This week’s blog will be about the importance of social media tools. I’ll be talking about how to use them, why you need them, and how they can help you grow your business.
Social media tools are essential for businesses today. They allow you to reach a wider audience than ever before, and they help you stay connected with your customers while collecting valuable data that can be used to improve your marketing strategy.
The first step in learning how to use these tools is deciding which ones are right for your business. There are many different types of social media platforms available, so it’s important to choose one that makes sense for your industry and demographic. For example, if you own a restaurant chain then Facebook might not be the best option because most people aren’t going on Facebook when they’re hungry!
Once you’ve decided which platform works best for your needs then it’s time to get started! The first thing I recommend doing is creating an account on each platform where applicable (Facebook and Twitter are required by law). Then start interacting with other users and posting content regularly so that people know who YOU are as an individual or company rather than just another face in their feed or news feed – this way
Posting To Social Media Tools
1. Falcon
Falcon focuses on giving social media professionals access to a structured set of features that help listen, engage, measure, schedule and publish content that makes a difference. Falcon offers two plans. The Essential plan targets single users and small teams and focuses on a content calendar & campaign planner with advanced analytics and community management. The Full Suite is more designed for larger companies with multiple teams and markets. It takes everything from the Essentials Plan (although it permits unlimited channels, reporting, and teams) and adds in social media advertising, competitor benchmarking, and collaboration & approval flows.
Falcon considers your content calendar to be one of the most important tools you’ll work with. It provides a view of all your scheduled content across multiple social networks. You can plan, schedule, edit, and post directly from your content calendar. With Campaign Planner, you can map, create a brief, roll-out, and collaborate on campaigns for all social platforms.
Falcon supports images, video, Instagram Stories, and Facebook carousels. You can store all your content in Falcon’s version of a shared media library called the “Content Pool.” If you have a team, Falcon provides roles, approval processes, and an audit trail to boost quality. You can also activate email notifications and share notes. Falcon provides access to agencies to smooth your collaborative processes. You can control all access and set permissions.
Falcon lets users design their own inbox. You can include multiple feeds, labels and use filters. You can also create custom response templates for quicker replies and bulk actions
If you have the Full Suite, you can promote posts through Facebook and Instagram ads within Publish, which manages all ads in one place. The tool allows cross-channel advertising, automation, saved target audiences, running ads with customer durations, automated ROI tracking, and real-time insights. The Full Suite also includes social listening. With this, you can track trends, monitor your brand, create custom queries, track sentiment, monitor multiple languages, filter extensively, and track campaigns.
2. Loomly
Loomly is a powerful social media scheduling and management platform with a clean, intuitive interface. It offers four pricing tiers after a 15-day no credit card trial. They range from a $20/month Base plan for those with 10 or fewer social accounts up to the $228/month Premium Plan, allowing up to 26 users and 60 social accounts.
One useful feature of Loomly is that you can set various calendar workflows. The default setting for teams with more than one collaborator is:
- Draft
- Pending Approval
- Requires Edits
- Approved
- Scheduled
- Published
There is a straightforward process to go through when creating a post. You can either begin a post from scratch or pull in post ideas from RSS feeds that automatically create draft posts from them. You create the base copy of a post before you customize details for whichever social networks you want to use. If you intend to create a paid post for Facebook, you can customize your audience and set a budget for your campaign, all from within Loomly.
Sendible describes itself as “The #1 Social Media Management Tool for Agencies”. While it lists the $199 Medium Plan – “For Growing Agencies” as its most popular plan, it does cater for other organizations, with a $29 Micro plan for solopreneurs and a $99/month Small plan for small businesses, along with a $299/month Large plan, for large teams.
You can connect to just about any social network, as well as post directly to your WordPress, Medium, Tumblr or Blogger blog. You can use Sendible’s geo-targeting features to reach specific segments of your audience. Sendible helps you upload videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Sendible features an integrated dashboard and tools relating to publishing, collaboration, analytics, CRM, listening, and mobile.
