Social media has become the way of life these days and when it comes to managing your own social channels, it can be hard to find the best software for the job. Should you go with Tweetdeck? Is Hootsuite better? Or should you try something else entirely?
Social media management tools allow you to organize multiple social media accounts and measure your social media performance. There are more than thirty social media management tools, and each one of them has its own unique selling points.
Buffer
Description: Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform trusted by small businesses and individuals to help drive meaningful engagement and results on social media.
We have a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics, simple landing pages, and team collaboration. Our products are carefully considered and highly refined in order to help social media marketers and teams work more efficiently and effectively.
Unique value: What we’ve heard from our customers is that they love how clean and intuitive our tools are, how friendly and timely our customer support is, and how helpful our content is.
eClincher
Description: Like most social media management tools, eClincher allows you to schedule and publish posts, respond to social messages, and analyze your social media performance.
Unique value: What makes eClincher different from other tools is that it enables you to auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds, has a media library for your images and lets you search for social media influencers.
Crowdfire
Description: Crowdfire has been adding new features over the years. Besides scheduling content, it also allows you to manage your Twitter account (follow and unfollow) and suggests articles for sharing.
Unique value: Crowdfire stands out from most social media management tools in that it lets you connect your blogs, YouTube channel, and online shops and will create social media posts for every update you have on your sites.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr Social Cloud is part of Sprinklr’s suite of products to help enterprises connect and serve their customers across any channel at scale. It enables teams in enterprises to collaborate effectively and to reach, listen, and engage their customers on more than 25 social channels.
Social Hub
Social Hub is a social media management software built for businesses, agencies, and governments. Based on its target audience and customers, I believe it provides a solution that is efficient, scalable, and secure.
Socialoomph
Socialoomph has been stable in the market since its establishment in 2008. The tool may not appear with a various feature list, but its post scheduling and queueing functions are powerful enough to outperform many other competitor platforms.
Contrary to its overly simple interface, Socialoomph offers more benefits than you think. With Socialoomph, you can manage your postings as a team or an individual, from assigning posts, adding associates, organizing privileges, and configuring post-approval. Your posts will then be perfectly scheduled at the exact time and location of your choice – then added to your social feeds automatically as you have queued. Apart from scheduling and queueing, Socialoomph also provides other significant features such as RSS feeds, bulk uploading, self-destructing posts, or post-flood control.
Like the majority of social media management tools, Socialoomph has both free and paid pricing plans. With the free plan (Personal Suite), you’re allowed to schedule unlimited posts (three posts per hour) in one profile account as one user. Premium plans on Socialoomph are exceptionally affordable – even the Business Suite version, which is the most expensive, only costs $55 per month. All these paid plans can be billed monthly or annually, with annual payments earning a 10% discount. The prices vary depending on the number of features and functions, so you can consider the best choice for your business’s scale and needs.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the most optimal solutions to connect your social media accounts seamlessly. The tool is widely trusted by more than 20,000 brands and organizations as it delivers users the ultimate usability and satisfaction with a powerful feature list.
The platform is designed with an extremely intuitive user interface to guarantee users a smooth experience. It features 4 main social modules – listening, publishing, engagement, and analytics – with each module holding robust advantages. While the listening functions help to convert trends data into practical marketing strategies, the publishing functions play an important role in reaching the targeted audiences with the scheduled and planned content. Your posts will then be streamlined and monitored with the engagement features, and their performance will be analyzed using social data and dashboards.
Besides, Sprout Social even supports a Smart Box to gather all your social messages in one place. You can easily combine and monitor your inboxes however you want.
Later
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks, with over 1 billion users active on the platform each month. Later started as an app dedicated to Instagram as a scheduling tool, but since its inception, they’ve added support for other social networks and is continuously adding new features. The app has a strong focus on visual content. Whether you want to schedule in-feed image or video posts, stories, or carousel posts — Later supports all of these options. Later has a free plan available that you can use forever, but you get features such as analytics, saved captions, scheduled stories, and more for paid plans. Their paid plans start at $9/month.
TweetDeck
Those who rely on Twitter to get their message across will find much to like about TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free application that enables you to manage multiple (unlimited) Twitter accounts from a unified interface. You can create your own customizable social media dashboard that allows you to send and receive tweets and manage and monitor your Twitter profiles. You can use TweetDeck as a web app, Chrome app, or desktop app. TweetDeck can be set to post scheduled tweets, build Tweet lists, and more. And the extra special part is that it’s always free.
ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. You can share ideas with, create approval workflows, build your content plan and then publish that content to multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Medium). ContentCal’s analytics will help you understand your content performance and the latest ‘Respond’ features act as a shared inbox for monitoring and responding to mentions, messages, and comments across social media.
One of the star features is the fact that ContentCal integrates with over 2000 other applications so that you can create the perfect social media workflow by connecting ContentCal to tools you currently use (think of things like Slack or Trello) and also distribute content to channels beyond social media, like emails and blog posts. The best content is created together. Involve your team (and clients) into the content creation process, share ideas, gain feedback and watch your content performance soar!
Conclusion
Social media has become an essential component of every marketing strategy. Knowing which social media management app is the best for you can be confusing and difficult, especially if you are on a budget.