Fresh out of a high school or college, you probably didn’t think you’d be spending a lot of time on social media, let alone making your living with it. But here you are—a social media manager for a large brand. Now all you need is the right set of tools to make managing your company’s social media accounts and interacting with your customers as easy as possible.
Don’t worry—once you check out our list of some of the best social media management tools available in 2017, you’ll have everything you need to start working like a pro and impressing your boss!
Table of Contents
Best Social Media Tools 2017
Managing your social media marketing can be a full-time job. You need to do it, but you may not have the time or resources to do as much as you need to do to meet your goals.
Instead of waiting until you have the budget to hire more staff to get serious about your social media marketing, you just need to find the right tools. There are plugins, software and services that can do everything from schedule your social media posts to give you detailed analytics about your user engagement and other successes.
Instead of spending too much of your valuable time sorting through the dozens of available tools, just check out these top 5 social media tools for 2017:
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been around for a while now, but it deserves to be at the top of the list for 2017 because it is one of the best social media tools out there.
Hootsuite has grown to support numerous social networks. You can use it to manage Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and WordPress. Toggle between the networks to see a single dashboard that shows your news feed, your mentions, your messages and more. You can customize the feed to show the items you deem most important.
One of the best benefits of Hootsuite is that it allows you to publish your social media posts. You can schedule everything for the week or even a month, depending on how ambitious you are.
2. EveryPost
EveryPost is similar to Hootsuite, but it opens up your options a bit. It supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox and email. It allows you to curate content from YouTube and Flickr, and to automatically share to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
The software allows you to schedule posts, curate content, follow influencers, and track your analytics, among other things. You can choose from several different plans to suit your needs, and you can add up to five users that you can also manage.
You can download EveryPost as an app, and use it as an individual or as the social media manager for a larger company.
3. Crowd Booster
Make the most out of your social media presence with the analytics provided by Crowd Booster. This tool automatically updates your analytics and sends you important notifications. You can tweak your social media marketing strategy in real time based on how you see the audience is reacting.
If you are a social media manager for other brands, you can use Crowd Booster to create custom reports for clients. You can show clients the impact your work is making so you can justify your fees and attract new business.
Crowd Booster also lets you schedule posts to Twitter, but not to other social media channels.
4. Tailwind
Pinterest remains one of the major players in social media, but because of its unique platform, not a lot of the other social media tools support it. Pinterest is all about searching for and sharing content, which is much different than composing your own status or tweet.
Tailwind is one of the few tools available that supports Pinterest, and it saves you the time suck that you fall into when you visit the site itself. You can create pins with the software, perform bulk uploads, find out the best time to post pins and more.
The software is set up to support social media teams, so you can manage multiple users on your account.
As it has grown, the software has evolved to include support for Instagram as well.
5. Oktopost
Many social media management tools focus on giving you the ability to publish posts or to easily oversee all your activity on a site in one place. With Oktopost, the focus is on actually generating leads and revenue for your brand so that you can increase your ROI.
Oktopost focuses on B2B brands, which have traditionally had a harder time making connections on social media. It allows you to schedule and publish content like other tools, but it also allows you to measure the impact of a post, collaborate with industry influencers, stay on top of trends, and amplify your reach.
You can export data to share with other platforms and project management systems, allowing you to easily coordinate your efforts amongst your social media marketing team.
There are dozens of other social media management tools out there, and you can easily spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month on them, depending on how big your team is and what kind of features you need. It’s worth it to start small with the tools that can get you results without requiring you to spend a fortune.
Try out these social media tools for 2017 and get more out of your social media marketing campaign. You’ll improve your ROI while also reducing the investment you put in in the first place.
low cost social media management tools
1. Falcon
Although Falcon is not a free social media management tool, with the cheapest plan (Essentials) costing $129 per month for single users and small teams, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It doesn’t give a price for its more advanced Full Suite plan, targeting larger companies with multiple teams and markets, although it enables you to request a demo.
Falcon emphasizes that it offers 7-days a week support, with a real-time in-app chat, email, and telephone service. It also provides weekly training sessions, and you can find answers in its help center.
The Essentials plan focuses on publishing & scheduling and social media engagement. You can use an editorial calendar to plan, schedule, and edit across multiple social networks. It offers a content pool, meaning you can store assets for repurposing, plug into your DAM, and use Falcon’s cloud storage. It provides a customizable inbox, where you can arrange multiple feeds to build the inbox that suits you best. If you have a team, you can share notes and add messages to your team members. Existing contacts’ profile cards appear beside their messages. Falcon offers advanced metrics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
The Suite package offers everything available in the Essentials plan (allowing for larger teams and more significant usage) and adds a number of additional features. These include social listening, where you can monitor social media and the internet to discover much information about your business. You can track brands, topics, keywords, and phrases and even refine them with advanced parameters.
