a coffee roastery, your target audience might be interested in recipes for fancy coffee drinks, brewing tips and techniques, and other Java-related articles. Some of the important things you should know about your audience include age, location, gender, goals, likes, needs, behaviors, challenges, and pain points.
No matter who your audience is, the content you share should always be high quality and relevant. You should investigate the popular content types and prioritize video, images, and other types of visual content as often as possible because these are favored by all demographics and audiences.
5. Select Tools to Schedule and Automate Posts
Staying active and present on social media takes time and dedication. But there are plenty of automation tools available to content creators to automatically publish and schedule posts up to a month in advance.
These tools, which include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, MeetEdgar, and BuzzSumo, can save you time by allowing you to plan and schedule batches of posts at once. They also make it easier to monitor your networks and respond to messages quickly.
Free E-Book: The Future of Marketing: A Marketer’s Vision 2023 & Beyond
6. Actively Engage Your Audience in Relevant Ways
Although content is supremely important on social media, it’s not enough to just post your content and walk away. You have to create content that excites and entertains to connect and drive engagement. That way you can foster the relationships you want to build and gain the trust of your audience.
There are many ways you can engage with your audiences:
•Comment on posts
•Start and participate in conversations
•Share relevant information
•Share user-generated content (UGC)
•Ask and answer questions
•Post polls and follow up with the results
•Address complaints and criticisms
•Show appreciation for customers
7. Minimize the Time You Spend Promoting
Although the practice of social selling to increase sales is becoming increasingly popular among salespeople and marketers, the process of using social networks to drive growth is different from what most people are used to.
Rather than using social as an active promotional platform, it’s best to use it as a tool for engagement and communication.
In fact, it’s recommended that businesses follow the 80/20 rule and keep their promotional content to 20%.The lion’s share of content should be dedicated to meeting the needs of your audience.
8. Maintain a Constant Presence & Brand Voice
Social media isn't a one and done deal. It takes time and patience to cultivate a reliable presence.
An ideal platform for brand building and recognition, it’s crucial that every post is in line with your brand and image. This can become difficult if you have multiple people assigned to social media, because everybody will bring their own personality to their posts.For this reason, it’s best to limit the number of people responsible for posting, and make sure everyone knows the voice and image you want to present.
When it comes to posting, automation tools used effectively can save you a lot of time and ensure your presence on your networks even when you’re not! With the right tools, you can minimize the time you have to dedicate to social media, but it will still require at least 15 minutes a day to monitor your channels and respond to questions .
In terms of posting frequency, the right number really depends on the platform you're using. For LinkedIn and Facebook, don’t post more than once a day, and limit posts to five times a week. Twitter, on the other hand, changes so quickly that the more you post, the better. With Pinterest, 11 pins a day seems to be the magic number while Instagram audiences seem to like 1-2 posts a day.
9. Watch the Right Metrics to Monitor Your Progress
Social media use is growing all the time, and every month there are more active users than the one before, especially on the popular networks. It’s not necessary to have a presence on every social platform out there. It’s a much better strategy to define your goals, locate your audience, and pick the networks that are right for you based on those factors.
Your brand capabilities and social media goals will determine the metrics that matter and it’s important to measure these to ensure you're on the right track. For instance, if you want to increase site traffic, then pay attention to the amount of referral traffic coming from social.
There are many resources you can rely on for metrics, including Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics and page insights, Sprout Social, LinkedIn company pages report, Keyhole, Twitter analytics and keyword reports, Buffer, and BuzzSumo.
Free E-Book: The Future of Marketing: A Marketer’s Vision 2023 & Beyond
10. Keep learning by enrolling in a social media and marketing course
The key to mastering social media is to understand how to find and engage your audience and how each platform works. A great way to do this is to take the time to enrol in a social media and marketing course that will teach you everything you need to know to drive business success.
With DMI’s certified online Social Media Marketing course you will gain a deep understanding of the social platforms that matter including Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and TikTok along with social research, social strategy and content development. Get started today to set your business on the right track.
Social Media Management Software FAQ.
What are social media management tools?
Social media management tools are a big part of managing social media at scale. Once a brand (or influencer) get’s multiple large accounts it becomes a lot to manage without using a social media management tool.
What is the best free social media management tool?
The best free social media management tool is Later which has a feature-packed free plan that can handle most of your social media posts for your brand or personal accounts.
What are the major tools of media management?
The major social media management platform tools are Buffer, Hootsuite, and Crowdfire. These tools will cover most of your social media marketing needs for solo businesses or even large corporations.
What is SSO important in social media management?
SSO is the ability to access all social media accounts using a single login.
For example, if you manage Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts from one place, this will reduce the time to publish content.
The right SSO provider will ensure you are able to use the same password for all social media sites.
Summary.
Social media offers an instant reach to nearly half of the global population, which is a big deal.
As quoted by David Alston, a repeat tech and marketing startup entrepreneur, ‘Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.
Before choosing the best piece of marketing software, you need to carefully consider what you hope to achieve with it, and which features would align the best with your business requirements.
For example, if you’re a social media influencer and want to make money on Instagram, Buffer could be an easy way to schedule more posts.
If you’re a small business, Crowdfire could be a great tool to grow your social media follower count.
Keeping all these things in mind, try to make the right choice for your business. All the tools mentioned in this list come with a free trial, so you can test out their features before making your final decision.
Have I missed any of your favorites on this list? Which of these tools are you planning to use? Let me know in the comment section below.
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