You’ve probably heard that social media doesn’t bring in much web traffic: in fact, only 5% of your site visitors are social media followers following through a link. However, this doesn’t mean that it’s any less crucial.
Customers are picky specimen; they have hundreds of products to choose from, with thousands of reviews available for each. That’s why they don’t really care about what your website says – they are more interested in what other customers say about you.
That’s why social media management (SMM) is crucial for your business. And for effective SMM, you need the right social media management tools.
Why Do You Need Social Media Management Tools?
Managing social media for a business is not the same as handling a personal account – you can’t post whatever you want, whenever you want. There are many different types of applications to aid business SMM, but there are some that are quite essential:
A Scheduler: This tool would help you schedule your posts in advance so that they can be published at a specified time across several social media profiles, saving considerable time and effort.
A Trend Analyzer: This tool would scour through the internet to identify the type of content popular with your audiences by looking for specific keywords and mentions.
A Designer: Sophisticated, high-quality graphic design is essential to gain user attention and carve a positive brand image for your business. A professional designing app would help you achieve that.
A Listener: This tool would act as your ear to the ground, looking out for all mentions of your brand across social networks to enable you to connect with your customers and take note of their experiences.
A Connector: Influencer marketing is one of the most popular means of digital advertising today. A connector tool would help you fish out the right influencers for your products so that you can gain greater brand recognition and user engagement.
The 5 Best Social Media Management Tools
Hootsuite – The Scheduler
Hootsuite is an incredibly versatile, all-in-one scheduler that is suitable for both small businesses and larger enterprises.
It has an all-embracing user interface that combines all your social media profiles and storage platforms, such as OneDrive or Dropbox, into a single space. That makes it super easy to canvas your content, decide what to post, and schedule when it goes live.
Beyond scheduling, Hootsuite offers fantastic task assignment and monitoring tools – a team leader can ensure members are posting on their social media profiles on time. They can also set up approval systems to vet and regulate content.
Stand Out Feature: The tool offers excellent analytics, allowing you to compute follower engagement and content popularity off each platform and compute the ROI of each investment.
Pricing: Hootsuite offers several packages, depending on your business size. If you have less than 10 social media profiles, you’ll only have to invest $20 a month for the tool. It also offers plans ranging from $99 to $500/month for over 20 to 50 profiles.
Buzzsumo – The Trend Analyzer
Buzzsumo is a brand monitoring tool that helps you build profitable social media strategies for your business. It does that by searching up content relevant to your products via hashtags, keywords, and backlinks, as well as by spying on your competitors.
This data helps you analyze what works in your niche, based on total impressions and shares, so that you can produce and post similar content across your social media.
Stand Out Feature: The tool makes filtering through content super easy – you can identify trends by arranging content by its types, such as videos and pictures, or by the timeline, such as over months or years.
Pricing: Buzzsumo’s plans start at $99/month for 10 trending feeds and a year of data, along with analysis reports. They can go up to $499+/month for larger enterprises with 5 years of data and 150 trending feeds.
Canva – The Designer
Canva is a highly popular graphic designing app that is ideal for businesses that want sophisticated pictures at a low budget. The tool has hundreds of different templates to choose from to help you advertise new product releases, sales offers, or profile displays. It also has a variety of fonts, filters, and icons to choose from, enabling customization.
Stand Out Feature: The tool offers a variety of pre-determined post templates to choose from, so you can create an excellent Twitter head, Facebook cover, Instagram post without worrying about cropping and re-cropping it.
Pricing: Canva’s free version is pretty prolific and can cover your basic designing needs. However, for better customization and team-based usage, getting the Pro version at just $12.95/month for up to 5 people might be a good idea. In the Enterprise version, at $30/month per person, you can get additional scheduling and monitoring features.
Mention – The Listener
Mention serves a purpose essential to your social media marketing: Connecting with customers. It scours social media and sends you an alert as soon as your keyword is mentioned.
You can use the alerts to identify negative and positive reviews so that you can respond to them appropriately. Moreover, you can forge collaborations with influencers talking about your product to boost your brand recognition.
