"People came to Facemash in a Stampede, Right?" Even if you have not watched the 2010 American biographical drama the Social Network, still most of you can relate with the above statement of Mark Zuckerberg to Eduardo Saverin in the film. Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg is speaking about the popularity of his first social media attempt –Facemash. That was the year 2003. Facemash, a social media site designed by Zukerberg for a small college community, was an immediate success. The popularity that social media enjoyed since its genesis is still intact, and it has only increased with time.
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The popularity of Social Media:
The global 2019 social media statistics, states that there are around 3.499* billion social media users (around the globe with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Pinterest being the most popular social media platforms. One can estimate the popularity of social sites that after Google, (which is a search engine), the two most visited sites in the world are both social network sites-Facebook and YouTube. It gives us a clear idea of why social media management is so important in the present business context.
(Sources: Alexa.com, internetlivestats, Lifewire)
Using Social Media for Customer Engagement by Businesses:
Social media has stretched its boundaries from being just a social network platform for friends and acquaintances to becoming an inevitable avenue for businesses today.
It is often quoted that - 'trend is your friend,' and in the current business environment, social media engagement is the trend. The growth of a business largely depends upon the customers' engagement with the brand. Customers are very sensitive about the online reputation of the brands they use. Any dent to the online credibility of your brand can ruin the business, therefore maintaining the online stature of the brand is extremely important for the growth of any business. Research suggests that companies that engage their customers efficiently on social media platforms are more likely to get business than their rivals. This makes the social media management strategy a deciding factor for the success of any brand.
Why is social media management so important for businesses?
- Providing customer care services through social media:
Customers appreciate when brands reply to their grievances on social media platforms; it makes them feel more connected to the brand.
- Increasing your credibility:
Brands that have a presence on social media platforms are seen as more trustworthy by customers than those who are not. When customers see other buyers actively participating in discussions involving the review, feedback, or after-sales service of a brand, they become sure of the brands' authenticity.
- Creating a story around your brand:
Your brand should not only satisfy your customer but should also create the emotional connect by inspiring them. No other avenue provides the ease of spreading a story around your brand as social media does. Sharing Instagram stories Facebook live, sharing videos of other happy customers and other engaging content helps you to communicate the story or the idea behind your brand.
- Disseminating information in a creative way:
The growing popularity of social media can be attributed to its creative potential. Brands that use social media for disseminating information regarding new product releases, company news, promotional news, research, or any other expansion plans are likely to get more traction than any other medium.
- Two-way communication:
When businesses use social media for reaching their customers, it allows them to get the customers feedback, views, or opinion about their action, which is not possible with most of the traditional modes. Social media ensures the willing participation of your customers in the business process. Social media has become a two-way information process.
It is very clear that social media management is an important factor to retain existing customers and add new ones. Social media management requires skilled people who can handle multiple tasks and social networks at the same time. These people are called as Social Media Managers.
Social media managers have to handle an enormous amount of social activity, and therefore, they rely on certain tools that increase their efficiency to manage their social media strategy. These tools are termed as Social Media Management Software.
What is Social Media Management Software?
Social media management software (SMMS) is an application or software module that is designed to integrate the activities on various social media networking sites so as to help the brands in managing and analyzing their social media presence and interactions. Primarily used for increasing brand awareness, this software can also help in managing social profiles for distinguished personalities. SMMS integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and other popular social media platforms to provide the social media managers insights about customer’s perception of their brand on these platforms.
We have collated the list of 10 best free and open source Social Media Management Software:
- SocioBoard
- Hootsuite
- Everypost
- Social Oomph
- SM hack
- Zoho Social
- Crowdfire
- Juicer
- Sprout Social
- Buffer
Comparison Chart of 10 Best Free and Open Source Social Media Software
Socioboard is a free and open source social media management software that has powerful social media suite for all businesses. It generates reports and analyzes data to help social media managers make informed business decisions.
Features:
- Live chat, a news feed, timeline, profiles, events, notifications
- Highly customizable and scalable open-source interface.
- Scheduling & publishing is easy with Socioboard
- It generates tickets to reply to negative comments
- RSS Feed to distribute a list of headlines, notices, and content to the audience automatically
- Google Analytics integration to track website traffic.
- The innovative feature of Sentiment analysis conducts language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics.
