Best Social Media Management Software

More than 80 million small businesses have Facebook Pages to promote their brand and out of 1 billion Instagram users worldwide, 90% of them follow a business or a brand.

These figures tell us that posting the right content at the right time on social media platforms can help you in reaching out to the maximum potential customers. To widen your customer base, improve sales opportunities, and grow your business, it becomes necessary to manage your social media presence. Perfectly managing your social media presence would include -

• Creating engaging, original content
• Publishing content on social media platforms consistently
• Responding to audiences' comments, messages, and complaints promptly
• Tracking current market trends and hashtags accurately
• Measuring social media performance

Ensuring that all these tasks are being performed in an accurate and timely manner, you need to use the online social media management system. But, with so many social media management apps available in the market, how would you know which social media manager is right for your business? 

This buyers' guide to social media management software is aimed at answering general queries that can help you in identifying the right social media software competent enough to manage your social media activities effortlessly.

Social media management includes a systematic approach towards creating, publishing, scheduling effective content, and analyzing the performance on different social media platforms. It also includes engaging with the audience on social media platforms by responding to their queries & complaints. Social media management is done to reach out to target audiences in an effective manner and improve & maintain the online reputation of the brand or the business organization.

TVibes experienced 50% of new app installs driven by Facebook when they made use of mobile app install ads.

Social media management helps in running an effective social media marketing strategy. It enables you to publish the right information at the right time and on the right platform. Precisely, social media management sets your social engagement rules with your audiences, which plays an important role in converting them into your customers and further winning their loyalty for your brand. Below are some points which elaborate on the fact that social media management is extremely important for a business.

Helps In Identifying the Right Social Media Platform

Posting your website link on any random social media platform would increase traffic over your website, but would also increase your bounce rate, which is quite disappointing. Social media management helps you in identifying the right social media platform where your target audience is available, and you get maximum benefits out of your social media marketing efforts.

Engages Audiences Effectively

Having an exponential number of followers on social media is not just enough. How many of your followers actually interact with you is important. Social media management helps in engaging the audiences effectively and builds trustworthy relationships with them. Using social media management tactics, you can reply to the queries and concerns of your audiences instantly on social media platforms and enhance their satisfaction, which further helps your business in earning an online reputation.

Expands Business Globally

The aim of every business is to multiply conversions so that sales goals can be achieved. As social media management allows you to post your content on multiple social media platforms at the same time, it becomes easier for you to target customers irrespective of their geographical locations. This helps you in overcoming business challenges arising due to geographical barriers.

Enables Launching a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Social media management helps you in measuring the content which was most liked by social media users or the content having maximum engagement. Based on that, you can get an idea about which type of content would work best for your business, at what time you should post that content to gain maximum attention from your target audience. Using the right social media content manager software can help you in gaining popularity for your brand and grow your business.

Competition is fierce when it comes to promoting a business on social media platforms. Getting through competition and setting your business apart from your competitors is something that can make your social media management efforts successful. But, this is, of course, easier to say than to execute practically. There are certain challenges that social media managers are facing as given below -

Focusing on all Social Media Platforms

If you are trying to give equal attention to all the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc., it can be a highly time consuming and tedious job. Instead, you need to decide the social media networks suiting to your business type. For example, if the type of audience you are focusing on may not be available on Twitter, you may be wasting your time and efforts in writing tweets and posting them on Twitter.

24/7 Availability

You would agree to this fact that social media never sleeps. You can never be available to respond to your customers' queries on social media platforms 24/7. Due to this reason, a negative post or comment about your brand may go unnoticed on the weekend and create dissatisfaction in the mind of your customers, which can have an adverse effect on your business.

Measuring Efforts

If you keep on putting in new efforts without measuring your past efforts, you may fail to achieve your desired results out of your social media management strategy. You will never come to know what went wrong previously. To get the answers to questions like, is your content engaging, are you targeting the right audience, you need to measure your efforts and plan your future strategies.

Timing Is Everything

Your audience on social media are located all around the world and follow different time zones. If you post an update on Facebook about your business at the wrong time, it may be unable to grab the attention of the audience you are trying to target. Thus, it becomes important to identify the right time to post to get noticed by the people you want to engage with.

Posting Fresh Content

Generating new ideas and posting fresh content every time can be a challenging task for any social media manager. Moreover, it is necessary to post fresh content that is relevant to your business so that it can engage your audience in a meaningful way. To check the latest trends pertaining to your industry, and create content for your social media posts that can be interesting for your audience is one of the major challenges of social media management.