Stand Out Feature: Beyond detecting your mentions, the tool also offers Insights and Analytics features, where you can filter through, group, and visualize your data to gauge audience sentiment and make comprehensive reports.
Pricing: Mention starts at $25/month for entrepreneurs, going up to $83/month for a small business Pro account, to $450/month for teams and agencies. The social accounts and mentions discovered vary with each plan.
Inkybee – The Connector
Inkybee is ideal for businesses looking to connect with niche influencers for PR purposes. All you have to do is enter a keyword in the search bar. The tool returns a list of blogs, which can be ranked by visibility, engagement, and relevance. That is also highly useful for SEO backlinking purposes.
Stand Out Feature: Inkybee also lets you filter through the massive list of influencers, by geographical region, frequency of posting, and social media metrics. That helps narrow down the list to influencers who would be more profitable for you to collaborate with.
Pricing: The tool starts at $79/month for an in-house team with 1 user, up to $249/month for up to 8 users. All features are available to paying users.
It goes without saying that not every social media management tool out there would perfectly fit your business needs. Our list of tools would definitely help you iron out your SMM strategy. However, there are several other factors you need to take into account when investing in a tool, especially if you’re a small business owner.
How To Choose the Right Social Media Management Tools
The right SMM tool would:
Fit Within your Budget:
Most of the tools on the list have reasonable subscription fees and various packages depending on your business needs. However, signing up for them without considering your marketing budget may land you in hot water.
Analyze how much you’ll use each platform, and how much benefit you’ll gain from it. Compare that projected benefit with the costs to discern your ROI.
It’s simple: If the tool costs more than you’ll possibly gain from it, keep your purse strings drawn.
Cater to Your Customer Type:
Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) marketing strategies vary.
For B2B businesses, marketing is aggressively geared towards a small group of customers. They focus on cultivating personal relationships via open communication and logic-driven marketing.
That means platforms that enable close monitoring of industry players for lead generation and help synthesize social media posting onto a workable interface are most useful for such businesses.
For B2C firms, marketing to a wide audience means they have to employ several different channels to distinguish themselves from their competitors and attract users via emotion-driven advertising.
That means all platforms from social media organizing to graphic designing, to metric monitoring are valuable additions to a B2C marketer’s arsenal.
Be Flexible:
Every business has plans to grow. That means that as revenues rise, their social media presence becomes vaster.
Larger businesses usually have an entire social media team dedicated to their management, and so the tools they use should be flexible enough to accommodate multiple accounts and coordinated activities.
Handling SMM across multiple channels and tools requires a carefully laid out strategy, tons of tools, and a substantial team of managers and interns. That’s why most growing businesses choose to outsource the digital marketing function to a professional agency that does the job for them.
Do You Need a Digital Marketing Agency?
Social media management isn’t as simple as posting pictures and reacting to comments. It requires careful consideration of audience likes and dislikes, as well as a steady schedule for posting.
For the amateur social media manager, interpreting analytics and evaluating content can be a daunting and time-consuming task. Digital marketing agencies, however, have SMM specialists who can do that for you.
At Go Digital World, our specialists take their time studying your business and its social media profiles to understand the target audience and its engagement rates. Based on your campaign goals, such as an increase in follower engagement, brand recognition, or better customer relationship management, they carve out a strategy to implement.
Besides the greater expertise and experience that comes with hiring an agency, you also benefit from lower costs. That is because the digital marketing company already has access to premium SMM tools, and so besides their subscription fee, you wouldn’t have to spend funds on apps you would have to handle yourself.
Additionally, agencies set expectations for the work from the onset and provide periodic reports detailing the progress made. At Go Digital World, we assure clients with realistic targets based on their SMM goals and offer track reports monthly so that they can analyze the ROI of their campaign.
If your business needs a social media reformation, these SMM tools can do an excellent job for you. However, if you want thorough insight into your campaign, especially if you’re at the reigns of a growing business in a competitive industry, consulting an expert might be a good idea.
Contact Go Digital World at +1-609-323-5507 to book a free consultation with our SMM technicians. Even if you choose not to sign up with us, you’ll still get some free marketing tips and loads of great coffee!
