- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Sprout Social
- Later
- Social Pilot
- Social Bee
- Hubspot
- Zoho Social
- Agorapulse
- Sprout Social
Once upon a time, social media was primarily used as a platform for personal connections, fun, and games. However, times have changed. It became a catalyst in business and digital space.
Like any other technology, the social media landscape is ever-evolving, which means upgrades and new tools constantly emerge to address the growing needs of its users.
Social media has now become a great resource and tool not just for ordinary users but, most of all, for business owners. In addition, it impacts, if not thousands, millions of users all across the globe through timely, relevant, and high-quality content.
Furthermore, every business nowadays aims to reach as many target audiences as possible. Entrepreneurs ensure they are present where their target market is; hence they establish this presence through various social media platforms.
Now, here’s the tricky part, social media management–synonymous with scheduling, publishing, reporting, and engagement can be daunting, precisely when you need to do it on a daily basis.
In this article, we will give you the ten best social media management tools you or your social media virtual assistant can use to increase your efficiency and productivity so you can focus more on scaling your business.
Let’s Recap: What is social media management?
Social media management refers to the process of creating, scheduling, analyzing, and engaging with content posted on social media platforms. It is the process of managing your presence across all the social media channels that your brand uses.
Consequently, social media management also involves creating a strategy from its inherent platform analytics and monitoring social media metrics to track results and returns. It aims to enhance brand visibility, increase engagement, and build a robust online presence. It is an essential area of digital marketing that helps businesses establish connections with their target audience and promote their products or services.
What are the ways you can use social media management tools?
Through social media management tools, users can manage and automate repetitive tasks across various platforms. It simplifies social media workflow by organizing and scheduling content, managing campaigns, scheduling activities, engaging with target audiences, and archiving posts.
Scheduling and publishing
Social media management tools allow users to schedule a month’s worth of posts in advance. You can also maximize your social reach using best practices. With the help of its built-in analytics, you can identify optimal times of the day and days of the week in scheduling your content.
Moreover, these tools can help users plan posts for specific times to boost their relevance, visibility, and audience interaction. You can prepare relevant content in advance just in time for holidays and events. If this task is adding up to your workload, you can always hire a virtual assistant agency that offers social media virtual assistant services to tick this off your list.
Account Management
A social media scheduling tool is a must-have for your business, especially if you have accounts on multiple platforms.
With this technology, users may consolidate accounts from various platforms into a singular location where dashboards provide data and analytics and let users publish content to one or more accounts. It also offers administrative features to ensure your account information is up-to-date, campaigns are managed, and profiles are customized.
Centralizing your social media accounts will make it easier to keep up with the rapidly changing social media landscape so you can stay above the competition.
Reporting
One of the best features of social media management tools is its ability to generate data to create strategies that will help scale your business. It allows you to closely examine factors like demographics, regions, and trends depending on the reporting features of the tool you will be using.
However, keep in mind that not all social media management tools offer comprehensive reports. But to the ones that do, these can be used to produce content to demonstrate to your team, partners, and potential clients. It allows you to present factual data to support the efficacy of your social media strategy. Over time, reports can highlight patterns and elements that can significantly impact your social media activity, especially your business.
Customer Engagement
Another essential benefit of using social media management tools is their ability to streamline your procedure for posting so you can have more time to interact with your ideal customers and audiences. You can direct your efforts in engaging with your target audience when you spend less time organizing and scheduling social media content. Having an improved social media engagement is directly related to an increase in brand awareness, fostering a more active community, and, eventually, growth.
Some of the principal advantages of social media management tools include:
- Manage various types of social media accounts
- Gather data from your customer base and followers
- Effectively address complaints or criticisms
- Access to insights into customer behavior and satisfaction
- Track competition
Top 10 Popular SMM Tools
Below are the top ten most popular and widely used social media management tools you should consider using this 2023.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to easily manage organic and paid social content together, schedule and publish posts across multiple channels, keep track of conversations, and draw out actionable real-time insights for deriving crucial business decisions.
This tool is ideal for teams, small businesses, freelancers, and agencies.
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Winning Features:
- Has a social media scheduler and content calendar
- Provides audience insights to boost your engagement
- Centralized viewing of statistics on all your social media accounts
- Organizes social conversation in one place
- Helps you write captions and create a content calendar with its very own AI technology, OwlyWriter AI.
2. Buffer
Buffer is a popular social media management tool for its user-friendly and practical features. Many individuals and organizations rely on it to increase engagement and achieve desired results on various social media platforms. With the addition of its latest feature, Start Page, users can now create personalized and mobile-optimized landing pages for their campaigns.
Platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Mastodon.
Winning Features:
- Most affordable and no-frills social media management tool
- Simple and straightforward
- Allows you to reply to comments on Facebook pages and Instagram business accounts
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a user-friendly platform allowing users to create better, more innovative, faster business results. It provides you with the social insights that help empower your teams to more effectively engage your audiences, streamline workflows, collaborate in real-time, and drive critical business decisions.
This social media tool for marketing is ideal for YouTubers, Pinterest users, small to medium businesses and teams, as well as agencies.
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Winning Features:
- Offers scheduling and full-featured analytics
- Helps you plan and execute your social media strategy
- Has a unified social media inbox so that you can respond to messages across multiple social media channels
4. Later
Later is a powerful tool for visual-focused platforms like Instagram. It lets users plan and schedule visual content, preview their feeds, and optimize posting times for maximum engagement.
If you want to enhance your Instagram feed, Later provides some exciting features. You can use their Instagram feed planner to preview how your grid will look after you post your content. This is an excellent tool to customize your grid and make it stand out.
Later is best for solopreneurs on Instagram.
Platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok
Winning Features:
- Visual planner
- IG story analytics
- Hashtag suggestions
- Content discovery
- Optimal times to post suggestions
- Linkin.bio integration
5. Social Pilot
Social Pilot is one of the best social media management tools for digital agencies and medium-sized businesses that handle multiple accounts and clients, as it is a fully-integrated tool.
If your team primarily zeroed in on developing workflows with permission settings, collaborative tools, and customized client reporting, then SocialPilot is the right tool for you. Although SocialPilot has pretty much covered the essentials, it also comes with a full social inbox function to allow its users to interact with their audiences apart from automating posts.
Although they may not have an influencer search option, they provide social monitoring and listening, a crucial hero feature required nowadays by most businesses as they continuously adapt to remote environments.
Platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Tumbler.
Winning Features
- Ideal for agencies as it offers easy client management for managing social media accounts
- Allows users to schedule posts in bulk (up to 500 posts)
- Allows customization of materials published by adding watermarks or logos to image posts as you work with various brands
- Use its very own AI Assistant to instantly generate original social media post concepts, captions, and winning hashtags.
- Provides comprehensive social media analytics and reporting to examine social media accounts
- Analyze the efficacy of your strategy across several platforms by assembling analytics from the various accounts into a detailed PDF report.
6. Social Bee
SocialBee is a versatile social media management platform that centralizes all your social media marketing efforts by taking care of all your needs in one place. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Google Business Profile are supported.
Thanks to its AI integration, post production has never been easier with SocialBee. It allows users to produce new material, tailor it for other platforms, and reuse their previously successful content to reap its benefits.
Moreover, because of its content curation feature, you will never run out of posts to share with your audience; you only have to pull the most recent blogs from the massive reservoir of internet sources.
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Google Business Profile
Winning Features:
- Categorizes content for easy posting
- AI integration allows post generation
- Intuitive calendar for content strategy visualization
<a/a>7. Hubspot
Although Hubspot may be known more as a customer relationship management platform, it has its own social media management software that may meet your needs.
HubSpot’s social media management tool helps users centralize and monitor their campaigns in a single location. It also offers several helpful analytics tools that you can use to examine your post performance in-depth. It tells you which channels, promotions, and publications times work best for your business. With its integrated social listening tools, you can watch what people say about your business and specific keywords.
Platforms: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter
Winning Features:
- Campaign Management
- Marketing Automation
- Keyword tracking
- Ads optimization
- Customer Relationship
- Management Integration
- Analytics and Reporting
8. Zoho Social
Zoho Social offers a straightforward way of managing your brands on social media. You can create personalized reports, evaluate your social media performance, and monitor vital metrics.
Furthermore, with the help of its unique CRM integration with Zoho Social, you can manage and interact with your prospective customers.
Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business
Winning Features:
- Automated reports
- Collaboration with teams
- Social monitoring and listening
- CRM Integration
- SmartQ
9. Agorapulse
Agorapulse has all the essential capabilities of a fully integrated social media management tool, including scheduling, a visual content calendar, a social inbox, analytics, and team collaboration. It also offers competition research and enables boosted posts on Facebook to reach your target audience effectively.
A bit of a downside with this software is that it does not have an influencer tool. However, despite this con, Agorapulse has an enormous following of specific users who firmly believe that this social media management just got everything they need.
Platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube
Winning Features:
- Unified inbox
- Post publishing
- Social standing monitoring
- Comprehensive monitoring
- Advanced analytics
10. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a platform designed to cater to the needs of large organizations and teams. It is well-known for its monitoring, scheduling of posts, analytics, and team management capabilities through workflow approval. It may be simple, but it is powerful as it offers many features you would ideally look for in a social media management tool. You can even request custom features.
In addition, it has a social inbox tool, like most of the tools listed above, that allows you to communicate and engage with your audience and a social monitoring and keyword search feature.
If you are passionate about employee advocacy, Sprout Social can help you.
Platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, UserVoice, Twitter, and Zendesk
Winning Features:
- CRM
- Integrations
- Mobile access
- Analytics
- Monitoring
- Publishing
- Account structure
How to Choose the Right Social Media Tool
From a broader perspective, you can now envision the impact a suitable tool can bring to your chosen social media platforms and workflows.
Before we conclude this blog, here are some factors that you should consider before diving right into the tool:
- User experience. Can you easily navigate the tool? Is it optimized for mobile use?
- Customer support. Do they respond to customer concerns swiftly? Do they offer training? Is there a channel where they can readily answer your concerns?
- Features. Can it meet your marketing needs? Does it offer hashtag suggestions, influencer searches, a calendar planner, and more?
- Analytics and reporting. Does it help you keep track of the metrics and KPIs to measure your campaign results?
- Supported social media platforms. Does it support the platforms where your ideal customers are?
- Pricing. What budget can you set aside for this social media management tool?
Most offer demos and free trials if you are new to the industry and want to experiment with multiple tools. This will help you explore, test, and even become proficient enough to navigate it from there on.
Final Thoughts
Remember, as a business owner, staying updated on the latest trends and new tools is crucial to ensure you’re using the most relevant and effective options for your social media strategy. Consider your specific needs, budget, and goals when choosing the right social media tools for your business or personal use.
On a side note, you don’t have to do all these things on your own. You can always create a team to help you run and scale your business. If you are looking for a social media manager who can help you with the ins and outs of your chosen platform, try our virtual assistant services now! Book a call with us to get started.
Resources:
https://www.g2.com/categories/social-media-mgmt#learn-more
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-management-tools/
https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/digital-marketing/social-media-management-tools/
https://eclincher.com/top-10-social-media-management-tools/
https://www.socialpilot.co/social-media-management-tools#agorapulse
