Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are some of the most popular social media platforms we use daily. Updating, curating, and managing each one takes effort and time. So to help keep you organized, we’ve researched the best tools you can use to manage your social media presence. We’ll look at social media management and understand how it can help you be at the top of your game.
What is Social Media Management?
Social media management is the key to managing your online presence. It lets you create, analyze, publish your posts, and engage with your followers in a systematic way.
Brand Awareness and Loyalty
Social media influencers and business owners use this process to build brand awareness and loyalty. You have access to a wide variety of audiences. Similarly, the marketing aspect of social media management help in increasing followers and creating traffic to your online site.
Content Consistency
Social media management tools create a unified platform for your social networking sites to help get your message across. On the other hand, not everyone uses the same sites. Some users prefer Facebook over Instagram and vice versa. Through social media management, your Facebook follower has access to the same information as those in Instagram and Twitter. Therefore, you can establish content consistency across your social networking sites.
Top Tools for Social Media Management
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management solution that easily integrates your social networking sites into one central hub. That is to say, it lets you schedule your posts and monitor your content in one place.
Their visual calendar helps you strategize and plan your posts giving you a daily, weekly, or monthly view. They have an optimal time feature that increases content reception and engagement by telling you the best time of the day to post.
In addition, Sprout Social gives you access to images and videos from their centralized library which you can use to create fresh and engaging content.
Pricing: Sprout Social offers a 30-day free trial. They have two plans you can take advantage of: Standard plan is $99 per user, per month for 5 social profiles. The Professional plan is $149 per user, per month for 10 social profiles. The Advanced plan is $249 per user, per month for 10 social profiles plus access to chatbots and automation tools.
3. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is an intuitive social media management tool that has all you need to manage all your social networking sites. Firstly, you get access to a publishing calendar that makes your content posting efficient. Secondly, Their SmartQ predictions update you when your followers are most active so you can engage with them in real-time. Moreover, this ties in well with the listening dashboard that allows you to track mentions and keywords optimal for live engagement across your social channels.
Zoho Social empowers team collaboration further allowing you to create discussions and creative exchange of ideas internally. For instance, you can assign which team member handles a particular social channel enabling accountability.
In addition, the monitoring dashboard is customizable so you can modify it to fit your specific needs.
Pricing: Zoho Social offers a 15-day free trial. You can continue using the Zoho free plan or take advantage of their two individual plan offerings: The Standard plan is $10 per month billed annually for 1 brand with 7 social channels. The Professional plan is $25 per month billed annually for 1 brand with 7 social channels and access to 10 custom reports.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been in the market since 2008. It is a popular and reliable choice for social media management for good reason. They have a compelling analytics tool that generates trends and visual reports. Consequently, this helps you find new followers and lets you track and improve your social impact.
You can access automated post scheduling allowing you an unlimited number of posts across your channels. It lets you further assign individual or team access for easy collaboration.
You can take the pulse of the crowd by keeping abreast of hashtags, keywords, and conversations about your brand. Hootsuite protects your information and saves it in your cloud file service.
Pricing: Hootsuite offers a 30-day free trial. You can choose from their three plans: The Professional plan is $19 per month billed annually for 10 social profiles and 1 user. The Team plan is $99 per month billed annually for 20 social profiles and 3 users. Business plan is $599 per month billed annually for 35 social profiles and 5 users.
4. Brand24
Brand24 integrates online reputation protection with your social media management. They feature strong social media analytics to monitor your engagements and likes. In the same vein, you get notifications allowing you to respond to all online comments about your brand. Therefore, it makes your online engagements personal and it allows you to get to know your followers.
The automated reports feature lets you track your social media presence which helps in the marketing and PR of your brand. Reports are available daily or weekly so you can plan and make changes to your content depending on your brand level engagement.
Pricing: Brand24 offers a 14-day free trial. You can choose from their three plans: The Plus plan is $49 per month for 5 users with data analysis and updates every 12 hours. The Premium plan is $99 per month for 10 users with data analysis and hourly updates. Max plan is $199 per month for 99 users with data analysis and real-time updates.
5. Buffer
Buffer makes social management simple and easy to do, so you can access your socials in one cohesive platform. Their dashboard is user-friendly allowing you to publish your content in one go. You can drag and drop images and content into your interface and upload them according to your schedule. You get a preview of your audience demographics so you can supply engaging content every time.
Pricing: Buffer offers a 14-day trial. You can choose between their Publish and Analyze plans, depending on your business focus. The Pro plan is $15 per month for 8 social accounts and 100 scheduled posts. The Premium plan is $65 per month for 8 social accounts and 2000 scheduled posts. Business plan is $99 per month for 25 social accounts and 2000 scheduled posts.
Understanding social media management is essential to building your social media presence. Similarly, taking advantage of the best social media solutions benefit you by organizing your socials, monitoring your engagement, and following, and making sure that you don’t miss anything. In short, you can handle your socials like a pro by finding the social media management tool that works for you.