Staying active on social media is one of the best ways for you to create brand awareness and engage with your audience.
But with so many different social platforms to manage on a daily basis, it can be overwhelming. Sometimes keeping up with all these networks at once can feel like a full-time job.
You have enough on your plate when it comes to running your business. Sometimes, your social media campaigns get pushed toward the bottom of your to-do list.
If you’re not in a position to hire a full-time social media marketing manager, you can use a variety of marketing tools to help you streamline this process.
Those of you who have a social media marketing manager can still take advantage of these tools to help make their job more efficient.
I’ve used my fair share of social media marketing tools over the years. Some were great while others not so much. I want to help you avoid the ones that weren’t efficient.
I took the time to narrow down my favorite social media marketing tools that helped save me a ton of time. My hope is you’ll have the same results using them.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is great because it has versatile plan options that can match the size of your business and its needs. If you’re the only one using it and you’ve got no more than 10 social media profiles, it’s only $20 per month to use this tool.
But for larger teams and businesses, it has plans for up to 20 and up to 50 social media profiles that can be managed by multiple team members. Those plans go for $99 and $499 per month, respectively.
Hootsuite helps you schedule all your social media posts across all your accounts.
That way, you can schedule all your posts in one go on all your accounts as opposed to manually posting on all your profiles throughout the day.
Hootsuite allows you to easily organize all of your content. Their content library dashboard is extremely clean and easy to navigate.
Those of you who store your content on the cloud-based platforms, such as Drop Box, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, or Box, can access those files directly from the Hootsuite dashboard.
If you’re using other apps to help manage your social media accounts, Hootsuite can work with those tools as well. That way, you can manage everything in one place.
The schedule menu clearly displays all your pending content, so it’s easy to monitor. You can view the schedule by day, week, month, or even as a list.
If you have a large team using Hootsuite together, you can assign team leaders to have the final approval of content before it goes live. That way, you’ll catch any mistakes and won’t have to worry about posting unapproved content.
One of the best parts about this social media marketing tool is the analytics reports.
You won’t have to use another third-party platform to measure the reach and engagement of your content. You’ll see the metrics of each post per platform, which can even help determine your social ROI.
Hootsuite also has tools that help monitor your team and keep everyone accountable. You can see which team members are resolving tasks the fastest and which ones need improvement.
As a whole, Hootsuite is worth checking out. They offer a 30-day free trial, so it can’t hurt.
MeetEdgar
If you have problems coming up with new content to post on your social profiles, you may want to consider MeetEdgar as a solution.
This software will recycle old posts when you run out of new ones to make sure your posting queue is never empty.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this is a permanent solution and a strategy you should employ all the time. But with that said, there’s nothing wrong with bringing old posts back to life.
It’s definitely better to recycle old content as opposed to posting nothing at all.
If you’ve been slacking off with creating new content and your posting queue runs dry, you can set up MeetEdgar to share older posts with high engagement statistics.
Even if you’ve got a content library full of new content but don’t want to take the time to decide what order to post them in, the auto-scheduler can choose for you.
Instead of having to download the software and open it every time you want to manage your social media accounts, MeetEdgar has a browser extension, allowing you to access its services from the web.
If you operate a small business and have bigger tasks to worry about than micro-managing your social media accounts on a daily basis, I’d say you’re an ideal candidate for MeetEdgar.
It’s $49 per month, and you’ll get a free month if you enrol in an annual billing cycle.
Buffer
Like most social media management tools, Buffer also allows you to schedule your social media posts from a single platform. But what separates Buffer from the crowd is its mobile application.
I know what it’s like to be constantly on the go. You don’t always have the time to sit in front of your computer to manage your social media accounts.
Even if you’re just scheduling posts for the week, having the option to do this from a mobile app makes things easier and gives you lots of flexibility.
You can access the Buffer app on your smartphone while you’re on the train, bus, subway, or in the back of an Uber. If you’ve got downtime between meetings, it’s much easier to pull out your phone than to grab your computer to do the work.
Buffer provides you with visual reports and analytics that track engagement metrics such as:
- mentions
- likes
- comments
- shares
- retweets
- clicks
- reach.
This service also highlights your top performing posts. You can see which strategy is working the best and craft your future posts in a similar fashion.
