We cannot be thankful enough to the creators of social media management tools that have made our lives easy. This is especially true when we are handling several projects and social media accounts at the same time.
Nowadays, for your business to be successful, you have to be present in several social media platforms so you can reach out to your different audiences. Facebook, is being used by 1.15 billion daily active users with 83% women and 75% men, it is a must for a business presence. We also have Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and they all have their own demographics which may work for your business depending on your target audience.
To add to what is already a tedious task, we also need to maintain a minimum number of posts per day and make sure we share interesting contents. It is a competitive market out there. To make sure we stay on top of our game, we need to have a social media marketing strategy and these tools will help us keep up with these demanding tasks.
- Hootsuite – This comes with a free version however, as a business grows, the free version may not be sufficient to run all of your campaigns. It can be used to schedule your posts and reply to comments for platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Google Plus and Foursquare in just one dashboard. It also provides analytics which you can customize for each of your clients.
- Buffer – Like Hootsuite, this can be used for free but only for individual usage. As the usage increases, so does the fee. It has a clean and simple layout and can be used to schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and if you have the paid version, Pinterest too. It also has an integrated free image creation tool, Pablo. This you can use to create images which you can then share in your social media platforms. You can also access the buffer analytics which allows you to view which posts are doing well based on engagement. Unlike Hootsuite, Buffer doesn’t have Instagram integrated into their platform and you also cannot monitor mentions, searches, and hashtags.
- Statusbrew – If your target audience is mostly in Twitter, then it is best to use statusbrew. You can grow your audience by copying someone else’s followers and clean up your twitter profile by unfollowing those who are not following you.
- Social Oomph – This app allows you to manage various (unlimited) Twitter accounts. You can also use this to schedule your posts to Twitter and Facebook just like in Hootsuite and Buffer although Social Oomph’s edge is its ability to send recurring updates. This auto update feature can be deemed as spammy if not used properly but if managed correctly, can save you a huge amount of time scheduling. It is best to send real time tweets along with the automated tweets to engage with your audience as well. Social Oomph also has a feature that allows you to auto-follow new followers so if someone follows you in Twitter, you can enable your settings to follow them back automatically.
These are just a selected few of the social management tools out in the market and there are still a lot of them that offers different functionalities that can fit a specific niche. Do you have any interesting finds that you can add to this list? Follow us on Facebook and let us know what you think.
Statistics source: Social media demographics shown came from Pew Social Media Update 2016.
