Introduction
How can you improve your social media management? From content creation and publishing to checking analytics, social media management can be an overwhelming task. Thankfully, there are several social media management tools available that make things easy for small businesses and social media marketers. These tools help to reduce stress, save time, and ensure that content meets the right target audience on time.
With so many of these tools available, this article will enlist the top 10 best social media management tools that are best for your small business. But before that, let’s see the important factors you need from the best social media management tools.
Key Takeaways
- Social media management tools help small business owners, content creators, and marketers spend less time on recurring aspects of social media and more time on creating strategies.
- The best way to choose the right social media management tool is to clarify your business goals and strategies for social media marketing.
- There is no best social media platform to use. All platforms are important to reach your target market. Choosing the right tools will make social media marketing on any platform easy and effective.
Important Factors When Choosing the Best Social Media Management Tools
It is overwhelming to choose the best tools for you, especially with the large number of social media for marketing and management tools available. The best way to determine the right tool is to understand your social media goals and priorities as a business.
- How many hours do you use on social media every week?
- How many platforms do you create content for regularly?
- How much are you willing to budget for social media marketing?
Your sincere answers to these questions will help you choose the right tools.
There are still certain factors or features you need to consider when choosing the right social media management tools. Here are a few of these:
- Pricing
- Platform integration
- Content calendar
- Scheduler
- Post optimization
- Keyword monitoring
- Analytical reporting
Pricing
If you are a small business or a new content creator, going for the free or freemium tools can be a good place to start. But sometimes, you are more likely to benefit from a tool if you get the paid version. Therefore you must understand which features matter to your business the most and look for a tool that can provide that for you at an affordable price.
Platform Integration
The main reason you need a social media management tool is to use your social platforms flawlessly. Keeping up with multiple platforms every day can be a hassle. When choosing a social management tool, ensure that the one you go for allows you to manage all your accounts in one platform.
Content Calendar
A content calendar helps you to plan your social posts and campaigns for a particular time. This saves time and helps you to be consistent in posting. You can plan as much as a year’s worth of social content at once.
Scheduler
A scheduler is an effective feature that helps content creators and social media marketers to automate recurring tasks (posting every day). This gives room to focus on other important operations (analytical reporting and strategy creation). Once you have created a content calendar and created visuals for your social posts, scheduling becomes easy. The tool you go for must come with a scheduling tool.
Post Optimization
Scheduling is great but if you do not post at the right time, you won’t get the right engagements you want on the post. Since social media audiences are different, posting at the right time is important. Choose a tool that allows you to optimize your post and ensure that it gets to your target audience on time.
Keyword Monitoring
You cannot be on social media all the time. You need a tool that will help you monitor relevant keywords related to your brand. Keyword monitoring tool allows you to get conversations where your business is mentioned and join the discussions when necessary.
Analytical Reporting
Analytics remains a critical aspect of any social media marketing effort. You need to know if your social media strategies are working. The earlier you check your post performance and KPIs, the better for your business. You need a tool that can monitor your social metrics and provide insights on what’s working and what’s not.
Top 10 Best Social Media Management Tools to Use
To help you further in choosing the right social media management tool, we’ve curated a list of the top 10 best social media management tools to use in 2023.
Buffer
Buffer is a streamlined platform that helps small business owners and creators to drive engagements on social media. It has different features that assist content creation, from a content calendar to a scheduler, analytical tools, landing pages, and team collaboration. Each feature was designed to help social media managers work more effectively.
Price: It comes with a free plan and paid plans that start from $6 per month per social platform with a two-week free trial.
Unique selling point: Buffer has intuitive tools that are easy and user-friendly. Its customer support is functional and helpful.
Our Take: Buffer is a well-rounded software that you can use for your social media scheduling, analytics, and collaboration. However, Buffer doesn’t offer more integrations than its direct competitors. If you are a newly formed small business, you will enjoy using this platform as it is user-friendly and has a cheap paid plan than other platforms.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to manage all your social platforms in one space. It is one of the biggest social media management tools in this review. Its users are over 18 million people and about 800 Fortune 1000 companies use Hootsuite. Hootsuite is also an all-in-one tool that helps you to create and schedule content for socials, measure analytics, and run social ads.
Price: It comes with a free plan and paid plans that start from $99 per month and come with a 30-day free trial.
Unique selling point: Hootsuite is a highly comprehensive tool. It does everything a content creator and social media marketer wants. You can monitor your multiple social accounts and analyze your engagements and activities. You can research relevant keywords for content creation and bulk-schedule social posts.
Our Take: Hootsuite allows you to manage up to 35 social media platforms. It also offers multiple integrations with other applications that improve workflow and social management. Its analytical tool is one of the best as it helps you deduce social media engagement and the conversion rate of social ads. Hootsuite is best for small businesses that wish to scale.
Sprout Social
This tool is an all-in-one social platform that provides all you need – from scheduling to social monitoring to analytics and reporting. Sprout Social goes further in providing a customer relationship management tool. This tool will help you serve your customers better and build good relationships with them.
Price: Its paid plans start from $89 per month and come with a 30-day free trial.
Unique selling point: A common opinion many have said about Sprout Social is its reporting tool. Sprout Social comes with an amazing analytical reporting tool that allows you to check your social metrics. It also provides insights on how to make your content get more engagement.
Our Take: Sprout Social is best for businesses planning to scale and large organizations. It has one of the longest free trials in this review and its analytical reporting is one of a kind.
