From finding new clients to driving traffic to your website, today you can do it all with the power of social media as it is one of the most robust tools available.
And this has turned into a boon for small to medium businesses.
But you should also be quite aware of how you are using it.
Yes, consistency is key. So, while handling your social media you need to try hard enough to keep up with managing different inboxes, posting updates on several platforms, and checking analytics.
Also, social media plays a crucial role in letting you keep in touch with your existing clients.
Managing all of these hectic tasks with the regular social media applications is often very tough. Hence, there is a clear necessity of social media management apps.
There are also a few social media apps that have interfaces which help businesses in taking full control of their social media presence. And, that too from a single place.
They also let you automate your stuff, analyse the results, as well as control all the necessary accounts, providing you enough time to focus on the tasks that are more important, such as creating the best content for your audience to keep them engaged.
But, how can you differentiate them from social media management tools? Let’s find that out.
What It Takes to Become the Best Social Media Management Tool?
Well, this is a tough question to answer, especially in today’s date where there are so many tools available in the market.
Now, to keep it all simple, the main focus of any good social media management tool is helping businesses managing their social media presence in a smart, easy and efficient way.
Most small to mid-sized businesses out there do not have enough man power to keep on posting social media about their business updates and other necessary posts, besides entering each of those social media profiles in order to check what’s going on. They often consider it to be a waste of money and effort.
And, this is where the business owners decide to take up this responsibility, and often fail miserably.
So, having this in consideration, we need to have a list of criteria that determines the best social media management tool. Let’s check them out.
- The app should support and be able to manage several social media networks. If not, at least, they should be able to handle Facebook, Twitter, as well as, Instagram. Now, if the social media management tool is able to handle several other social media platforms other than the mentioned three, then that will be considered as bonus. But that is not mandatory at all.
- Wasting time on social media is easy, not matter what you are posting, be it for your business or for yourself. But, that’s not why we are here for. Previously, we required dedicated apps to make sure each of our future posts get scheduled accordingly. So, the best social media management tool should be able to keep you from distraction by not including the feeds, however, allowing you to curate and send messages
- The best social media management tool should also support analytics that will help the person behind the dashboard to understand which segment of audience is interacting with which segment of audience. This feature is quite important as different people have different tastes and it is important to understand it all so that you can manage it all with more ease.
- Lastly, the social media management tool should be cost effective so that even small to mid-sized businesses can afford them. The tool should be able to cater a value for money experience. There are several tools out there which are free or extremely cheap, but they are of no good. Hence, being value for money is important.
Moreover, such social media management tools often come with a free-trial option. So, before you settle down with any, make sure that you get your hands on a few of them which you think that suit you the best and then come to a decision.
So, let’s get started.
1. Best Tool for Scheduling Social Media Activity: Buffer
One of the longest running social media management tools, Buffer, originally aimed mainly at scheduling social media posts.
Although, today, after undergoing a good lot of iterations, updates, etc. it has a lot more developed than what it was before.
Today, Buffer is compatible with the most popular social media platforms like, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, as well as LinkedIn.
Not just that, free users can also work on three of their social media accounts. And, that includes their Facebook groups and pages too.
Buffer is a very convenient tool for any user. This is because, it automatically creates a schedule for your social media post automation when you get started with it by connecting your first social media account.
Speaking of this schedule, there is a scheduling set by the tool itself, which can be changed or altered by the user at their own will.
This schedule has four slots in them: morning, noon, late-afternoon, and late-evening. Their timings also depend on the time-zone that you have selected for your activity.
To tweak this, you can simply enter the ‘Settings’ menu and visit ‘Post Schedule’ and do what’s necessary. They also allow to delete the pre-scheduled activity of an entire day.
Now, you might be thinking that higher the number of slots, the higher will be the number of posts required to be scheduled. But that becomes a cakewalk with the intuitive dashboard, browser extensions as well as mobile apps that Buffer empowers you with.