In the area of publishing, it allows you to plan, schedule and publish posts, images, and videos to multiple social networks simultaneously using their powerful compose box. You can schedule social media posts, images and videos individually or in bulk as far in advance as you need. Sendible allows you to set your best-performing content on repeat to keep your social media profiles active. You visualize your content on a shared publishing calendar.
One useful feature is a tie-in with Canva to help you design better-performing visual content.
4. NapoleonCat
In the 7+ years that they’ve been in business, NapoleonCat has built an impressive client list that includes brands like the World Wildlife Foundation, Avon, and Allianz. One of their claims to fame is that they can help social media marketing teams to win back up to 70% of their time and energy. Even if this is not the case, just looking and interacting with its beautiful platform will make work feel less of a chore.
All in all, it’s easy to use and set up. One feature that deserves a special mention is that when you set up your social media accounts after signing up, it also gives you the option to keep tabs on your competitors. You just type in the competitor’s social media account name and add it to your watch list. You can also set it up so that each team member gets assigned specific permission. This is useful if you want to control who may create content.
With regards to posting and scheduling specifically, you can use it to schedule and post your content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business simultaneously via a single dashboard. It also generates post previews as you create them which is more useful than it sounds. Then, after your content has been posted, you can use its performance analytics to monitor your reach, engagement, and click-throughs.
While its list of features are pretty much the same as other social media tools, its approach to pricing is different and a lot more flexible. Unlike the majority of tools, NapoleonCat actually lets you select the number of social media profiles and users, making it an ideal tool for smaller teams.
5. AgoraPulse
Agorapulse provides an affordable social media scheduler and management tool for teams and agencies. It offers four plans from $39 per month aimed at Solos, though to a $239 Enterprise plan. The main difference between each option is the number of social profiles and users catered for, although there are also differences relating to data retention and ad comment monitoring.
You can use Agorapulse to publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate with your social networks. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google +, and YouTube.
You can centrally post to all of your social accounts, with a queue or schedule ensuring your content is delivered at the best times. It allows you to re-queue or reschedule evergreen posts. You can also tweak each post to take advantage of features specific to each social network.
6. Iconosquare
Although Iconosquare is most renowned for its in-depth social analytics, it has expanded its offering to cover multi-profile social management and a powerful scheduling tool. The various tools cover Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, although fewer capabilities are currently available for LinkedIn or Twitter. In particular, the only Iconosquare tools relevant to your LinkedIn account focus on analytics.
You can schedule Instagram and Facebook posts in advance from your computer or on the Iconosquare app. Insert saved captions or hashtag lists, schedule your first comment, and cross-post to multiple profiles at once in a few clicks. Then, easily preview scheduled posts and re-order your feed using drag and drop.
You can schedule photo and video posts automatically to Instagram and Facebook through Iconosquare. Tag accounts and locations in your single-image posts when posting to Instagram using automatic publishing. Tag your location or mention other Facebook pages when posting to Facebook. You need to schedule Instagram Stories and carousels on the Iconosquare website, being notified on your mobile at the time of the post to finish the publishing process on Instagram. No such restrictions reply to traditional Instagram posts, however.
Create captions and lists of frequently used hashtags in advance, then copy and paste them into your posts when scheduling content.
Iconosquare handles media well. Upload, label, and organize photos and videos from your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. Easily schedule posts using content from your media library. Iconosquare even tags any image that you use so that you don’t accidentally repeat it in a later post.
7. ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate content calendar and social media scheduling platform that helps thousands of individuals, businesses, and agencies with their content planning and social media. The platform also defines user permissions and streamline the approval process, manage multiple accounts in one centralized location, and communicate and collaborate with your team on upcoming content. With ContentCal Analytics and Respond you can also keep tabs on content performance and learn how to improve for the future.
