Small businesses are always looking for ways to improve their social media presence, but they can be hard to find the right tools. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the best cheap social media management tools for small businesses. Whether you’re a new business or have been using existing tools for years, these tools will help you grow your social media presence and improve your bottom line.
What is Social Media.
Social media is a term used to describe the ways in which people share and communicate information online. It can be used for business purposes as well, such as connecting with customers or followers, building relationships, and advertising products or services.
How to Use Social Media Tools
To use social media tools effectively, it’s important to understand their various functions and how they can be used to achieve your goals. For example, Facebook is a great platform for sharing photos and updates, while Twitter is perfect for carrying out discussions about your business or product. Additionally, Instagram and LinkedIn are popular social media platforms for networking with potential customers and colleagues.
How to Use Social Media for Small Businesses
Small businesses should also consider using social mediatools in order to connect with potential customers and shoppers alike! By using hashtags (#goodproducts #bestdeals), creating custom hashtags that focus on your niche market (for example: #cleaning supplies #jewelry stores), or releasing regularly updated sales information via social media pages (such as twitter@salesgov), you can reach a wider audience more quickly and easily than if you were to send out mass email campaigns alone.
Best Cheap Social Media Management Tools
1. Buffer
The platform for successful social media management
Price: Forever free plan. Paid plans start at $6 per month per channel with a 14-day free trial.
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 that support 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.
2. Nagios Core
Nagios® is the great-grand-daddy of monitoring tools, with only ping being more ubiquitous in some circles.
Nagios is popular due to its active development community and external plug-in support. You can create and use external plugins in the form of executable files or Perl® and shell scripts to monitor and collect metrics from every hardware and software used in a network. There are plugins that provide an easier and better GUI, address many limitations in the Core®, and support features, such as auto discovery, extended graphing, notification escalation, and more.
3. Hootsuite
Manage all your social media in one place
Price: Limited Free plan. Paid plans start at $49 per month, with a 30-day free trial.
Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 18 million people and more than eight hundred Fortune 1000 companies. There’s a good reason for their success: it’s an all-in-one platform that allows you to curate and schedule content, measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and more.
Unique value: Being such a comprehensive platform, there are several things that people love about Hootsuite: being able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, connect with over 35 social networks, and bulk-schedule social media posts.
4. Cacti
Cacti® is another of the monitoring warhorses that has endured as a go-to for network monitoring needs. It allows you to collect data from almost any network element, including routing and switching systems as well as firewalls, and put that data into robust graphs. If you have a device, it’s possible that Cacti’s active community of developers has created a monitoring template for it.
Cacti supports SNMP polling, which itself covers a wide range of network devices. You can also extend Cacti’s capabilities to use scripts, queries, or commands for data collection, and save it as a template to use for polling other devices for similar datasets. Cacti leverages the power of RRDTool, an open-source data logging and graphing system for creating graphs from the stored datasets. RRDTool’s data consolidation lets you store collected data forever and is limited only by the size of your storage. Cacti also allows you to add multiple users and give them access with or without edit permissions, which is perfect for service providers and enterprises with a large NOC team.
5. Sprout Social
Real people. Real brands. Real connection.
Price: Paid plans start at $89 per user per month with a 30-day free trial
Description: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social combines several social media tools into one platform — from social media scheduling to monitoring, to reporting.
Sprout Social is one of the few social media management tools that provides customer relationship management (CRM) features. Having a complete profile of your customers help you serve them better and build stronger relationships with them.
Unique value: The most common praise I’ve heard about Sprout Social is its amazing reports. Many social media managers found the reports so great and beautiful that they would download and send them to their managers or clients without editing them.
6. Zabbix
Admittedly complex to set up, Zabbix® comes with a simple and clean GUI that makes it easy to manage, once you get the hang of it. Zabbix supports agentless monitoring using technologies such as SNMP, ICMP, Telnet, SSH, etc., and agent-based monitoring for all Linux® distros, Windows® OS, and Solaris®. It supports a number of databases, including MySQL®, PostgreSQL™, SQLite, Oracle®, and IBM® DB2®. Zabbix’s VMware® monitoring capabilities allow you to customize using any scripting or programming language, which is widely regarded as its best feature.
Zabbix is probably the most widely used open-source network monitoring tool after Nagios.
7. Agora Pulse
Social media management simplified
Price: Free. Paid plans start at $99 per month.
Description: Like the social media management platforms mentioned above, Agora Pulse is also an all-in-one social media platform with scheduling, responding, and reporting features.
Unique value: Unlike the rest, Agora Pulse has several unique features such as competitor analysis and Facebook contest apps at a very affordable price point.
8. ntop
ntop, which is now ntopng (ng for next generation), is a traffic probe that uses libpcap (for packet capture) to report on network traffic. You can install ntopng on a server with multiple interfaces and use port mirroring or a network tap to feed ntopng with the data packets from the network for analysis. ntopng can analyze traffic even at 10G speeds; report on IP addresses, volume, and bytes for each transaction; sort traffic based on IP, port, and protocol; generate reports for usage; view top talkers; and report on AS information. This level of traffic analysis helps you make informed decisions about capacity planning and QoS design and helps you find bandwidth-hogging users and applications in the network. ntopng has a commercial version called ntopng pro that comes with some additional features, but the open-source version is good enough to quickly gain insight into traffic behavior. ntop can also integrate with external monitoring applications such as Nagios for alerting and provide data for monitoring.
ntopng has some limitations, but the level of network traffic visibility it provides makes it well worth the effort.
