You’re probably wondering what social media management tools are. Social media management tools are tools that allow you to schedule your social media posts in advance, post on multiple accounts at once, and report the results of your social media campaigns. Although there isn’t a standard social media marketing tool, there are a handful of options available.
Social media management tools are often overlooked and underutilized by businesses and marketers. But they shouldn’t be. There are a number of great tools that can help your business grow, but it’s important to know how to use them.
SMMs tools allow brands to manage a large number of social media accounts in one place, schedule and publish content, engage with followers and customers, monitor all activity going on on your brand’s accounts. Sounds good, right?
Social media is a great way to share information about your business. It allows you to create content for free. Companies such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and others have made it easier for marketing teams to manage the multiple social networks out there.
Sprout Social
Our platform’s all-in-one scheduling dashboard gives you the freedom to seamlessly switch between social platforms and manage them more effectively. Integrating with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube, you can work across your entire presence in a single platform. Plus, you can also manage reviews from sources like Google My Business and Facebook, and create shoppable posts integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs.
You can queue up your posts in advance, providing opportunities to optimize tags and captions for each platform with ease. Sprout’s ViralPost feature ensures that you publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage, boosting visibility and reach automatically.
Beyond planning a comprehensive social strategy, we know that responsiveness is a top priority for marketers today. Sprout’s Smart Inbox guarantees that you don’t miss any messages from your audience.
The Smart Inbox compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms, giving you a complete view of all your social interactions. You can also search for specific messages using branded keywords or tag filters. This is particularly useful when it comes to dealing with customer service concerns.
Sprout lets you show the value of your social strategy with comprehensive analytics and reporting functionality. In addition to helping you identify the most relevant hashtags for your content, you’ll find plenty of ways to break down insights into your performance at large.
For example, you can track your audience growth, impressions, post engagement and link clicks across social in one place
These data points highlight your most engaging content and top-performing platforms. In turn, you know the types of content your audience wants to see and where they hang out. The custom URL tracking feature in Sprout Social gives you a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions.
Pricing: Sprout’s “Standard” plan starts at $89/mo per user.
Sendible
Sendible is brimming with features tailor-made for busy agencies.
Like the rest of the social media management tools on our list, the platform allows you to schedule and monitor engagements across multiple social accounts. For marketers juggling a roster of clients and campaigns, a dedicated management platform is a must-have or reining in the chaos.
Sendible encourages the use of workflows and approvals for the sake of assigning and delegating tasks in a timely manner. Features such as roles and account limits are helpful for agencies working alongside clients and freelancers. Much like Sprout’s own ViralPost, the platform has its own optimized timing feature as well.
Pricing: “Creator” plan starts at $29/mo.
Loomly
Loomly is an ideal tool for small social teams and agencies looking to master the art of collaboration.
In addition to social media management features, the platform also boasts features to help marketers wrangle their projects. This includes calendars, deadlines, and workflows.
As an added bonus, Loomly actually generates ideas for your social media content strategy based on trending topics and social conversations. The affordability of the platform is a huge point in its favor, as is Loomly’s clean, easy-to-use interface.
Pricing: “Base” plan starts at $25/mo for two users.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a household name in marketing and the platform’s social media management features are nothing to scoff at.
Specifically, Hubspot lets you monitor social engagement in the context of your customer relationships. Shout-outs and mentions from customers are logged by default, representing a massive time-saver and less manual logging on your part.
Coupled with HubSpot CRM, the platform gives you a detailed understanding of your customers’ social interactions and how many actual leads you’re generating from specific platforms. This allows you to immediately highlight the ROI of your social campaigns.
That said, the platform is only available to those already using HubSpot and isn’t a native social media management app.
Pricing: $800 as part of the app’s “Marketing Hub Pro,” not available standalone
Sendible is brimming with features tailor-made for busy agencies.
Like the rest of the social media management tools on our list, the platform allows you to schedule and monitor engagements across multiple social accounts. For marketers juggling a roster of clients and campaigns, a dedicated management platform is a must-have or reining in the chaos.