Features of ContentCal include social media post scheduling, keyword filtering, collaboration, feedback analysis, reporting, project management, and more. Content creators can use the application to design visual content by modifying the layout and adding a header color and personalized logo. Additionally, employees can create and store posts as drafts, receive feedback from collaborators, and preview posts before publishing.
You’re able to save time, collaborate with team members or clients, and create even better social media content. This platform is perfect for agencies, distributed organizations, or anyone who needs to manage and participate in multiple social media accounts. It could not be any easier, which is perfect for teams with varying degrees of ability. And, the ability to create custom workflows and approvals that reflect your unique governance plan is unmatched. Not only is ContentCal well priced but it is also one of the leading social media schedulers in the market today. 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/m
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
8. Onlypult
Onlypult markets itself as being the one platform for brands, agencies, and businesses to work with social media. It actually offers more than that, letting you work with images and videos and post to social media, blogs, and messengers. Indeed, the list of apps you can schedule to is one of the largest we have seen: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, YouTube, TikTok, Tumblr, WordPress, Telegram, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, Pinterest, and Medium.
Onlypult offers four plans, differentiated by size: Start, SMM, Agency, and Pro. Each of these plans allows you to use different numbers of managers, accounts, and tracked users. Otherwise, the plans all give you access to an image editor, video editor, multiple simultaneous accounts, hashtags, a planner, a calendar, and automatic post deletion.
You can upload photos and videos via the web, schedule your posts for the future and publish them in real-time. Onlypult’s scheduling allows you to create multiple social posts and set days and times for them to be pushed through to your social channels. You can even schedule carousel posts and Stories. In addition, you can set posts to auto-delete at a scheduled time, so you don’t have to worry about promotional links and codes floating around on the web or people querying old posts and asking for special discounts.
Usefully, you can multipost with Onlypult. You can create copy and apply it to multiple posts using different images.
Like most of these social media posting and scheduling tools, Onlypult provides you with a content calendar to help you keep tabs on what’s happening and when your content will be published. It is clean and easy to use.
Onlypult includes limited access to two other tools at all plan levels, Builder and Monitoring. Builder helps you create a micro landing page in a few minutes with a convenient visual builder. Monitoring tracks mentions of your competitors, partners, or buyers. You can use Monitoring to find discussions related to your brand to help you make the right decisions.
9. Planoly
If you’re searching for a social media posting and scheduling tool that has a good app, be sure to check out Planoly. Founded in 2016 by a jewelry brand, Planoly started out as a visual planner for Instagram. Since then, it has expanded its set of features to include tools for social marketing on Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.
The idea behind Planoly is simple – social media marketing shouldn’t have to be so challenging. So, to help social media managers and business owners, it integrates social strategy and content scheduling.
One of the features that deserve special mention is its analytics. You can access basic analytics for Instagram and Pinterest for any specific time frame. It also offers advanced analytics for Instagram and suggestions regarding which will be the best time to post on Instagram based on your target audience’s activity.
Before you can get to studying analytics, though, you’ll first need to get posting. It’s especially useful if you need to create shoppable posts. With the help of sellit, you can transform your social media content on any social platform into a social storefront. Alternatively, if you simply want to create engaging social media posts, its StoriesEdit feature offers designer templates and stickers to help you create and customize content.
It offers three paid plans and a basic free plan. So, it can grow with you as your needs change.
10. Monday.com
Monday.com is different from most of the products we have included in this post in that it doesn’t specifically target social media posting and scheduling. Indeed, many businesses use Monday.com for things other than social media. Its primary focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your teams. However, this makes it ideal for those wanting to create a logical workflow to manage their social media accounts.
Boards are the heart of Monday.com. It uses boards as fully customizable tables to manage your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards to represent your workflow. You can create boards to organize any projects and activities your team does.
Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point and has one specifically designed for social media management. This template builds two boards:
- Campaign Ideas and Requests
- Campaign Progress and Status
Members of your team can make suggestions for upcoming social media posts in the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. You then use it to create an efficient and standardized workflow for your social media campaigns.