With the Buffer RSS feed, it’s really easy for you to publish content from any of your favorite websites with just one click. The platform also supports video and GIF uploading, so you can share different types of content with your followers.
Buffer also has its own image creator. This is a chance for you to let your creative juices flow and come up with original images that make your social posts stand out from the crowd.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo differs from the marketing tools we’ve analyzed so far.
The software analyzes social media profiles and connects you with influencers to promote your brand.
If you’ve read my top marketing trends of 2018, you know that micro influencers are on the rise this year. If you’re looking for help in this space, Buzzsumo is a great place to start.
Even if adding influencers to your marketing campaign isn’t part of your marketing strategy right now, Buzzsumo still has lots of great tools to make your social media marketing strategy easier.
It has brand monitoring tools that will alert you with mentions of your company as well as your competitors’ plus any relevant keywords, backlinks, and other domains.
This makes it easy for you to see how you stack up against your biggest competition.
Buzzsumo also searches for relevant to your brand content across the Internet. The software filters information that resonates with your audience to help you stay up to date on the latest trends.
You’ll have access to reports about the content shared the most across all the different social media platforms. You can filter this information by the last 24 hours or other time intervals, going back to the past year.
You can determine which type of content is popular short- and long-term.
Buzzsumo lets you organize popular content by its type. You can look at videos or infographics in addition to images and written posts.
If you’re using some of the other tools I previously discussed, Buzzsumo can be a useful addition to your arsenal.
You can choose from plans ranging from $99 to $300 per month. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and you’ll get 20% off if you sign up for yearly billing.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another top choice if you’re looking for one place to manage all your social media profiles.
This platform makes it really easy for you to draft, store, and queue all your social posts. You can see everything organized from the calendar, which serves a visual representation of your schedule.
The dashboard also helps you monitor how your posts are doing. You’ll get to view all the metrics by platform or post.
If you’ve got several team members working together on your social media campaigns, Sprout Social is a great option for you. It’s easy to delegate tasks and choose who gets to approve posts before they go live.
Sprout Social also helps you respond to all of your messages from followers. You won’t have to individually log in to your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other profiles to see these messages.
This will help you stay organized and respond to messages in the order they were received, as opposed to responding based on which platform you’re logged in to at the time.
Sprout Social has features that help you monitor hashtags and keywords. You can see the share of the volume of those specific keywords your company has.
You’ll also have access to features specifically designed for building and managing your customer relationships.
Members of your team can make notes about different customers and their social media profiles based on your history and contact with them.
If the same customer contacts you more than once using more than one platform, all their information will be neatly organized in one place.
Oktopost
Oktopost is different from the other tools I’ve discussed so far because it’s specifically designed for B2B companies.
B2B marketers don’t use social media the same way B2C companies do. The type of engagement and response they’re trying to get out of each post is different.
B2B marketers put a strong emphasis on the quality of their lead-generation strategies.
Depending on your business and industry, you may not need to expose your brand to hundreds of thousands of social media profiles. Sometimes, just a handful of new clients per year is enough for a business to be extremely profitable.
Oktopost is great because it helps B2B businesses make sure they’re using the right social platforms effectively to reach their audiences.
You’ll still get the same benefits of posting automation, scheduling, and management you receive with some of the other options I talked about, but you’ll get the analytics geared toward a B2B business.
Conclusion
Effective social media management is imperative for all businesses in every industry.
You just need to make sure you’re using your time wisely while doing that.
The tools I’ve outlined above are great because you can manage all your accounts on one platform. Instead of spending all your time posting, you can schedule your content to get posted automatically.
I tried to include something for everyone here.
If you’re working on multiple social media profiles with a team, you may want to consider platforms such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social.
For those of you who want to work primarily from a mobile application, Buffer is probably your best bet.
Companies prioritizing social influencers and competitor analysis can use Buzzsumo for their social media marketing needs.
Smaller businesses without a ton of new content should lean towards a tool such as MeetEdgar.
I’d recommend Oktopost for B2B social media marketing management.
Whichever platform you decide to choose, I’m sure it will help you save lots of time so you can be more productive.
Which tools does your business use to save time managing your social media marketing campaigns?