Social Media Management Tools 2021 has become the need of the hour for all the businesses today. Social media platforms have created a pool of opportunities for businesses to connect with their customers and fans socially. Social Media Management Tools have made it possible to manage multiple social media in just one place. This helps you save hours of work every single day, making it easy to be more productive.
Numerous tools are available in the market that helps you manage social media accounts. In fact, you will have a list of tools to choose from. However, finding the right tool for specific objectives can prove difficult. It is one of the important challenges that many firms face while they are looking out to expand their reach on various social channels.
Best Software For Social Media Marketing The use of social media has increased dramatically in recent years. People are using social media tools to enhance their day-to-day lives. This includes connecting with friends, family and others around the world through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. The use of social media also helps businesses reach out to customers in real time and promote their products and services through social networks.
The best social media management software makes it easier to manage and increase your audience as well as help you with your overall marketing goals. The right social media management tool is essential for enhancing the efficiency of your business, which is why we have done our best at comparing some of the top marketing tools in this guide.
What are Social Media Marketing Software?
Social Media Marketing Software helps to integrate social metrics into your marketing efforts. Social Media Marketing Software helps to acquire new customers, engage existing customers and build brand advocates by using Social Media for Marketing purpose and engaging with them by making it easy for customers to share your content with their professional networks, friends, and family using built-in social media sharing buttons.
Social Marketing Software helps marketers to learn about customers’ preferences and feedback on social networks and stream line marketing strategy for an effective ROI. Social Media Platforms have built-in data analytics tools, which enable companies to track the progress, success, and engagement of ad campaigns. Companies address a range of stakeholders through social media marketing, including current and potential customers, current and potential employees, journalists, bloggers, and the general public.
Buffer
The platform for successful social media management
Prices: Forever free plan, $5, $10, add $10 per month per social channel connected (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 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.
Hootsuite
Manage all your social media in one place
Prices: Free plan, $29, $129, $599 per month, and enterprise pricing (with a 30-day free trial)
Description: Hootsuite, probably the biggest social media management tool, is used by over 15 million people and more than 800 of the 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.
Sprout Social
Real people. Real brands. Real connection.
Prices: $99, $149, and $249 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.
ContentCal
At its heart, ContentCal is a social media calendar for firms wanting to organize their social accounts. However, with the Content Hub, you have an advanced collaboration tool for serious social accounts.
ContentCal has two set plans: $17 per month for the Pro plan (targeting individuals, with one calendar and four social profiles), and $47 for the Company Plan (targeting small teams, with two users, two calendars, and eight social profiles). Any firms with more extensive needs can create a Premium Custom Plan (3-10 users) or an Enterprise Custom Plan (for more than ten users). ContentCal also offers custom plans for agencies. At the bottom end is the free Hobbyist plan (Single User, four social profiles, one calendar, ten posts per month) for those with limited needs.
ContentCal considers a calendar to be a home for each client, sub-brand, or business you manage. A calendar can hold one of each network (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram), although you can have multiple social accounts on the custom plans.
At its heart, ContentCal helps you and your team run a coordinated, well-planned social campaign. You can organize your posts in their Content Hub, with full collaboration capabilities for your team. Depending on the plan you select, ContentCal also includes modules to check your performance (Analytics) and handle inquiries (Respond).
Monday.com
monday.com is primarily an organization tool. You can use it to better organize most areas of your business, including social media marketing.
You begin by picking the template that best suits your needs. You can then customize that template to suit your exact workflow and needs. You can use as many templates as you need to address your workflows.
You can then adjust the columns to decide what’s essential to your team, using the software to capture and visualize all the info you need.
You then invite all relevant team members to collaborate. monday.com allows you to keep all your conversations, files, briefs, checklists, and sheets in one place.
You can then plan relevant timelines, track progress and keep an eye on your week.
While this does not sound specific to social media marketing, monday.com is a useful tool for setting up content and/or social media marketing calendars.
There are multiple pricing levels, depending on the services you require and your number of users. The Basic Plan for one user starts at $25 per month (when billed annually).