On browser, Buffer makes it quite convenient for users as they have extensions available which are compatible with Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox as well as Opera.
If you have Buffer installed already in your browser, you can just click on the toolbar, compose an update, and select ‘Add to Queue’ to schedule.
Speaking of the pricing part, Buffer does have a free option but, to get a complete experience, manage things on a professional level, and to incorporate more social media profiles more than three, it is important to invest a minimal $6 per month per platform. It is called the Essential Plan.
Now, if you wish to bring in your team members to help you with the work, then you will be required to pay $12/month for every channel.
2. Best Tool for Scheduling and Monitoring Activity, And Analytics: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool and is widely known for its all-encompassing approach when it comes to social media management.
Yes, this social media management tool is meant to cover it all.
This fascinating app is capable of supporting 20+ social media platforms which include the most popular social media networks known to man such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
In fact, you will also be able to connect more networks to this app through the Hootsuite app directory.
Hootsuite comes with a full scheduler that queues posts automatically whenever you choose them.
There is also an AutoSchedule function available which allows you to schedule all your updates at the exact optimal engagement times.
You can also make use of the Bulk Composer to prepare CSV files containing all your uploads. This feature allows users to fill their schedules and fill the queues for the upcoming days, weeks and even for months.
There is also a Planner option which lets users view the outgoing posts and reorder them as per requirement with just a simple drag and drop option.
Hootsuite also houses a robust analytics tool, although that is available only with the expensive plans which all opens all the secrets of this fantastic app.
This analytics section is so robust that you can measure your social media performance using over 200 metrics.
Not just that, you can also generate reports of the same, followed by exporting them in several formats such as Excel, PowerPoint, CSV, and PDF.
With this tool you also get the chance of measuring the performance of every team member and entire teams that too can be exported similarly.
With Hootsuite you will also be able to monitor the social web with social streams that can be customised.
These feeds are made specifically for your benefit and lets you check the new mentions, followers, hashtags, search terms, engagement, and whatnot.
You can also create streams by filtering out unnecessary keywords, locations, languages as well as the post types.
Speaking of bigger businesses, Hootsuite also allows assigning levels of access to several members of your team.
Also, you have access to free stock photos as well as GIFs from GIPHY. You can also connect with DropBox, OneDrive as well as Google Drive. You can also make use of Adobe Stock if you have a paid account of the same.
3. Best Tool for Social Media Post Automation: MeetEdgar
When it comes to automation, nothing can surpass the utility of MeetEdgar as it is similar to being an autopilot for your social media accounts.
It takes care of a good lot of tasks and can easily support social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
But this social media management tool does not provide you with the analytics support. It is just for scheduling your posts.
However, MeetEdgar’s automation game is so good that this capability sets it apart from its competitors.
For instance, MeetEdgar is capable of finding out lines that are quote-worthy from several links and create social media posts for them.
All you have to do is clicking on ‘Suggest Variations’ after pasting your link, and this tool will come up with four alternatives based on the content in the provided link.
Depending on what you wish, you can edit them, erase them or save them to your library with just a single click.
And, this is practically the only social media management tool that creates content for you.
It has come a long with better updates which has made it capable of generating content with any plagiarism. What else can be better?
Alongside all of these, you can also categorise your updates with MeetEdgar. You can simply categorise your content and segment it to different sections so that you can easily choose the content type that you wish you wish to post based on your schedule.
For instance, you can easily create a category for blog posts, one for promotional content, one for how-to posts etc.
And, these categories are colour-coded, making it easy to decipher what contains what, and making it easier for adding several categories of content in order to appeal all the sets of users that your content caters to.
Speaking of other content sources like Medium, YouTube or WordPress, you can also add content from these websites, automatically, by making use of the quick import feature.
Now when it comes to analytics, we do believe of saying that MeetEdgar does not come with any analytics feature, however, it allows users to run A/B testing in order to find out the best content which connects to your users.
