Marketing Software for Social Media

Marketing Software for Social Media makes it easy to create and schedule your own custom posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr, Google+, and Instagram but also automate the creation of stunning social media graphics and popular memes without having to hire a designer or buy expensive design software

Social media marketing is a fast growing market and so is our social media management software. Social Networking Software allows you to easily create, schedule and manage all your social media content in one place. You can use our analytics to measure performance and see what works to increase traffic, leads and sales. The software platform includes tools for social networking, website monitoring, blog management and RSS feeds.

Buffer

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

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.

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.

How to Compare Social Media Marketing Software

How do you know what your customers and leads are saying about your business on social media? How do you know if someone who tweets a question at your business is already subscribed to one of your email marketing campaigns? Does this customer subscribe to one of your competitors’ social media accounts?

If you only have a handful of clients, then this information isn’t hard to track, however, as your business grows, you’ll need a more connected view of your customers, and the history and nature of their relationships with your company. SMMS platforms help through integration with your sales or marketing database(s) to create rich, omni-channel customer profiles with information on previous web interactions with the company — page views, email opens, etc. — and their purchase history.

In addition to rich customer profiles, most SMMS platforms have advanced monitoring tools to help track specific keywords or contacts. Having real-time streams of relevant phrases can help you prioritize your social media efforts and identify how and when to interact with your customers. It’s all about being there to say the right thing to the right person — at the right time. To make it easier to monitor all of these channels, nearly all solutions provide a combined social media management dashboard so you don’t have to track mentions or interactions using multiple tools.

With all interactions centralized on a single social media management platform, it’s much easier to generate omni-channel marketing reports and perform robust analytics to determine the return-on-investment of your efforts. You can see the number of clicks per message, as well as the number of leads and customers you generate.

There are several ways to package SMMS solutions. They may come as a module of your marketing automation software (ie Hubspot), or as a standalone social media management tool that integrates with existing systems (ie Hootsuite). The best solution for your business will be the one that integrates your social media activities with any legacy systems. Features will vary from vendor to vendor, ranging from simple social profile access to sophisticated analytics and social media monitoring capabilities. Before your evaluation, determine which functions and criteria are important to you.

Social Media Marketing Features

Features of social media marketing software platforms are numerous, as social media platforms allow diverse forms of media, have varying levels of functionality, and wide-ranging options for social promotion, sharing, or paid media. Some common features of social media marketing tools include:

Publishing and scheduling of posts
Social listening and monitoring
Sentiment analysis
Keyword tracking
Automation (favorites, retweets, likes)
Enhanced customer profiles
Multi-channel management
Multi-account management
Campaign management
Reporting and analytics

Additional Considerations

Selecting a social media marketing solution is about more than just features and supported networks. In addition to making sure the system you choose offers the features your company needs, you’ll need to verify the system is scalable in functionality and price. You’ll also want to evaluate your options and decide on the importance of:

Team collaboration
User permissions
Mobile access
Available pre-built integrations to legacy systems (such as CRM software)
Customer support
Pricing model

Social Media Marketing Software Applications

No matter how large or small your business is, social media marketing software can help increase customer engagement, improve the response of customer support, boost sales, and much more. Creative companies leverage social media marketing strategies in a variety of ways; these are a few common social media marketing software use cases to help paint a picture of how you can use social media to improve your business.

Market Analysis:

Use the information gathered through social listening to gain a better understanding of customers and prospects. What are their questions and pain points? What are they sharing? Use social media data to draw valuable insights about your target audience, then use those insights to guide your efforts, inform your content creation, and gather customer suggestions for product or campaign improvements.

Publishing, Promotion, and Curation:

Social media is most commonly used to publish and curate content, but you can’t just blindly schedule posts without considering your audience. You want to create content based on your specific business goals; do you want to be a seen as a thought leader in your industry? Do you want to get more sales leads? Are you trying to garner more web traffic? In order for social media marketing to be successful, you have to have a goal to measure success against.

Social Listening:

Social media should be viewed as a dialogue, rather than a monologue. If you make it all about you, then no one will be interested in the message. One way to avoid this is through social listening. Social listening is a way for your business to scan for crises, identify industry trends, gather intelligence on competitors, and identify sales opportunities. For example, to help with social selling and lead generation, you can subscribe to mentions of a certain phrase. When these words are triggered, you can then connect with new opportunities. You can also use social listening for customer care. Almost half of all consumers who complain about a brand or product on social media expect a response in 60 minutes or less.⁴ SMMS tools can help you prevent and mitigate customer criticism, and retain customers through faster issue resolution.

Community Management:

Social media can help brands establish their voice by creating content schedules and identifying leading influencers in your market. Then you can nurture those relationships, which can help to improve the overall image and visibility of your brand.

Creating Executive Buy-In

Gaining buy-in from executives is a critical success factor for approval of any software purchase. At most companies, you’ll need to include data that shows stakeholders what kind of return on investment they can expect. To this end, present industry research, statistics, or relevant case studies like the one below. Additionally, consider tailoring your appeal to address the concerns of each member of the C-suite separately. Below are a few talking points to get you started:

CEO

Since CEOs are concerned with the big picture, they’ll want to know how SMMS can improve the business overall. Along with the benefits and strategies already mentioned in this guide, be sure to point out your competitors’ social media strategies. More than 80 percent of U.S. businesses are trying to leverage social media for growth, and have increased their budgets to accommodate new social strategies.⁵ If your business isn’t one of those companies, then it’s likely you don’t have the upper hand.

CMO

Your chief marketing officer already knows the importance of marketing, lead generation, and brand awareness. They’re likely already using analytics to measure these efforts. Be sure to mention the benefits that an omni-channel SMMS platform could bring. To make your case stronger, you can focus on getting approval for a small trial or proof-of-concept. Many vendors offer a free version or trial period. Use this chance to test social media marketing software on a small scale, and then leverage your findings to make the case for a larger investment.

CFO

Your chief financial officer ensures resources align with the organization’s priorities. They will want to know the funding requirements for a new technology investment, and how it will generate revenue, and how it will reduce costs. SMMS can reduce customer service costs by resolving issues quickly online, which reduces the amount help tickets created. It also provides a greater opportunity to identify areas of product and market growth. Again, a small proof of concept and software case studies that feature companies similar to yours can help CFOs understand the financial benefits of investing in this technology.

Conclusion

Marketing Software is the easiest way to create awesome marketing graphics and schedule them to auto share on all of your social media profiles. It’s never been easier to get started in the world of social media marketing!