If there’s a downside to social media marketing these days, it’s that it sometimes takes a lot of effort to manage all the tasks associated with your marketing campaigns. There are reports and analytics to be consulted, there is content to be created and published, and there are posts which have to occur regularly, in order to keep your users and followers informed.
Fortunately, there are a number of terrific tools which can be used for social media management, that help all these tasks get accomplished efficiently and smoothly. While you may be familiar with some of the best of these tools, you probably aren’t aware of a lot of the really good tools available that can help you with your marketing tasks. Here’s a rundown of some of the most useful social media marketing tools available today, both for small to medium-sized businesses, and for corporate entities.
Social Report
Social Report makes interacting with your social media pages effortless. In addition to making it incredibly simple to schedule your posts, the Social Report app will give you the freedom to collect comments, shares, and DMs from sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn so that you can respond from one place.
If you want to augment the approach of your Facebook page, there are very few tools out there who can do it as effectively as Social Report.
Social Report also makes it easy to build presentation-ready reports with detailed analytics. Download the data from your social channels and see it laid out in their clean and intuitive dashboard. The data collection is effortless – just connect your social media profiles and you’re ready to rock. You can even organize your data quickly by customers or business.
You can track your own social profiles as well as profiles of others (great for competitor analysis). Use their tool to monitor what’s being said about your brand on blogs, news, social networks and in comments to up your social media game.
Ready to try it? They offer a 30 day free-trial for all new customers.
Buffer
Buffer offers a suite of products which can be used for analytics, team collaboration, publishing, and user engagement. It is a very intuitive group of products which are easy to learn and perform much the way you would expect them to. It’s really a social media management platform which has a very streamlined look and feel, and which businesses of all sizes have come to trust for driving meaningful engagement with social media followers. The company marketing this software platform also provides very good customer support, and is easy to contact at any time of day.
Sprout Social
This product also combines a number of social media tools and makes them available on a single platform, including everything from scheduling to monitoring, as well as a suite of reporting tools. It also contains many of the features of a customer relationship management (CRM) software package, so that you can maintain a complete profile on all of your customers. This will help you provide better service to them, and strengthen relationships formed with your customers. Sprout Social has a very strong reporting system, and the reports are so concise and so well laid out that they are routinely passed among managers for high-level consultation.
Social Pilot
One of the great things about Social Pilot is that it manages to include a number of social media management tools into a convenient and simplified dashboard. The simplicity is extended into its pricing scheme, as it is one of the most affordable of all the social media marketing tools. It also includes a customer management feature that will be very beneficial for companies, which have a number of customers to keep track of. One of the strong suits of Social Pilot is that it can curate and suggest content across a number of different industries, for those seeking to find good relevant content. The white label reports available from Social Pilot are also especially useful for agencies.
CoSchedule
This software product goes far beyond being a simple social media management tool, and is also an extremely powerful calendar which can be used to manage most of the tasks associated with your marketing campaigns. Using CoSchedule, you can set up a high level of team collaboration, so that posts and content can be created and coordinated easily across all team members. Any business looking to organize all its projects under one umbrella would find this to be extremely useful, since it can easily accommodate content, emails, events, and social media tasks within the platform. It has a feature called ReQueue, which assists with determining the best times for posting, and which helps you to fill in any gaps in your social media schedule, by inserting your best posts.
HootSuite
This may be the biggest and most well-known social media management tool on the market today, being used by more than 15 million people, as well as by at least 800 of the top Fortune 1000 companies. The reason it has become so popular is because it’s an all in one platform which allows you to run social media ads, measure your return on investment, and easily schedule your content for publication. It is one of the most expensive platforms on the market because of its powerful capabilities, such as its ability to monitor a number of different accounts and keywords, connecting with as many as 35 different social networks, and its ability to bulk-schedule posts to all social media you’re involved with.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a social media management tool primarily used for Instagram and Pinterest. It can help with the scheduling of posts, monitoring of conversations, and results measurement. It also offers suggestions and recommendations on how to improve your performance using Pinterest or Instagram. This is a great tool for marketers because it offers a range of features which are specific to these two platforms. Pinterest content promotion can be made much simpler, as can your Instagram UGC content management.
Post Planner
Post Planner helps social media marketers in three primary ways, by finding high-quality content, establishing an optimal publishing calendar, and arranging a consistent posting schedule. It provides a tool called Find, which makes it very easy for you to discover content that has a great track record for user engagement. It can also curate and rank content suggestions, allowing you to create the ideal content-based schedule. Rather than just picking time slots in the schedule for your posts, Post Planner helps you select the right type of content for each time slot, and fills those slots with the selected content.