The Campaign Progress and Status board focuses more on specific campaigns. It shows Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed and Stuck. The two boards join, so when you approve a campaign on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board, it automatically populates the Upcoming Campaigns section on the Campaign Progress and Status board.
You can include Automations and Integrations on your boards. Automations are rules based on some action that occurs within the site. Integrations are where your Monday.com boards interact with some other software platform.
social media management
Social media management is the process of analyzing social media audiences and developing a strategy that’s tailored to them, creating and distributing content for social media profiles, monitoring online conversations, collaborating with influencers, providing community service, and monitoring, measuring, and reporting on social media performance and ROI.
All these tasks, which were once marginalized by businesses, have now stepped into the limelight of companies’ marketing strategies.
Why? Because social media provides great money-making opportunities – on the condition you manage your social channels in an organized, efficient way.
Why is an efficient social media management process important?
The business potential of social networks is immense. Brands can leverage social media platforms to successfully drive their objectives across the marketing funnel, from raising brand awareness to increasing store visits.
But to be able to accomplish this, they need efficient social media teams.
The more goals you want to achieve through social media marketing, the more people dedicated to this channel you are going to need. This demand will eventually lead to building complex social media team structures.
If you are a large brand, you might even have multiple teams in different offices and regions of the world, leveraging different strategies to meet different targets.
Now, how do you make sure all these people work together hand-in-hand to deliver maximum value from social media?
The answer is: build an efficient social media management process.
Managing social media: where do I begin?
If you’re not sure how to begin optimizing the way you manage social – don’t worry. It’s something many marketers are confused about.
To be able to start off on the right foot, you need to do three important things:
Conduct a social media audit
Decide on the right social media platforms
Analyze your target audience
Why did we outline these three tasks in particular?
Because completing them will provide you with fundamental information that will steer your social media marketing efforts in the right direction. As a result, you will be able to concentrate your resources on strategies that work and cut down on those that don’t.
Let’s take a closer look at each task:
Conducting a social media audit
A social media audit can always improve how you manage social media:
It will give you a granular picture of the effectiveness of your strategy
It will allow you to pinpoint where you’re wasting your resources
It will show which social channels are bringing in the most results
It will demonstrate the impact of social media on your web results
So, how do you go about performing your social media health check?
Step 1: List all of your company’s social media profiles, including those from different regions and belonging to your different sub-brands.
Step 2: Use social media analytics to review your key performance metrics, such as follower growth, engagement (including the average engagement rates for particular months), publishing frequency, most engaging content formats, top-performing posts, traffic sources, community sentiment, question response rate, average response time, audience interests, demographics, and behaviors.
social media management dashboard reporting
Step 3: Put all that information into a neat social media audit template.
Social media audit example template
Step 4: Analyze the data and identify areas that could use improvement. For example, if you see a dip in your engagement volume, it might be a result of low content quality, inaccurate targeting, or wrong publishing frequency.
That’s exactly the type of information you need to single out shortcomings in your strategy. From there, you can take the first steps towards fixing them and making your social media management activities more efficient.
Decide on the right social media platforms
Another critical element of managing social media more efficiently is picking the right platform.
After you conduct a social media audit, it might turn out that some platforms simply don’t work well for your brand. In that case, you should take the time to understand the effort it will take to get the results you need.
A lot also depends on where your audience is. If during your research, you find out your audience is mostly on Twitter, for example, but your presence on the platform is far from strong, then you should obviously seek to improve.
If your results aren’t that great and your audience is somewhere else, you might consider shifting your resources to a different channel. But before you do, ask yourself the following questions:
What are my business objectives (improving brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, conversions, etc.)? Will I be able to meet my business objectives on the platform? How much will I have to spend to meet my goals?
Will I be able to perform efficiently enough to generate positive ROI on the platform? Will the amount be enough to justify the cost of marketing on the platform?
What are the demographics of the community on the platform and are they matching the demographics of the audience I’d like to reach?
Is my target audience present and active on the platform? Will I be able to reach them effectively?
