Social media management tool: September 2022

Social media management platforms can help you capitalize on billions of users combined across platforms – Meta, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and others. Having a cohesive social media presence allows you to speak to customers where they are at, globally.

With a number of prominent platforms out there, managing multiple social media accounts can be an absolute nightmare. It requires time, effort and knowledge of multiple social applications, write each post, schedule them as needed throughout the day, everyday. With so many channels and platforms to manage, it is simply not feasible for many businesses, especially small to medium sized ones where there are only a limited number of employees. This is where social media management tools aid businesses to build a comprehensive social media strategy they can manage all in one place. Businesses today also keep searching for new or emerging social media platforms on a weekly to monthly basis to aid their social media journey.

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How do these tools aid businesses?

These tools help businesses create, schedule posts across multiple platforms in one place. They also offer  access to valuable engagement tools like idea generation, analytics, and integration with other software’s businesses may be using. They aid to gather user information for sales funnels, target specific audiences with online ads further to boost sales.

Many businesses are better off focusing on specific social media platforms, here a social media management tool that, for example, offers a budgeting app for Meta will do some more good. These tools can help brands to identify which platforms provide them the best results, helping them to determine where their time, energy and dollars should be spent with their data analytics and report on engagement.

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Here are the tools that one should not miss as we close in to the end of 2022:

Sprout Social

This social media management tool offers deep social media listening and analytics, social management, customer care and advocacy solutions to close to 25,000 brands/ agencies globally. It is a known unified platform that integrates the power of social and enables its managers at every level to extract valuable data and insights that drive their business forward. Known for its excellent user dashboard, Sprout’s analytics and reports help you manage user engagement and your ROI. It also offers you a 30-day free trial to test their platform before paying to use. Sprout operates across many social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Google MyBusiness, Tripadvisor, Glassdoor and LinkedIn.

Hootsuite: Best known tool for analytics

They pride in offering the right tools. Hootsuite’s platform and solutions offer brands to launch brilliant social campaigns, deliver a 5-star social commerce experience, and manage all their customer conversations in one place. Hootsuite further focuses on offering you the right expertise, their Hootsuite Academy helps thousands of professionals and brands to master new social media skills with free online learning and also via paid certifications in social media marketing, social selling. Their tracking tools and analytics rank high globally and their software lets you analyze trends and engagement in real-time. Their starter professional plan, ideal for small businesses, allows brands to manage up to 10 social profiles in one place.

It comes with unlimited scheduled messages, unlimited auto-scheduling, a publishing calendar, a social inbox and a number of other tools. If you prefer to try before you buy, Hootsuite also offers you a 30-day free trial.

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Zoho: Best all-in-one tool

With over 75 million users worldwide, Zoho is a smart software that helps you grow your business. Their 50+ products aid in sales and marketing, support and collaboration, finance and recruitment needs – helping you to only focus on your business. They are one brand that does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, as part of their respect towards user privacy. It’s an all-in-one tool to use for businesses to manage their emails, projects, accounting and webinars. It is indeed one of the best tools based on CRM products in the market in addition to social media management software. Zoho also offers social media software for agencies where they can manage at least 10 different brands under their business umbrella.

Buffer: Most suitable for limited budgets

An intuitive, streamlined social media management platform that is trusted by brands, business, individuals and agencies globally- helps them to drive meaningful engagement and results on social media. Their product line includes a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics and team collaboration that are carefully refined to help social media marketers and teams to work more efficiently and effectively. One can try Buffer for free for 14 days and their plans start at just $5 per month making it the best budget option for small business. Their core benefits include a posting scheduling tool, a link shortner tool, and optimization tools for hashtags, tags and mentions across platforms.

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SocialPilot: Most suitable for small teams

SocialPilot is a social media scheduling and marketing tool for professionals, digital media agencies, individuals, bloggers and anyone seeking to increase their social media presence in an effective manner. It is known that SocialPilot is ideal for small businesses/ brands that are seeking to manage their social media platform for more than one user. All their plans come with features like unlimited scheduling, bulk scheduling, access to social media analytics, a browser extension, and customer support. The more expensive plans on SocialPilot aid their customers to manage Facebook ad accounts, oversee more social accounts, have more users, and gain more access to special features like client management tools.

A couple of other tools you may check are Loomly (ideal for large corporations) and Sendible.

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Which management tool works best for you is based on your needs. Are you looking at a social media management software that offers the broadest range of social media networks? Or one that is an all-in-one management and integration tool? Is price a factor that will determine which tools may not make the cut for you? Or is your focus more on generating engagement via bulk scheduling posts, and gaining access to more data-driven numbers of how your network is engaging with the posts?

Answers to these questions are vital before you make the choice to which software to pick, for this reason, the trial versions for many of these management tools can come in handy.