Change in Social Media Algorithms

Another thing that makes the task of a social media manager difficult is constant change in algorithms by social media platforms. And also, all the social media platforms do not follow the same algorithm. In this case, it becomes essential to keep track of the social media algorithms and create the type of posts that can gain audience attention and popularity.

Consistency in Posting Updates

Ultimately you can lose the interest of your audience if you post too many social media updates or very few of them. Identifying the consistency of posting updates is critical and challenging at the same time. You need to ensure that you are posting updates on social media at regular and proper intervals keeping your audiences' interest alive and attention intact.

Streamlining Social Media Content

We all know that finding, updating, and posting content on social media is a time-consuming and tedious process. And, if you are handling more than one social media platform, it becomes overwhelming to streamline social media content. To create posts, schedule them, set up the priority of the content, identify the content suitable as per the social media platform, and also smartly reuse the content to achieve success in social media marketing is a real challenge for most of the businesses these days. 

There is only one solution that can help in overcoming these challenges, and that is using the best social media management software. Let us have a glimpse of what a social media management tool is and how it can help you in making your social media presence effective.

Social media management software is a tool that can help you in successfully engaging and communicating with your potential customers on multiple social media platforms from a single interface. It allows you to create and schedule content for posting on your social media accounts, monitor conversations with your audience, evaluate your efforts, and make informed decisions for the future.

Precisely a social media management platform simplifies the process of -

• Managing your social media accounts
• Scheduling content to be posted on different social media platforms
• Managing communities on your social media networks
• Centralizing your feeds between different social media sites
• Responding to messages and queries of your audiences
• Measuring your social media marketing performance

The first social media platform sixdegrees.com was launched by Andrew Weinreich in 1997, and then AmIHotorNot.com was born in 2000. Then came Friendster in 2002, and Myspace in 2003. Mark Zuckerberg launched Facemash in 2003, which was followed by Facebook in 2004. Around this time, other social media sites like YouTube, LinkedIn, del.ici.ous were introduced. In 2006, Twitter (known as Twttr at that time) was introduced. 

In 2008, Holmes (Founder of Hootsuite) realized that it was difficult to manage multiple social media networks in his digital services agency known as Invoke Media. So, he, along with the Invoke Team, planned to develop the social media management system of their own, which can automate the process of managing their several social media accounts. In November 2008, they launched the first social media management system known as BrightKit. Later on, this social media management platform was known as HootSuite, including a clean interface and advanced publishing capabilities.

As per the University of Maryland Smith School of Business poll, in 2009, the percentage of small businesses using social media increased from 12 to 24 percent. Till this time, social media was optional for businesses. In 2010 Charlene Li (co-founder of Altimeter Group and one of the world’s leading thinkers of social media) predicted that the businesses not harnessing the power of social media would not survive within three to five years.  

With the increase in the use of social media networks for businesses, the use of social media management systems also accelerated gradually. Today, there are so many social media tools available in the market with advanced technology, that it has become difficult to choose the one best among them.

The social media management tools have evolved a long way and have reached the point where using innovative ways to connect, tracking and maximizing your social media presence has become a norm. Below-mentioned are some current trends followed by most of the leading social media management tools these days.

Real-Time Listening & Responding Instantly

Social media is all about gaining maximum likes, shares, followers, tags, and ultimately popularity. But, what matters for a business is engaging conversations on social media platforms resulting in lead generation and high conversions. Listening to your audience on social media platforms on a real-time basis and responding to them instantly is something your today's highly demanding audience expects from the brands. To cope up with this expectation; the social media management solutions ensure to have features that can filter out the clutter and help marketers to respond to their audiences' important comments and queries on a real-time basis.

Brand Advocacy

With so many businesses marketing on social media, it has become difficult to gain the trust of potential customers. Moreover, the algorithm of different social media platforms may cause limitations in the visibility of your post to your target audience. One perfect way which has come up to overcome this problem is brand advocacy. When a trustworthy voice is recommending your brand, it becomes easy for you to generate more leads through social media. The social media management tools these days come with the features that can streamline your advocacy data and efforts effectively.

Live Streaming and Broadcasting

Social media platforms like Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram facilitate you to broadcast live videos making your social media efforts highly effective. Whether it is a new product launch, an event, or how-to-do information, live streaming and broadcasting can attract your audience and bring them to your website. Social media management tools can help you in streaming across multiple social media platforms and grow the engagement of your audience.