Agora Pulse
AgoraPulse is also an all-in-one platform that assists in scheduling, replying, and analytical reporting. Unlike others, AgoraPulse makes social media marketing simple. Its free plan has key features you will need for your social media efforts.
Price: It has a free plan and a paid plan that starts at $99 per month.
Unique selling point: At an affordable price, this tool comes with unique features, such as social listening and competitor analysis.
Our take: AgoraPulse is one of our best picks because it comes with unique tools at an affordable price. AgoraPulse has a competitor analysis that helps you know who your competitors are and what they are posting on social media. It also comes with a social listening feature that shows what is trending in your niche and what your target audience is doing on social media.
eClincher
Like most social tools in this review, eClincher lets you schedule posts, respond to direct messages, and analyze your social metrics.
Price: Its plans start from $59 with a 14-day free trial.
Unique selling point: eClincher’s unique value is that it allows you to auto-post with RSS feeds and smart queues. It also comes with a media library for image storage and it allows you to search directly for influencers.
Our take: Why is eClincher in our top 10 list? eClincher has a 14-day free trial with no credit card required! This tool also comes with numerous integration and is best for businesses planning to scale and large organizations.
Sendible
Sendible is a tool built specifically for small marketing agencies. It is an all-in-one platform and provides its users with customizable dashboards that you can brand to attract potential clients. It has been regarded as the number 1 tool for small marketing organizations.
Price: Sendible paid plans start at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial.
Unique selling point: This tool allows for integration with other management tools like Canva, YouTube, and Pexels. It also comes with an automation tool for repetitive tasks.
Our take: Sendible has a CRM system that enables users to interact with influencers and communicates with them. It also has a social listening feature that allows users to monitor trending keywords, their competitors, and their target audience.
Social Pilot
This is a simple and cost-effective tool for content creators and businesses. It is an all-in-one platform that uses a really simple dashboard for its many features. It comes with a client management tool that allows marketing agencies with numerous clients to manage content and socials for their clientele.
Price: Its plan starts from $30 every month and comes with a 14-day free trial.
Unique selling point: Social Pilot provides content suggestions from different industries and will help you easily find relevant content. It also comes with white-label reports for agencies.
Our take: Social pilot is another effective tool that many small businesses need to use. It is a simple platform and has one of the cheapest paid plans. You pay $30 for all social platforms you manage. The social pilot also suggests niche content for you which is helpful if you are looking for content to post on your social media.
CoSchedule
As its name implies, CoSchedule helps in scheduling social posts. It comes with a marketing content calendar that makes content creation easy. With this tool, you can collaborate with others when creating content, social posts, events, and tasks.
Price: It has a free plan and paid plans start at $39 per month with a 14-day free trial
Unique selling point: CoSchedule comes with a great content calendar. It is especially useful for marketers who wish to organize their projects in one platform. It has a feature that allows you to post at optimal times.
Our take: CoSchedule has the best marketing calendar for all businesses regardless of size.
MavSocial
This social media tool focuses more on visual content. It is an all-in-one platform that helps in scheduling, monitoring, and reporting social posts. In its paid plan, you can manage your meta ads with the platforms.
Price: Paid plans start from $19 per month and come with a 14-day free trial.
Unique selling point: MavSocial has a visual library where you can store, use, and edit your images and videos for social media. It also comes with an in-built search engine where you can get millions of free and paid stock photos.
Our take: MavSocial is another affordable social media management platform for small businesses. Its digital library is one of a kind. You can source any images you want when preparing social media posts.
Crowdfire
This social media management tool has been adding new features for a while. Aside from its scheduler, the tool allows you to manage Twitter accounts and suggests relevant articles to share. Crowdfire is best for small businesses.
Price: It has a free plan and its paid plan starts from $9.99 every month.
Unique selling point: What makes Crowdfire stand out the most is that it allows integration with your blog platform, YouTube channel, and online store. It can also help you create posts for any update you make on these platforms.
Our take: Our review ends with Crowdfire which is an effective yet simple social media management tool. Over the years, Crowdfire has ensured that it adds new tools and features. Its willingness to upgrade and remain valuable is why we have it in our top 10 list.
Conclusion
Your business niche will determine the social media management platform to go for. There are a lot of tools offering different price points and features. Therefore, you need to choose the one that will save you time and help your business automate social media marketing strategies, collaborate with others, and check analytical insights. If you want to market your business on social media successfully, you need to choose a platform that meets your needs.
Whether you go for an all-in-one platform or a content planner tool for content creation, ensure that you put your business’s needs first so you make a good choice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What tools should social media managers use?
There are different tools that social media managers need to use. Most of them include Hootsuite, Social Pilot, Sprout Social, and CoSchedule. Each of these tools allows users to manage their social accounts in one platform, measure the performance of their campaigns, schedule, and respond to posts.
Does Google have any social media management tools?
Google is known for its innovative tools. Sadly, Google doesn’t have a specific tool for social media management. However, it has important automation tools like Google Analytics and Google Drive which aids collaboration and marketing, and can also be integrated into many social media management tools.
How much will I pay for social media management tools?
Most social media management tools have free basic plans that small businesses and new content creators can use. However, some companies provide free plans with minimal tools that may not cover the features you really need for social media marketing. If you want to get more features and integrate more platforms or manage more social media accounts, you will have to pay for plans that vary from $5 a month to $599 a month. If you have a mid-size or large-size firm and you need to manage more than one social media account, you might pay more than that amount.