How do you stay on top of all your social media marketing tasks?
From creating and publishing content to analytics and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to think of all the jobs social media marketers have to complete every day.
Thankfully, there are a bunch of awesome social media management tools available to help. These tools can streamline your workflows, help you save some time, and even ensure your content reaches the right audience at the right time.
But how do you decide which product to use?
With so many great social media management tools out there, we thought it would be great to showcase some of the top ones to help you pick what’s best for your business.
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
Hootsuite aims to provide an all-in-one platform for social media management across multiple sites. As expected, there’s an option to search and filter through existing social media, in order to find brand mentions, insights, and demographic information.
Additionally, with any of Hootsuite’s plans, you have the option to schedule posts from multiple profiles across multiple social media sites. This allows you to ensure any marketing campaigns are properly timed and targeted when and where you need them to be. This is especially when posts can be tagged to ensure you store them in the right place for use at the right time.
There’s also an analytics feature so you can track and measure performance against KPIs. Reports are customizable, so you can ensure you display and read the data you need to and stay focused on that. This is especially as Hootsuite is built to work for teams, not just individuals.
A number of integrations are also available, such as Asana, Slack, Mailchimp, Trello, and Zendesk, ensuring that you can work productively and efficiently when it comes to building your social media marketing and communications campaigns.
Agorapulse is one of the best social media management tools overall. It provides all the key functionality you need in one user-friendly interface. It works great for individuals and teams alike. And if you’re not ready to invest straight away, it even offers a limited free plan.
If you’re looking for a full-featured social media management tool to replace your entire stack, there’s no better choice.
Aside from giving you access to powerful publishing tools (including bulk scheduling, post categories, labeled content, automated rescheduling, and more), Agorapulse also offers:
- A powerful unified social inbox. Track all your communications with social media users across platforms in one unified inbox. Automatically apply labels and assign conversations to specific team member roles and make use of saved replies to save time.
- Social listening. Unlimited social listening searches enable social media managers to monitor key conversations and uncover insights about their brand.
- Collaboration tools. Agorapulse is one of the best tools for agencies and teams as it’s jam-packed with useful collaboration tools. You can assign team member roles, delegate tasks, share internal notes, and more.
Plus full analytics and reporting capabilities, fast support, and much more!
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google My Business (on Pro plans and above), LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Key features:
- Social inbox with automation rules
- Scheduling + publishing
- Analytics + reporting
- Social listening
- Team management + workflows
- Mobile app
Pricing: Agorapulse offers a Free plan that includes basic features, up to 3 social profiles, and 1 user. If you want to unlock premium features and additional profiles or users, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts from $79/month.
You can also try out everything included in the paid plans for free with a 30-day free trial.
Sendible
Sendible is a great all-around social media management platform that includes strong scheduling functionality, a social inbox, and more.
If you want the same features as Agorapulse, but at a more attractive price point, Sendible is one of the best social media management tools available.
Unlike Agorapulse, Sendible offers a Creator plan specifically built for creators and solopreneurs. It’s more affordable than Agorapulse’s entry-level paid plan, which is built for small businesses.
As such, Sendible is one of our top recommendations for freelancers, bloggers, coaches, influencers, and other independent creators. In particular, we really like Sendible’s built-in social media scheduler, one-click reports, and Content Suggestions feature.
Because the various all-in-one social media management platforms on the market tend to be very similar, we also used Sendible’s live chat support feature to ask their sales reps if there was anything in particular that made Sendible stand out from the competition.
Here’s what they said made Sendible different:
“Our reporting suite is the major selling point with it being so comprehensive!
Also, the ability to customize posts depending on which social network you are posting them to [is something other platforms don’t offer]”
They also get bonus points for rapid support – they responded to our query within 10 minutes!
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.
Key features:
Social inbox with automation rules
Scheduling + publishing
Analytics + reporting
Social listening
Content curation
Team management + workflows.
Mobile app
Pricing: Unfortunately, Sendible doesn’t offer a free plan. However, you try Sendible for free for 14 days.
The Creator plan starts from $29/month (limited to 1 user and 6 social profiles). If you want to add more users and social profiles, higher-priced plans suitable for larger teams and agencies are available from $89/month.
Hubspot
Hubspot Social Media Software is a suite of social media management tools available under the Marketing Hub. The aim is to save time by prioritizing social connections you place the most value on across a range of social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
There are various management features available, such as for publishing and sharing content, monitoring mentions, and reporting to let you know not just levels of engagement but also how these translate into actual business metrics.
These tools are available as part of the Hubspot Marketing Hub, which means you can use them in conjunction with a range of other focused marketing tools.
As above, this means not simply monitoring and managing your social media, but critically also ensuring that the work you put into it translates into some form of measuring business return.