With Falcon’s Full Suite, you can benchmark your strategy across all major social networks. Falcon has a database of over 100,000 brands, letting you benchmark your performance on multiple levels. You can also schedule and post ads on Facebook and Instagram without having to leave Falcon.Compare Social Media Marketing PlatformsPopular FeaturesBest forPricingRating
IconosquareMake your life as a social media manager way easier.WEBSITEAnalytics, Reporting, Publishing & MonitoringMedium-sized to enterprise companies and agenciesFrom $49
FalconThe Platform for Every Kind of Social Media Marketer.Multi-Channel Scheduling, Analytics & Reporting, Social Listening, Social CRM.Designed for businesses of all sizes$108+ p/m
Monday.comManage all your marketing assets and campaigns from planning to execution with monday.comSuggested content, Free media assets, Scheduler, Visual calendarMarketing agency, Marketers and Social media managers$8/seat – $24/month
SendibleGo-to social media management tool for agenciesTailored Posts with Previews, Canva Integration, Content Libraries, White Label.Marketing agencies and bigger teams looking to simplify and scale their efforts.Agency plan with 3 users starting from $89/month
PLANOLYPLANOLY is your all-in-one platform to plan & schedule your social content.Analytics, Automated Publishing, Content Management, Multi-Account Management.Businesses of all sizes who post to Instagram and Pinterest.From $11.25
LoomlyTry out one of the Leading Social Media Scheduling Apps GloballyManage digital assets, Fuel storytelling, Engage community, Measure performanceSocial media managers, from brands to agencies & individuals$26 – $249+ p/m
AgoraPulseManaging social media has never been easier. Schedule your content, get reports, and engage followers with one simple tool. See why 22,000+ brand and agency marketers have made the switch to Agorapulse.Simplify social management, Reporting, Publishing, EngagementAgencies and businesses – both large and small$99+ p/
ContentCalCollaborate with your team and post great content.Simple to use, visual tool with custom approvals for content creation and publishing.Streamlined planning, approval & publishing. Community management, analytics.Individuals, businesses, franchises and agencies$37 – $119+ p/m
Visit our in-depth comparisons and reviews for all solutions on offer in this categoryRead Reviews
Falcon identifies the visual elements of images from the most engaging branded content. You can even invite your team to collect and comment on highly engaging branded content from other brands.
2. Loomly
While Loomly doesn’t provide a free plan, it does offer a free 15-day trial, and its cheapest plan is $48 per month (or $36 per month if you pay for a year up-front). That Base plan permits two users and a maximum of ten social accounts.
You can connect all your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts to Loomly. It is a simple process, although, like all social media management software, you have to live within limitations set by the social media networks, e.g., you can post to Facebook business accounts, but not personal profiles.
Loomly asks you to set a workflow that matches the way you run your accounts, whether you are part of a team, or operate your accounts solo.
You can select from three views in Loomly:
- Calendar view – shows all posts spread over a calendar month.
- List view – displays all posts as a list and includes essential information for each
- Post view – allows you to examine individual posts
You can do more than just schedule posts in Loomly, however. It offers an interactions feature where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle @-mentions.
Analytics are available for each of your social accounts, as well as Loomly’s main dashboard containing an overview.
3. Sendible
Sendible offers a free 30-day no-credit card trial on all plans. Its cheapest plan is the $24 per month Micro plan, which accommodates 12 services for one user, with unlimited pst scheduling and up to 10 queues. Other plans add additional features, along with more services and permitted users.
Indeed “Services” are Sendible’s principal point of difference. They are like channels or profiles that you create within your Sendible account and allow you to select which features you need.
Sendible has operated since 2008, evolving with time. You can use it both for scheduling content to your social platforms and drafting and publishing posts on all the leading blogging platforms. You can create your own content, or use Sendible’s Google Chrome Extension to publish or schedule content you come across while browsing the web. You can also find high-quality content to share with your followers through Sendible’s content tool, RSS feeds, and Google Alerts.
You can also use Sendible to help you centralize your social media management, including such things as Facebook moderation (automatically removing comments and posts from your Facebook Pages that contain words or phrases you specify) and uploading and scheduling Facebook Page cover photos to match your marketing campaigns.
Although Sendible doesn’t have an in-built graphics editor, like PromoRepublic, it does include Canva integration, allowing you to create social media graphics with Canva and schedule them to your profiles and pages.
4. Iconosquare
Social media is a data-driven game and Iconosquare makes it easier to win. You can test the waters with a 14-day trial to see if it’s right for you, and it’s worth the effort. While Iconosquare only caters to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it has all you need to peel back the layers of your content and audience engagement to generate results. Reporting gives a look at content impressions, and average and individual post reach (including average reach rate by post).
You also get Instagram Stories analytics. These show impressions, story completion rates by story type, and the best time to post Stories. Reporting is easy. In a few clicks, you can automate reports and include hashtag tracking, and keep tabs on competitors.
A feature that many will love is Iconosquare’s profile activity tracking. It tells you which links in your profile drive traffic to your site — a great way to tie social to ROI. Analytics aside, you get a social media scheduling tool that helps plan your post rollout effectively. Engagement on social is the goal, and to help drive as much for your content, Iconosquare also offers a “first comment” feature. First comments are posted along with your post, making your social activity look and feel organic and personalized.
5. AgoraPulse
Although AgoraPulse offers a generous 28-day free trial, it is one of the more professional, and therefore expensive, social media management platforms, once you’ve concluded your trial. The cheapest plan is the $99 per month Medium plan.
It features an extremely user-friendly interface.
The heart of AgoraPulse is its unified Inbox. It shows your comments, mentions, conversations, and reviews relating to each of your social accounts. The Inbox Assistant allows you to set rules that automatically clean up and organize each account’s Inbox.
It includes a Social Listening module that allows firms to keep an ear open for mention of their brand name (or any other term).
AgoraPulse provides a variety of ways to publish content. The default Publishing tab takes you to a calendar, showing the social messages you have scheduled, queued, published, sent to approval, had assigned to you, or failed. AgoraPulse is at its most potent when you use its bulk publish feature. This lets you import a series of posts from a CSV file, a website using RSS feeds, or as a group of pictures to transform into posts.
It provides an extensive array of reports, both globally about your social account usage, and also about specific items of content.
Conclusion
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