Loomly
Loomly is a simple social media calendar tool that helps people and businesses create content for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
It offered three pricing tiers:
- Solo – for one user operating up to 10 social media accounts
- Pro – for 5 users operating up to 15 social media accounts
- Small Team – for 10 users operating up to 30 social media accounts
- Medium Team – for 15 users operating up to 50 social media accounts
- Large Team – for 40 users operating up to 140 social media accounts
Loomly offers post ideas for those times when you are stuck for inspiration. It also gives post optimization tips to help you better craft your content.
Thanks to Loomly’s post mockups, you always know what you scheduled posts will look like.
If you are working in an environment where you need post-approval, Loomly includes an approval workflow system.
As with other social media content calendar software, Loomly allows you to automate your publishing schedule and provides analytics for every post – advanced analytics if you have a Pro Plan or one of the Team plans.
Zoho
Zoho stands out as an all-in-one tool consumers can use to run the social aspects of their business in one place while managing their email, projects, accounting, and webinars.Pros
- Zoho offers a CRM product that lets you manage your email, projects, accounting, and more under one umbrella
- You can integrate their social media management platform, which works with all major social media networks
- Social media planning for individuals starts at $10 per month
- A free edition with limited features is available with an option to upgrade
Cons
- Plans for agencies start at $230 per month, which is on the expensive side
- Plans for individuals and businesses only include one to three team members, with more users requiring an additional monthly spend
Zoho made our ranking as the best all-in-one tool based on the CRM product they offer in addition to social media management software. You can utilize Zoho to store and manage your email, create and oversee products, and take care of accounting all in one place. Zoho also offers comprehensive social media management software you can buy separately or integrate for full all-in-one management.
When it comes to their social media management software, Zoho offers three plans for businesses:
- Standard: $10 per month
- Professional: $30 per month
- Premium: $40 per month
Each plan lets you publish and schedule posts across multiple platforms, access summary reports and analytics, and access a Bitly integration & URL shortener. The Standard and Professional plans are limited to one brand and one team member, but both plans let you add additional team members or social channels for an additional cost.
A free plan with limited functionality is also available. With the free plan, you get access for one team member and brand and the ability to publish multiple posts in one place. Zoho also offers social media software for agencies that manage at least 10 different brands under their business umbrella.
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar stands out due to its automation and scheduling features. They even offer continuous posting, which means they will automatically curate and reshare relevant posts on your social media accounts.Pros
- Excellent automation and scheduling features let you set your social media and forget it
- Free trial for seven days
- Analytics for engagement and response
- Edgar Lite plan starts at just $19 per month
Cons
- Only integrates with Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram
- Most affordable plan only lets you work with three networks
- No central inbox for messages or managing comments
MeetEdgar wins for best automation because they are set up to help time-strapped businesses automate their accounts. This software lets you generate posts using a browser extension, set up category-based scheduling that saves you time and effort, and executes continuous posting that ensures you’re constantly engaging your audience.
With MeetEdgar, you also get access to an unlimited content library, which the platform will shuffle and schedule for you on your behalf. You can also set up your account to automatically upload your newest content, and you can use an automatic link shortener that helps you save space when you share your content on social media.
MeetEdgar offers two main plans:
- Edgar Lite: $19 per month
- Edgar: $49 per month
Both plans offer similar tools, although the Edgar Lite plan only lets you integrate with three social media accounts. The more expensive plan also offers 1,000 recurring scheduling time slots per week versus just 10 with the Edgar Lite plan. Either way, you can try MeetEdgar for free for seven days.
Is Free Social Media Marketing Software Worthwhile?
Social Media Marketing Software has many features and can do a lot to help your business to succeed in social media by monitoring your and competitors social media mentions and interactions, and it is not very expensive. There are also plenty of limited free Software available. There are two categories of Social Media Marketing Software based on licensed model: Open Source and Proprietary. Based on Installation type, there are On Premise and Cloud and the selection of the installation type depends on your business and organization requirements.
You can find limited free versions and full-fledged free trials in both the licensing models.
Conclusion
Most of us know that social media marketing is a growing field. If you want to grow your business on auto-pilot, social media management tools can be the answer.Social media has been a popular topic over the past few years. And while there are still some that are on the fence about the growing popularity of social media marketing, others have learned to either love or hate it.
Social Media Marketing is an integral part of any business marketing strategy and any smart marketer knows. And it’s not just about Facebook and other social networking platforms. It’s also about the software you use to help manage all your social media tasks on a daily basis.