Moreover, you also get a link shortener with MeetEdgar which is ‘ed.gr’.
Scheduling content via web is also possible as there is an extension available of this tool on Chrome, and a bookmarklet on Firefox and Safari.
4. Best Tool for Small Teams: SocialPilot
We have already mentioned three social media management tools in this list, but not many of them are compatible enough when someone else is handling the social media activity of your handles.
These tools do cost a lot of privilege, and to save it all you can just give out credentials to your team members, but that too comes along with security threats.
Hence, there has to be a solution that would work great with small teams and would not even hurt your pocket that much.
Yes, SocialPilot can save you here big time. The Small Team plan of SocialPilot is available at $50 per month and in that plan, you can add another couple of members of your team along with you.
This plan also allows you to house 25 social media accounts.
For this level of benefits with any other good social media management tool, you would be required to be paying a lot more sum.
Although you might find the UI of SocialPilot a bit on the old-school level, but it is completely fine.
This user interface comes with sidebars which contain tabs that allow users to manage their posts and social media accounts, configuring team and client status, accessing inboxes and analytics, and lining up content from several feeds.
So, clearly, it comes with almost every option that you get on any other social media management tool.
But, among all of these features, the ‘Team’ option is the best one.
Yes, with this option, team leaders or business owners get the chance of assigning several roles to their team members depending on what actions they will be able to take while using the tool.
For instance, you can give access to your content creators to submit their posts for approval, and just that. And, for managers, you can give them the access to edit, schedule and approve the posts.
Yes, with SocialPilot, you can simply delegate responsibilities to your team members without allowing them the entire access to this platform.
5. Most Affordable Social Media Tool, overall: Sendible
This is another social media tool which is comes as an entire package. However, what makes it stand out of this crowd of social media management tools is the price that Sendible charges for all these benefits.
So, as we have mentioned it is a package of benefits so you can already understand that there are a good lot of scheduling tools present in this package.
Let us tell you about some of them.
Sendible allows you to create a rundown of all these posts for all these social media platforms, blogs as well as mailing lists that you have connected to it.
You can also maximise your engagement by selecting scheduling times of your posts with the Smart Queues feature.
This feature also lets you posts your top-performing evergreen content to be posted over an over again at certain intervals in the future. And, that too automatically.
Undoubtedly, these tools are quite effective as compared to any other tool of this niche.
Moreover, you also get a shared calendar which will show you the pending updates that are yet to be posted on the given networks that you have connected to Sendible.
You can also connect your RSS feeds in order to curate them and schedule posts for the future.
There are a lot of other social media management tools available at the price range of Sendible, however, none of them enable you to keep an eye on the mentions of your brand on your social media hands. Not just that, you can also customise it to show you the mentions of your competitors as well as other points of interest as well.
For this, all you have to do is setting up alerts for the concerned keywords. Simply pick your keywords that you wish to target, post locations as well as words that you wish to exclude.
Once you are done doing this, just set the automation on your dashboard so that they can get emailed to you on a fixed interval, that too set by you.
In fact, segmenting and opting between positive and negative alerts is also a feature here.
In the cheapest plan of Sendible, you get the scope of getting pre-built reports (from GA too) in order to see the progress of your social media campaigns.
With Sendible, you also get the chance of viewing new comments, direct messgaes as well as mentions on your social media profiles.
Now this is really very commendable when a social media management tool offers you so much at $29/month with single user access, allowing 6 social media channels, and 100 posts per day in a basic Creator Plan.
What’s Your Take?
These social media management tools mentioned in this blog are the best ones to pick if you are willing to manage your social media in the best way in the forthcoming year of 2022.
They fit perfectly to your business needs and we have tried to make sure that no matter what your business size is, at least you find one of them being the best pick for you.
And, if you have found the one from our list already, then get started with it right this moment!
What are you waiting for?