- Sophisticated analytics and interactive social discovery tools
- Team collaboration tools and 24/7 Technical Support
- Social CRM tools and Helpdesk integration
Hootsuite is a free social media management software that supports social network integration for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Hootsuite offers a free plan with features to manage multiple networks, scheduling content, and engaging with the audience in a single dashboard. In the free plan, one can manage up to 3 social media profiles. It requires only one password for three profiles on different social networking sites. It provides support and online help through the community forum. It also helps users to find and share important content from verified sources. It allows users to schedule posts to keep regular contact with the audience automatically.
Features:
- Two RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed integration to easily distribute content to a large number of people.
- Users can curate their content by searching for popular hashtags or keywords.
- Its content library feature their content efficiently.
- Its hootlet extension allows to post or schedule content without even the need to login into the social accounts.
- Users can track the social post-performance in different timeframes through customizable reports with over 200 metrics.
- Allows searching and filtering social conversations in multiple languages.
- Users can see messages and comments on multiple social networks in one place.
- The metrics measure the influence of social media content across multiple channels and campaigns.
- The reports can be exported in Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and CSV formats.
Everypost is a free social media management software that facilitates handling customizing and scheduling posts with visual content to create a greater impact on the audience. With this tool it is very easy to inspect the latest multimedia content from different social networks.
Features:
- Every Post focuses on Visual content as a strong and effective social media strategy to gain more engagements.
- Users can create groups of social networks.
- Users can share content from other sources to increase engagement metrics.
- Everypost gives users the ability to customize your content to suit the style
- Various post customization options are available, and each Post can be customized differently.
- Collaboration and managing roles and permission levels between team members.
- It allows custom scheduling of posts, previous multimedia post-viewing, and option to delete previously scheduled posts.
Social oomph falls into the category of free social media management software that has features of an advanced scheduling and publishing tool. It automates social media activities across various social networks.
Features:
- Social oomph enables the users to manage their own social posts and those of their clients, in one account.
- Scheduling at the preferred time slot.
- Creating posts and uploading multiple posts is allowed.
- There is an option to separate client data from users.
- Users can make assign associates and subordinates to their account; assign special roles and authorize admin to work on selected profiles and blogs.
- Videos/images are restricted from the bulk upload.
- Allows Tagging and grouping posts to search them easily.
- Users can create social, and blog posts from RSS feed entries automatically.
- Social oomph has a feature to set a limit on the number of the posts users post in a given interval of time.
- This prevents social media managers from posting too frequently.
- Creating posts with the help of other services such as IFTTT is possible.
- It's content planning tools helps to implement marketing campaigns easily.
It is a powerful free social media management software for publishing and scheduling posts for increased traction on social media platforms. Its inbuilt features support social media managers to increase their reach and engagement on various platforms.
Features:
- SM hack allows assigning user roles to team members.
- Replying, commenting, and re-tweeting option.
- Admin can allocate tasks, approve conversations, and close interactions.
- Users can compose relevant content and post them to their social profiles
- Postpone posts by auto-scheduling
- It generates a report of the user’s content and publishing strategy
- It tracks and unveils your competitor’s complete social media strategy
- It creates useful and detailed team progress charts
- It analyzes patterns in your rival’s brand followers growth rate
- Learn your competition's fan behavior to create an engaging strategy
- It creates categories for content based on contemporary popular themes
- A high performing post can be up-cycled from one platform to other
Zoho Social is a free social media management software that is used to manage multiple social media platforms, unlimited schedule posts, and track keywords from a single dashboard. Zoho Social is a social media suite that has all the features required to build a brand reputation in social media. In its free edition, it lets one user work on one brand. It also provides URL shortener & zShare Browser extension in its free version.
Features:
- Its SmartQ feature can predict the most active time of your audience.
- Posting in such unique time slots can be very beneficial for social media managers.
- Managers can create a spreadsheet to create and schedule multiple posts for days in advance.
- Create spreadsheets to track reviews, keywords, or comments.
- Facebook Lead Ads account can be integrated with Zoho Social to monitor leads in real-time.
- Monitoring ad campaigns' performance to drive leads is easy with this feature.
- It has an inbuilt ticketing option that converts social media updates into tickets.
- Each ticket can be responded separately to deliver support to your social media followers.
- It provides the entire context of a previous conversation to respond to everyone who interacts with your brand on social media.
- Assigning roles to your team members and determining the access they will have to admin rights is possible.
- Know the demographics of the audience and the content they are interacting.
- Use analytics to customize reports for multiple social channels.
- Options to make reports visually appealing with colorful graphs and charts are available.
- Lets user schedule posts and automate reports.