Integrations

The social media platform enables you to communicate with your audiences having different requirements. The collection of this data integrated with other platforms like marketing automation software, customer relationship management system, business intelligence tools, etc., can help you in gaining clear visibility of your marketing system. It becomes easy for you to remarket a product, or upsell a service when you recognize your present customer interacting with you on any social media platform. Using these integrations, you can pitch your customers on social media platforms based on their buyers' journeys and make your marketing efforts highly effective in helping you to gain more conversions.   

Personalization Is Important

Many may argue that businesses cannot personalize their content when it comes to posting on social media platforms. But, now, social media platforms have gained the capability of understanding user behavior and preferences. When it comes to ads on social media, you might have noticed that social media platforms show you the ads for the products similar to your purchases, or based on your location in your feed. If personalization is your key to gain more customers, ensure that your social media management system supports this trend.

Tracking True Social ROI

We have already explained the importance of measuring social media activities, including likes, shares, followers, etc. But, will this data be able to help you in tracking the exact ROI figures generated from your social media efforts. No, this data would only help you in evaluating the popularity of your brand on social media. Tracking the engagement of your audience on social media would make you feel good but not confident in terms of ROI. For that, you need a social media management solution that allows you to dig deeper into your social media funnel and break down conversions to determine exactly which channel, network, or content has brought in more leads.

With so many different social media platforms to manage and extensive content to streamline, it becomes essential to select social media management solution including the below-mentioned benefits -

Manages Multiple Social Media Accounts

As your business begins to grow its presence on different social media platforms, there are multiple accounts to manage, different user interfaces to master, and passwords to remember. A social media management system can simplify this task by managing your multiple social media accounts from a single interface.

Helps in Responding to all Important Notifications and Messages

If you miss out on an important notification or message of your customer, it may result in loss of money, reputation, and business. A social media management software notifies & reminds you about all the important messages allowing you to respond to them promptly, saving you from issues arising out of customer dissatisfaction.

Allows Scheduling Posts

Planning in advance would always help you in visualizing whether your social media posts align with your goals or not. The best social media calendar software allows you to schedule your updates on social media, ensuring that accurate content is being posted consistently.

Encourages Real-Time Engagement

Spontaneous engagement is as important as consistent posting. People on social media want to deal with real people and not only brands. The social media management tool helps you in participating in conversations on a real-time basis, which ultimately improves the quality of communication and engagement with your customers.

Makes Your Social Media Posts Attractive

It has been proven that the attractive posts embedded with images and videos have a powerful impact on the minds of the people. The social media marketing software, including templates, helps you in creating appealing social media posts that can impress your audiences and gain their attention.  

Measures Performance

It is a fact that if you cannot measure, you cannot improve. You can never come to know which one of your social media posts was successful in gaining maximum likes, or which social media platform got more shares on your post until you don’t have a social media monitoring tool to measure your efforts.

The social media platform integration depends on the social media software you choose and its pricing package. For example, social media management tools like HootSuite can help you manage your accounts on 20+ social networks. Some of them are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. But, its basic package allows you to manage only 10 social profiles. So, you need to choose which social media platforms you require to promote your business among those 20, if you are opting for the basic package. You can also go for its customized package, which can allow you to integrate the niche social media platforms you require to use to promote your business.

The same logic applies to other social media management tools too. So, before making the purchase decision, you need to make sure that the social media planner software supports the social media platforms, which are mandatory for you to promote your business, and also costs you within your budget.

As the market for social media tools continue to grow, and new trends come up every day, it has become critical to determine the features your social media software should possess. Here, we have shortlisted some must-have features of a social media management system that you can consider while making the purchase decision.

Scheduling Social Media Posts

Scheduling your social media posts is essential to ensure that your audience notices your content at the right time. You are targeting audiences located at different geographical locations having different time zones. Matching up to the time of your target audience is just impossible. Using social media scheduling tools, you can make your posts visible to your audience depending on their suitable time and also free yourself for other strategic tasks.    

Analyzing Competitors’ Social Activities

The best social media management solution would not only help you in analyzing your activities but also enable you to analyze what your competitors' are doing to gain the attention of the buyers. Comparing your social media marketing efforts with your competitors' can help you in implementing new strategies that can yield benefits in terms of increased brand popularity and ROI.  

Monitoring the Engagement of the Audience

How many people liked your post, how many of them shared, or how many people subscribed to your channel, is something which you would like to know to monitor the engagement of the audience with your brand. The accurate and real-time answers to these questions provided by your social media monitoring tool would help you in analyzing the users' behavior and their sentiments. Based on that, you can plan your social media strategies that really work.

Integrating with Multiple Tools

Your social media management system should allow you to integrate the data with the tools you are currently using for marketing automation, customer relationship management, etc. This would help you in importing/exporting important data and save your time. Also, it would help you in having a 360-degree view of the buyers’ journey and plan your digital marketing activities accordingly.

