What are Social Media Management Tools?
Until and unless you have been living off the grid, you must know what Social Media Management tools really are. There are plenty of these tools out there in the market to help you sustain your brand’s digital presence and help you reach your overall goals.
In the most literal sense, a Social Media Management Tool is an application program or a programming suite module that enables an organization’s capacity to effectively take part in web-based social networking crosswise over various communication channels. A complete Social Media Management Tool will facilitate all aspects of managing your Social Media Empire, which would automatically result in your organization’s operations to be effective and efficient.
How Do These Tools Help You Reach Your Goals And Grow Your Business?
From making and distributing content to analytics and reporting, isn’t it overpowering to think about all the various tasks associated with social media marketing that organizations have to execute on a day to day basis? Well, this is where Social Media Management Tools kick in.
These absolutely incredible tools not only help streamline your workflows and processes, they even help you save ample amount of time making sure that your content reaches the right audience at the right time.
As discussed earlier, a full fledged Social Media Management Tool will help with all the aspects of your social media handling and management including:
- Facilitating Lead Generation
- Determining Buyer Persona
- Curating and Creating Content
- Scheduling and Publishing Posts
- Social Media Calendar
- Social Inbox
- Listening & Monitoring
- Audience Management
- Team Attributes
- Analytics & Reports
The 5 Must-Have Tools
Buffer – Social Media Management and Content Curation
Buffer is a social media management tool designed for managing all your social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and many others. It allows you to schedule your posts across all social networks, analyze results and even helps you to engage with your community. Below are some pros and cons of this software application:
| PROS | CONS |
| With one simple click, you’ll be able to share content and schedule posts via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest | It does not have tools for mentions, searches and hashtags, so you’ll have to monitor these from another tool or through the networks themselves |
| Buffer has Pablo, a free image creation tool that can help you create social media images | Buffer doesn’t have any phone, email or Live Chat support, which perhaps is a bit disappointing keeping in mind how big of an organization they are. |
| It finds the best time to post and automatically time your posts to get maximum user engagement | |
| It shows your best and worst performing posts based on engagement, reach, and post type. All of this is exportable in case you need to perform any further analysis. |
Pricing
Talkwalker – Social Media Monitoring and Analytics
Talkwalker is a social media management tool that specializes in listening, analytics and reporting that empowers over 2,000 brands analyzing online conversions on social networks in 187 languages. This software program is designed to help you optimize your brand, boost its reputation and help maintain your marketing campaign as well. Below are some pros and cons of this software application:
| Pros | Cons |
| It helps you monitor online mentions so you can stay aware of what’s being said about your company | There may be too much data. You will need to figure out what’s most useful for you |
| It helps you delve deeper into the social insights to track patterns and give you data to help you with your marketing campaigns | It’s quite expensive, especially for SMB’s. |
| Talkwalker is amongst the very few programmes that incorporates AI and is on the cutting edge in its field | The software could be pretty hard to master, not as user friendly as one might expect it to be |
| It helps you keep a close eye on your competitors and their updates across all social networks. | It is missing an option of excluding certain words and thus you sometimes have to refine your search results on your own. |
Pricing
Link to their Website: https://www.talkwalker.com/
OptinMonster – Facilitating Lead Generation
OptinMonster is an online lead generation platform that integrates with all major email marketing and CRM Platforms making it very easy for brands to generate, manage and share leads. Since their launch in 2013, they have been the best lead capturing tool who have helped several businesses with increased conversions.
Below are some pros and cons of this social media management tool:
| Pros | Cons |
| It is the only application that integrates with web platforms such as Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. | They lack official integration with SendGrid Marketing Campaigns |
| It is extremely user friendly. It does what it claims to do as it is pretty straightforward. | There is no free/lite version available for OptinMonster |
| It has got a drag and drop builder and has precision targeting features. | No one-time payment available unlike many list building plugins. |
| It includes features like a/b testing, adblock detection, lead sharing and behavior automation | No automatic winner selection for A/B tests. |
Pricing
Link to their Website: https://optinmonster.com/
BuzzSumo – Facilitating Content Marketing
BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring tool that helps you to the most viral and shared content across all social media channels. This tool is like an angel to a brand’s content marketing, as it uncovers the content that will work and that will sink. BuzzSumo increases productivity and content success through its 4 key components; content discovery, content research, finding influencers and monitoring. Below are some pros and cons of this software application:
| Pros | Cons |
| BuzzSumo is excellent with its insight on SEO/keywords. It tells you which keywords relevant to your products have been searched most frequently | Sometimes there are very broad results to searches which can be very distracting. |
| It really helps with finding the most effective content along with the best time to publish it. | Buzzsumo’s pricing is its worst aspect. Non-profits, schools/students, and small businesses might not be able to easily afford it. |
| It is a great tool for understanding which social media platform to use for sharing your content. | It does not provide suggestions based on your previous searches |
| Trending now makes sure that you don’t miss any big happenings, topics or ideas in the industry. It also helps you find popular articles to link to on your social media networks. | The brand mention tool picks up mentions close to your company’s name. If you have a relatively common name, you’ll get confusing results. |
Pricing
Link to their Website: https://buzzsumo.com/
Agorapulse – Social Media Management and Analytics
Agorapulse is a social moderation and analytical tool that helps with a brand’s social media management and engagement across all social networks. It is a very effective tool to help your business gather critical data like statistics and reporting to aid high quality insights and execute effective social media campaigns. Below are some pros and cons of this social media management tool:
| Pros | Cons |
| Agorapulse offers a free 28 Day Trial. | It can be quite expensive for SMB’s |
| They provide an excellent in depth reporting that allows you to take a closer look at how your social media marketing efforts are affecting sales. | You can’t shuffle publishing times in the queue based on your best-performing times. |
| The customer support at Agorapulse is an absolute killer. They are friendly, responsive, and always open to suggestions. | You can’t monitor Facebook check-ins, event comments, or comments on dynamic creative ads. |
| Social Inbox- Check off comments as they are viewed/handled so you never miss a thing. | Competitors feature doesn’t show their top-performing posts and each competitor you want to track costs extra money |
Pricing
Link to their Website: https://www.agorapulse.com/
Final Word
We’ve shared our Top 5 Social Media Management Tools with you that are an absolute killer in terms of their productivity, effectiveness and efficiency. Depending on the need and the size of your enterprise, all of you might vary in your choice to opt for any of these social media management tools. Therefore, what you have to do is realize your company’s needs based on its delivery and performance, and then pick any of these tools accordingly.
We hope that this article is useful and helps you with your decision! Good Luck!
