If you run a social media agency or manage multiple social media accounts for your brand, you know how challenging it can be to do it on your own. The first question we ask potential clients is: ‘How many social media accounts do you have and on which platforms do you want us to help you?’. Unfortunately some brands just start list their accounts without checking what they actually post on those platforms. And that’s why we want to give you a hand and show our favourite social media management tools of all time.
Have you heard of social media tools? Well this is your chance to discover the best social media management platforms ever created. We decided to write this article on best free social media management tools 2021 because we felt it is important for all our clients to know what software is available on the market.
Sendible
This is a social media management tool for agencies. It allows teams to manage social media activities for multiple clients – all from a centralized hub.
Sendible is equipped with an easy-to-use dashboard, a social CRM, analytics, and a full-fledged publishing system.
Managing social media is a time-taking process. The main aim of this tool is enabling social media manager and his team collaboration to save time and focus on what truly matters – content creation and client pitch preparation.
Agency features
a. A single inbox for each brand
Multiple brands have multiple social accounts. To avoid chaos, Sendible has a Priority Inbox that keeps the respective teams focused by bringing all social media messages from a specific client’s multiple accounts – under the same roof.
It doesn’t matter how many members are in a team or how many client social channels one is handling, makes it fairly easy to not only manage but also derive excellent results with efficient team collaboration.
One of the best features about Sendible is that even if someone has not tagged a company yet is talking about it, Sendible will let the company know.
This functionality helps bring more users on board – without being mentioned or tagged.
b. Streamlined scheduling and publishing
Simplification of the publishing process is enabled by scheduling social media posts, images, and videos either individually or in bulk.
It allows the user to keep his best-performing social content scheduled on repeat so that the social media profiles are always active and churning quality posts.
Best social media management tools like Sendible consistently analyze the social media profiles of the clients to suggest content that will best resonate with the audience. It also suggests an optimal time to post.
c. Social collaboration made easy
Sendible helps turn social interactions into actionable tasks. It helps the team leader to supervise his team’s social media posting activity.
Sendible allows others to contribute to the Content Library and create the best content together as a team.
Due to its transparent and easy dashboard, Sendible enables the creation of smoother workflows.
d. Detailed progress reports
Sendible delivers dynamic reports featuring social media analytics data in easily a digestible format.
From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and LinkedIn, it generates in-depth reports that help the users in spotting trends easily.
Google Analytics forms the foundation of Sendible. It helps tracks the impact of social media activities on website visits, landing page views, content popularity, demographic performance, and more.
Pricing
Sendible offers four types of packages for – growing brands, small teams, and big brands. Depending upon the size of the team, the user can opt for a 30-day trial to see if Sendible is apt for his team.
In case the scope of work increases or decreases, the user can upgrade or downgrade (and even cancel) the account at any point in time.
Check out the pricing plans:
Integrations
Sendible integrates with a number of systems and applications such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Analytics, WordPress, Pinterest, Canva, Tumblr, Google Drive Flickr, Google Plus, Dropbox and more.
GDPR and CCPA Update: Sendible has updated their terms and policies agreement as per the new GDPR and CCPA guidelines. The website has clearly mentioned all the steps they have taken to make their platform GDPR and CCPA compliant. To review the changes you can visit here.
AgoraPulse
This social marketing software is a social community and moderation tool that helps businesses manage all their social media accounts from a single dashboard. AgoraPulse is user-friendly, flexible and has top-notch customer support.
It is a top choice of social media tools for digital marketing agencies.
The tool ensures the user doesn’t miss a tweet, comment or even a message.
AgoraPulse is well-equipped with tools that help gather critical data such as statistics and reporting necessary to devise quality social media campaigns.
Agency features
a. Engagement
AgoraPulse patches content from everywhere in one place so that it is easy for the user to reply, review, assign or tag.
The tool also syncs with Facebook’s Marketing API and Graph API so the comments are in real-time.
b. Multi-platform publishing platform
AgoraPulse allows the user to publish on multiple social accounts from one place on timelines set by him. Top-performing social content can be queued repeatedly so that the social accounts never lack good content.
The AgoraPulse dashboard allows the user to take a glance at all his published, scheduled, queued and yet-to-be approved posts.
Agency features
a. Client involvement
Used by global brands such as CGR Communications, Digital Republik, Ogilvy, TBWA and Geeky Brands, AgoraPulse allows even the clients to be a part of the social media strategy.
They can be invited to approve the draft posts and give feedback. They can be assigned questions to answer so that the tasks are completed on time.
b. Restricted access for teams
It is not necessary for everyone on the team to have the same access to social media accounts. Some members would have greater flexibility than others. AgoraPulse understands that and therefore has this feature specifically for agencies.
Pricing
There are four kinds of payment options offered by AgoraPulse:
- Medium ($79/month)-10 social profiles,
- Large($159/month)- 25 social profiles
- X-large ($239/month)- 40 social profiles
- Enterprise ($399/month)-60 social profiles.
All the subscriptions are on an annual basis and the user can cancel anytime. AgoraPulse also has a 100% no-questions-asked refund monthly subscriptions. Here’s a screenshot of its payment plans:
Check out the complete pricing details here. AgoraPulse works best for small and fast-growing agencies and it is equipped with many features favorable to an agency.
Awario
Awario is primarily a social media listening tool which enables you to monitor all the major social media platforms, news, forums, blogs, and the wider web for mentions of your client’s brands (or any other keyword). Awario’s Enterprise plan allows you to create up to 50 alerts, and collect tons of mentions, including both real-time and historical ones. This will ensure you’re aware of the present state of your clients’ online presence at any point in time.
To ensure you get relevant mentions only, Awario has a Boolean search option which lets you tweak each query, and decide for yourself how the tool will be searching for your keywords. Awario can display mention growth and reach over time, provide sentiment analysis, perform competitive analysis, and find social media influencers as well.
The tool also enables users to invite multiple team members with different access permissions, which makes it perfect for agencies. It also lets users create white-label PDF reports and export data.
Pricing: Enterprise plan starts at $299 per month. Free trial available (no credit card is required).
SproutSocial
SproutSocial is a multi-client social media management tool which covers publishing, social media monitoring, messaging, engagement, analytics, and reporting.
You can monitor and engage with messages from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and also monitor and engage with comments on all of your owned profiles. For Facebook and Instagram, you can also track the activity on your paid posts.
You can view, manage, schedule, and publish social posts across multiple profiles, networks, and campaign tags. You can also edit images and text with the built-in editor. SproutSocial even has patented ‘send time optimization’ technology, which ensures that your posts are published at optimal engagement periods.
SproutSocial analytics spots trends for each niche you work with, and can highlight influencers, track social media campaign performance, analyze sentiment behind brand mentions, and tracks engagement, impressions and follower growth across profiles. All of these metrics are included in white-label PDF reports.
SproutSocial can also be integrated with Google Analytics to make it easier for you to understand how social channels drive traffic to your site.
Pricing: Sprout Social’s advanced plan is $249 per user per month. Free 30-day trial is available.
Conclusion:
All social media managers need to be sure, that they are using the best social media monitoring tools for their business. Although, there are quite a few social media management tools available in the market, I’ve gathered eight best social media monitoring tools.