Sendible encourages the use of workflows and approvals for the sake of assigning and delegating tasks in a timely manner. Features such as roles and account limits are helpful for agencies working alongside clients and freelancers. Much like Sprout’s own ViralPost, the platform has its own optimized timing feature as well.
8 benefits of using social media management tools
1. Save time
For smaller brands and solo social media managers, this is likely the biggest benefit of a social media management platform. Stop opening apps or tabs and logging in and out of accounts. Instead, you can manage all your social accounts in one place.
You can also save time by preparing social media posts in advance and scheduling them to post later. You won’t need to interrupt your other work to post throughout the day.
This allows you to better plan content and improves your posting consistency. It also frees up time to work on other aspects of your social media presence.
Another time-saving benefit of social media management tools? The ability to manage your organic and paid social posts in one place. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of marketers have completely integrated paid and organic social media marketing efforts. This is much easier with a social management tool.
2. Plan a cross-platform content calendar
It’s important to plan your posts—both created and curated—in a social media content calendar. Many social media professionals use spreadsheets to plan and organize their social posts. But it’s more effective to use the planner built into a social media management platform.
Social media management tools with planners allow you to:
- Balance different types of social messaging
- Publish posts when they are likely to receive the highest engagement
- Curate compelling content to share with your followers
- Plan for seasonal and release-specific messaging
A built-in content planner allows you to schedule posts at the right times. In most cases, you can adjust your schedule with a simple drag and drop.
3. Automate social listening
You need to know what’s said about your brand, your competitors, and your industry. In fact, 48% of marketers strongly agree social listening increased in value for them in the last year.
Social listening allows you to monitor conversations across channels from one central dashboard. You never need to switch between browsers, and you never miss relevant conversations.
Social listening is also a powerful content curation tool. Use appropriate industry keywords and hashtags to source great third-party content. Share that content to complement work created in-house.
4. Centralize creative assets
Keeping content consistent across channels and teams can be a challenge. A content library can help make it easier. A content library makes it easy for teams working in various locations to share appropriate, pre-approved content. This ensures all your social channels remain on-brand and on point.
5. Streamline permissions
It is a truly terrible idea to share passwords among members of your team. A social management dashboard creates unique passwords for each person who needs access to your social accounts.
You can control permissions for each team member based on their role. It’s easy to revoke that permission when someone leaves your team. And the appropriate stakeholders can sign off on social content right within the posting workflow.
6. Unify analytics
It’s important to use real data to test your social media strategy.
Social media metrics tell you when your content strategy is performing well. And where it might need reworking. A good analytics tool helps crunch the numbers that matter to measure performance.
Most social platforms offer native analytics. But these don’t give you the full picture of your social successes (or misfires).
A social media management platform shows you cross-platform analytics. You can see which content works best on which social network. Then, create custom reports based on your business needs, not network-specific stats.
7. Improve customer service
Have you tried calling an airline’s customer service number recently? Hold times can still be many hours. Customers are fed up and have turned to digital channels. So it’s no surprise that 59% of respondents to the Hootsuite Social Trends 2022 survey said social customer care has increased in value for their organization.
Customers who reach out on social expect a customer service response. But often, the person monitoring the social channels is not a customer care rep.
Social media management tools can help ensure the right messages get to the right teams. They also create a unified view of the customer. They merge messages across channels and even connect to your CRM.
As artificial intelligence improves, chatbots have also become invaluable for social customer care. They provide answers 24/7 to basic customer requests like package tracking and order status.
8. Simplify social commerce
The global social commerce industry is worth more than half a trillion dollars. And it’s expected to keep growing.
Social media management tools can help your brand sell more through social, automatically. AI-powered chatbots help guide shoppers to the products best suited to them.
Conclusion
Social media is important for brand awareness and customer engagement. The downside is that it can be a time-consuming activity if you have to do it manually. This time consumption poses problems for marketing departments as they are already stretched too thin in resources and further burdening employees with unproductive activities makes little sense.
Social Media Marketing has changed the way people do business. Every day organizations are spending billions of dollars on social media to manage their marketing strategies. To compete in this sector, marketers are constantly looking for free or affordable social media tools that would help manage and grow their social media accounts.