9. Sendible
The #1 social media management tool for agencies
Price: Plans start at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial
Description: Sendible is a social media management tool built specifically for agencies with several clients. On top of most features that social media management tools provide, Sendible allows you to customize your dashboard according to your branding to attract new clients.
Unique value: Sendible has some impressive integrations such as the Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also provides some automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.
10. Icinga
Built on top of MySQL and PostgreSQL, Icinga is Nagios backwards-compatible, meaning if you have an investment in Nagios scripts, you can port them over with relative ease.
Icinga was created in 2009 by the same group of devs that made Nagios, so they knew their stuff. Since then, the developers have made great strides in terms of expanding both functionality and usability since then. As the Nagios pedigree might imply, its primary focus is monitoring infrastructure and services.
Best Social Media Management Tools 2022
Sprout Social
We chose Sprout Social as our best overall due to the platform’s usability, publishing features, and analytics across all major social media platforms. This provider also offers one of the longest free trials in the business.
Pros
- Excellent user dashboard lets you manage your social networks in one place
- Utilize Social Media Optimization tools
- Analytics and reports help you manage your user engagement and return on investment (ROI)
- Scheduling tools make creating posts a breeze
- Free 30-day trial
Cons
- Expensive standard plan
- Limits to how many social profiles you can manage
We chose Sprout Social as the best option for businesses based on the array of scheduling tools and analytics they offer, their mobile app for iOS and Android, and their paid promotion tools to help you expertly boost Meta posts. One major benefit with Sprout Social is a 30-day free trial with any of their plans. If you’re unsure of the value of this software, this free trial gives you a full month to try it out.
This software currently supports all the major social media platforms, including Meta, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, making it an excellent choice for all-in-one management. There are three paid plans to choose from:
- Standard: $89 per month
- Professional: $149 per month
- Advanced: $249 per month.
Sprout Social says its Professional plan is most popular since it lets you manage up to 10 social media accounts in one place. It also comes with an all-in-one social box, social content calendar, response rate and time analysis reports, analysis tools for Twitter hashtags, and plenty more valuable tools. With any of their plans, you also get a mobile app to manage your social media accounts on the go.
The Standard plan includes many of the features of the Professional plan, yet you can only manage up to five social profiles if you choose this option, among other reduced features.
2. Sendible
The #1 social media management tool for agencies
Price: Plans start at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial
Description: Sendible is a social media management tool built specifically for agencies with several clients. On top of most features that social media management tools provide, Sendible allows you to customize your dashboard according to your branding to attract new clients.
Unique value: Sendible has some impressive integrations such as the Canva graphics editor, royalty-free image search, and YouTube search. It also provides some automation for those who want to save time on repetitive tasks.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite earns high rankings for its tracking tools and analytics. This software lets you analyze trends and engagement in real-time. Their analytics tools extend to both regular posting and social media ads.
Pros
- Professional plans start at just $49 per month
- Free plan available
- Connects with 20+ social networks
- 30-day trial available
Cons
- Some analytics reports are at an additional cost
- Plans can be costly if you have a lot of social profiles or spend a considerable sum on ads each month
- Free plans have limited tools
Hootsuite made our ranking as best for analytics because they offer some of the most comprehensive analytics and social media tracking tools on the market today, including customizable reports and team productivity reporting.
While paying more for detailed analytics and reporting can cause the cost of Hootsuite to swell, having access to this information can be crucial for businesses that rely on social media for the bulk of their marketing efforts.
Hootsuite has four paid options:
- Professional: $49 per month
- Team: $129 per month
- Business: $739 per month
- Enterprise: Varies (it’s for larger or more complex institutions)
The starter Professional plan can be a good option for small businesses because it allows you to manage 10 social profiles in one place. You also get unlimited scheduling, although you’re limited to one user. The Team plan is available for up to three users, and you can manage up to 20 social profiles in one place.
Note that all plans from Hootsuite come with unlimited scheduled messages, unlimited auto-scheduling, a publishing calendar, a social inbox, and plenty of other tools. You can also try two of Hootsuite’s four plans free for 30 days, which is a major benefit if you prefer to try before you buy.
How to Use Social Media to Save Time and Money.
To save time and money on social media, manage your accounts effectively. Create a schedule for posts, make sure you have the right tools and techniques at your disposal, and be prepared to respond quickly to comments and questions.
How to Save Time on Social Media Posts
By using effective social media marketing strategies, you can reduce the amount of time you spend on each post and save up money in the process. For example, setting up an automated system that posts new content on your account every few hours can help speed up the process while also reducing the amount of work you have to do.
How to Save Money on Social Media Posts
One way to save money with social media is by using keywords in your posts. By including key words in your posts, you can target specific readers who might be interested in what you have to say. Additionally, by using analytics tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Ads Insights, you can track how users interact with your content and learn which keywords are working best for you.
How to Use Social Media to Increase Your Brand Value.
One of the best ways to increase your brand value is by using social media to create a presence that is valuable to your target audience. To start, create a profile on each of your social media platforms and share interesting stories, photos, and videos about your business. You can also include informative content about your services or products.
How to Increase Your Social Media Density
Another way to increase brand value is by using social media more often than necessary. By doing this, you’ll help to build trust between you and your target audience and make it easier for them to connect with you in a deeper way. Consider using social media as a tool for customer service, giving insights into your product or services, or creating engaging content that makes users want to stay on top of your page.
Conclusion
Social Media can be a powerful marketing tool for small businesses. By using social media tools to manage your accounts, save time on posts, and increase your brand value, you can create a strong online presence that will help you reach more potential customers. Additionally, using social media to connect with customers and promote your business can help you save time and money on marketing efforts.