Collaborating with the Team Members

Collaborating using a centralized interface is required to ensure that all the team members have adopted the streamlined social media management process that delivers exceptional results. The social media management tools having real-time sharing and collaboration features keep all the team members on the same page and make the process of assigning tasks, and delivering scheduled reports simple.

Filtering Posts, Profiles, and Audience Responses

The social media management software you choose should allow you to filter posts, profiles and audience responses based on geographical location. This would provide you answers to the critical questions like which regional factors to consider while posting an update for a specific group of audience, how to find new social media users from a particular location, when to post new feeds for a specific location, etc., helping you gain more attention from your target audience.

Customizing Analytical Reports

For any social media marketer, having customized analytical reports which are easily accessible is extremely important. Your social media management platform should allow you to access different reports showing important data about the engagement of the audience, sales & conversions, etc., easily. It should include different reporting templates so that you don't have to spend much time in generating and scheduling reports exactly the way you want.

Your business can never drive leads or make money by simply posting and replying on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Effective social media management is more than that. It requires increasing followers on social media platforms, driving their engagement with your brand or company, building relationships with them, and maintaining those relationships in a meaningful way. Only the best social media management software with the below-mentioned qualities can help you in doing that.

Compatible with Different Social Media Platforms

To target customers on all the right channels, it becomes important to have a presence on multiple social media platforms. Not all social media platforms can suit for promoting your business. So, you need to ensure that the social media tool you are selecting is compatible with the social media platforms your business is utilizing today and is planning to utilize in the future.

Ability to Connect Multiple Social Media Profiles

Sometimes increasing the number of social media profiles of your business or using your employees' profiles for promotional purposes can prove to be beneficial in terms of increasing the effectiveness in brand advocacy, approaching followers, and SEO efforts. Make sure that your social media scheduling platform allows you to manage multiple social media profiles from a single interface, as that would save your time and efforts both.

Allows Uploading Different Types of Media

People on social media get attracted towards the posts with images and videos, rather than plain simple text. You are likely to engage more audiences through your posts, including images and videos. So, you need to ensure that the social media management platform you choose allows you to upload different types of media.

User-Friendly

The social media scheduling software that is user-friendly and easy to learn can save your time and simplify your job of managing your multiple social media strategies. Before purchasing any social media scheduler, make sure that you have taken its trial and ensured that it is user-friendly and is compatible with your business logic at the same time.

Scalability

There are emerging social media platforms adding up every day. Make sure that the social media platform you have chosen provides regular updates to cope up with the upcoming market trends and your business requirements, which are likely to change with the time and growth both. Investing in a social media management software is a crucial decision, and so choosing a tool which is not scalable can be a liability to your organization.

Social media management is a proven way to promote a business. At the same time, it is not easy as the social media platforms are overloaded with the content posted by the businesses all over the world, which has made the competition extremely fierce. It might be difficult to make your business stand out unless you ensure that your social media content management software meets the expectations of the consumers arising due to these upcoming trends -

Ephemeral Content

Ephemeral content is something that appears for a short duration and then disappears. For example, - Facebook and Instagram stories. Despite their short duration appearance, these stories are becoming increasingly popular these days. The social media management solutions can help in maintaining the consistency in posting the ephemeral content regularly and keep your audience engaged with your stories.

Niche Social Media Platforms

Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Instagram have always dominated as the best social media platforms. But, niche social platforms like TikTok emerged in 2016, suddenly became famous, and now are used by many businesses to market their products and services uniquely. Just like the companies into gaming use Twitch to promote their apps, many other social media platforms might not be popular but can be specific to your business. The social media management apps that can help in promoting your business on these niche social platforms are going to be in demand.

Social Media Shopping

Shopping using Facebook and Instagram has become quite popular these days. Brands have started creating their shopping pages on social media platforms. It is not at all surprising that social media platforms are now used for shopping too. If you already have multiple stores on social media platforms or planning to open very soon, you will have to consider selecting a social media scheduler app, including features that can support this trend.

Augmented Reality

Currently, augmented reality has been highly adopted by social media platforms, and the users are really enjoying its experience. Augmented reality changes the way things actually look. Not only for personal use but augmented reality is also being used by the brands on social media to improve the shopping experience of their customers. This trend is expected to grow as social media platforms are continuously adding AR and VR functionalities, which can be used by the brands to accelerate their business.