- zShare browser plugin curates interesting articles that the user is viewing.
Crowdfire is a free social media management platform that supports scheduling content and managing all your social accounts from a single window.
Features:
- Lets users curate content from across the web from multiple sources.
- Schedule and publish content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
- Posts are customized according to the social media platform.
- For each platform, there is a tailored post with enabled preview option.
- Customizing for the optimal time for posting is possible.
- Users can also set the timing for the Post with the inbuilt best time option.
- Users will never have nil post days. The queue meter makes sure that users have enough posts scheduled for a week in advance.
- If users enter topics they want to post, then Crowdfire will suggest them relevant articles and images.
- Users can Connect Shopify, Wordpress blog, Youtube account to schedule product updates.
- Post Engagement metrics gives the user a clear picture of the Post's performance.
- Good posts can be segregated from the bad ones.
- Users can add the RSS feed
- It provides Image editing suggestions for sharing images for Instagram.
- Monitor your past performance with detailed analytical charts.
- Crowd fire tracks every mention, comment, and reply, and users can reply to multiple platforms using a single dashboard.
Juicer is a free social media management software. Juicer has over 60,000 active users. It is a great tool to aggregate brands' hashtag and other content into a unified, beautiful social media feed. Images and photos from various social media channels can be embedded into one feed.
Features:
- Add and assign user roles to team members
- Planning and scheduling of social media posts.
- It allows featuring loyal customers on the website as well as social media
- It has an easy to use dashboard with navigation for all of your social media content.
- Social media moderation and filtering features
- It integrates with over 15 different social media sources allowing social media managers multiple options to find relevant content.
- 'Send All Posts to Moderation’ button for checking before posting.
- It curates content before final posting.
- Social walls to display social content aggregated from the various social platform.
It is a social media management software that has a very sophisticated platform to monitor and engage with messages across multiple social media channels with a unified social inbox.
Features:
- Set actionable tasks and assign them to a teammate
- Monitor and manage your business reviews
- Track activity on your paid posts by monitoring and engaging with comments
- View real-time indicators on the message dashboard
- Integrate your Google Analytics
- Easily email presentation-ready PDF reports
- View and manage social posts across multiple networks
- See conversation history across profiles
- Monitor and engage with comments
- Set customized mobile alerts
- Build and save drafts on your calendar
- Add filters and optimize images for each network
- Report in PDF/CSV exports
Buffer is popular social media management software that allows users to create, schedule and post from a single platform. It has its own image curator-Pablo. Buffer provides advanced analytics and reports about post performance. It is a complete social media management solution.
Features:
- Customized posts for each social network
- Overview of all the planned content on a single screen
- Team collaboration
- Review and moderate posts for quality before publishing
- Planning and scheduling posts
- Plan posts in advance and turn on the reminder notifications
- Measure social media performance,
- Create appealing analytical reports
- Create reports and track performance for one dashboard
- Provides reports of your performance in multiple social networks.
- View engagement metrics for each social media account
- Respond to social interactions
- Resolve customer queries
Conclusion:
Social media can fetch a company plethora of customers, leads, and sales. Social media managers can skillfully gain customers and business by channelizing their strategy appropriately.
For instance, Facebook suits more for building brand loyalty, whereas Twitter can be utilized for building public relations. Companies selling fashion brands can focus on Instagram, whereas food businesses are likely to get target audience on Pinterest. LinkedIn can be strategically used for building B2B relationships. Youtube can be used for sharing informative videos about your brand.
Brand Reputation is an intangible asset that has a lot of inherent value in it. A tarnished brand reputation can fail a fundamentally strong business. Customers are inclined to buy a product from a company that they often read about, regularly hear about, or see frequently. Brand awareness itself is a robust asset that very few companies can boast of possessing. Brand management is crucial to the success of any organization.
Social media managers aim to avail the opportunities that social media offers in the present business world to attain the goal of efficient brand management. They oversee the marketing campaigns on social media networks to grow their company’s businesses. With 3.499 billion people using social media, marketing managers cannot afford to ignore the potential that social media offers as a brand awareness tool.
It is also prudent for social media managers to leverage technology to ease the process of creating, scheduling, posting, responding, and analyzing the content across various social media networks. The social media software discussed in the article can immensely benefit social media managers to implement their social media strategy efficiently.
You may even share your thoughts in the comments section below. If you have used any of the social media management software mentioned above, then do share your feedbackwith us.
If you wish to refer to any social media management software or any other software category other than social media management software, then do look at our software directory.