Chatbots

Chatbots have been around for a long time, but they were dominated by a few keywords or some pre-written answers. But, now, the algorithms are transforming the effectiveness of the chatbots by comprehending the language of the users. Now, it is not required to stuff the bots with the stereotyped answers. Chatbots have gained the capability to browse the web and find the answers the users are looking for. This trend is going to change the way users would communicate with the brands, and your social media management tool should be prepared for that.  

AI and Machine Learning

Social media platforms are considered to be too noisy as there are too many updates every second with the audiences’ queries, recommendations, and comments to deal with. AI and ML are considered to be perfect technologies to deal with a large amount of data. The social media management integrating the power of AI and ML is likely to gain a competitive advantage and help brands to grow at an exponential level.

Before you deploy a new social media management platform, it is very much necessary to know whether it will align with your existing marketing strategy or not. Also, you need to ensure that your employees adopt it as soon as possible to get the maximum benefit out of it. Below are some considerations which you need to consider so that your social media management solution fits into your roadmap to success.

Involve Your Team Into Decision Making - After shortlisting some social media management solutions, you can take suggestions from your team members about which one to choose. Give them some time to trial and test the shortlisted software, so that they get an idea about which software meets your business requirements. Depending on their views, you can select a social media scheduler that suits their needs and comfort because the majority of the time, they are only going to use it.

Review Future Goals - Many times, businesses purchase new social media management systems to achieve future goals in mind. These goals can be targeting a new set of audience present on a specific social media platform, or improving the engagement of the present customers. Whatever your future goals may be, ensure that the social media management tool you choose has the ability to meet your future goals. Thus, you need to review your future goals to ensure the successful deployment of your social media management platform.

Current Digital Marketing Process - The social media management tool you select should fit into the current digital marketing process you are following for a successful deployment. And if you need to fix some flaws in your current digital marketing process, you need to analyze whether your social media management platform helps in doing that or not? If yes, you can move ahead with the deployment of your new social media tool.

The cost of a social media management tool depends on its features, the number of users it allows, and social media profiles it can integrate. There are many social media management solutions available, ranging from $3 monthly to $9600 yearly subscription. If your budget is limited you can also select one from the list of free and open source social media management software. Depending on the social media profiles you need to manage, the number of team members would be using it, and your budget, you can make your purchase decision.  

For example, if you go for a monthly subscription, the cheapest option would be Post Planner as that would cost you only $3/month, and one of the most expensive options would be Statusbrew, which would cost you $449/month. If you choose to go with yearly subscription plans, you can consider Kpiez at $50/year, or TalkWalker at $9600/year.

Many social media management vendors providing tools like Falcon.io and Hootsuite can quote customized prices depending on the features you require. It would be better to ask for the demo of the software or consider using it in its trial period to get an idea about whether it is worth its price or not. 

Investing in an expensive social media management system for the features you are not going to use can be an unnecessary financial burden for your business organization. At the same time, opting for cheap SMM software not having the features you require can prove to be expensive for your business in the long run. We would suggest you evaluate the features of the software and ensure that it suits your budget before selecting one.

Before selecting a social media management software, it becomes highly important to check the options available in the market in detail with the authentic reviews given by the users. Goodfirms' team has made that job easy for you by listing some of the best social media management tools in a user-friendly style so that it becomes easy for you to shortlist the software having good ratings and features as per your requirements. Besides that, below are some reasons that can convince you to trust the researched list of social media management tools provided by Goodfirms.

• Goodfirms includes a team of highly skilled research professions who follow a systematic approach towards curating the list of social media management software using the latest technologies and trends
• All the reviews and ratings given by the users for the software listed by Goodfirms are authentic and worth relying on
• Goodfirms has been successful in winning the trust of more than 9000 software and service providers worldwide

So, the simple rule is if you want to grow your business, the power of social media cannot be ignored. To be successful in gaining the attention of your audience on social media, managing social media profiles becomes the key factor. Only the best social media management software that works well for the type of business you are running can help you in gaining the competitive advantage on the major social media platforms like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, etc.

Consider how quickly these social media platforms have evolved. Back in 2012, people were happy if a social media management software allowed them to post a status on multiple social media platforms with a single click. But, with the increased expectations of social media users, the businesses are also facing new challenges every day. In the current scenario, besides managing your social media posts, you also need to manage your brand advocates, stories, videos, pictures, etc., on multiple social media platforms. Above all, you need to measure your performance on social media sites regularly to ensure that you are on the right track. All these tasks are just impossible without the help of an efficient social media management software.

Selecting the right social media management software requires a thorough understanding of your business requirements and marketing challenges. We hope that this buyers' guide to social media management has helped you in selecting the right social media management software which can take your business to the next level.