How popular among marketers is the platform? How much content will I have to produce to stand out?
Is my direct competition present on the platform? How are they doing? Will I be able to outperform them?
If you need help picking the right platform for your business, here’s a little cheat sheet from Socialbakers (now part of Emplifi):
Choosing the right social media platform
Analyze your target audience
Analyzing your social media community is everything when it comes to managing social media efficiently. There are plenty of benefits to analyzing your followers – including building stronger customer relationships, creating more relevant content, and boosting social media conversions.
On the flip side, if you don’t do market research beforehand, you’re at risk of getting on the wrong path, wasting both money and resources.
How do you build a detailed picture of your social media audience?
Start off by segmenting your audience into personas according to their shared characteristics – you can do that using this free customer persona template.
Or, if you want to make your life easier, you can let AI do the job for you.
It’s likely that your customer personas will be diverse. For example, you can have a group of teens interested in sports and a group of 30-year-olds following Digiday’s Facebook page and interact with their content.
Having this information will allow you to make better use of your resources by concentrating on doing what works best with your community. Need help analyzing your target audience on social media? Check out this audience insights report from Socialbakers (now a part of Emplifi).
Stock up on the right social media management tools
Advanced social media management tools are essential to building, executing, and measuring your social media marketing strategy effectively.
Here’s what you’re going to need:
Top-to-middle-of-the-funnel tools
Analyzing your top- to mid-funnel audience is especially important. That’s because people at these stages, sometimes called an unknown audience, are your potential customers.
The better you know these users, the more effectively you’ll be able to nurture them towards conversion with tailored marketing campaigns.
So, which tools are going to come in handy at this point?
Native social media analytics. The audience data you can get from social media platforms is quite detailed and includes:
Facebook audience insights: demographics, page likes, locations, activity
Instagram insights: top locations, times, and days when your followers are most active
Twitter analytics: demographics, lifestyle, consumer behavior, mobile footprint
LinkedIn analytics: demographics, job function, seniority, industry, company size, employment status
Audience Analytics: These enable you to see your Facebook audience grouped into personas based on their demographics, interest, and behaviors. As a result, you can save the time you’d have to spend on manual audience research.
You’ll also be able to immediately turn the result of your audience analysis into action.
Bottom-of-the-funnel tools
Analyze the bottom of the funnel users, which are sometimes called a known audience, and use customer relationship management (CRM) tools to focus on every part of the customer experience (CX).
These will give you a better understanding of the people who purchased your products, including their demographics, the touchpoints on their customer journey, and content that eventually made them hit the buy button.
Content management tools
Content creation is an important part of the social media management process – but also a really challenging one. To make your content workflow faster and more organized, try these tools:
Content ideas tools
Social media monitoring – discover trending topics online that you can tap into
Social media analytics – see what your competitors are posting and get inspired by some of their most successful ideas
Audience analysis – understand the content your audience responds to positively
Content curation tools – find trending articles online that you can repost
Content inspiration – discover thousands of top social media posts that will resonate with each of your audience personas
Content inspiration
Content creation tools
Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay – visit these sites for free high-quality stock images
Canva, Makeagif, Awesome Screenshot – design amazing visuals for your posts
Biteable, Lumen5, Shakr – create fun social videos your followers will want to share
Google Docs, Grammarly, Nuclino – collaborate with your team to create social media copy
Social media editorial calendars
Google Calendar – use Google’s visual calendar to easily slot your posts
Google Spreadsheet – create your own editorial calendar tailored to your needs
Free calendar templates – save time with pre-made social media calendar templates
Content calendar scheduler – access a visual breakdown of your social media content, schedule and review posts (also from mobile!), and have your teamwork on all content-related tasks directly within the calendar
Social media publishing tools
Social media publisher – manage social media publishing more efficiently by posting to multiple platforms with a single click. Plus, you will get precise recommendations on the best publishing times, so you can maximize your visibility and interactions. Below is a look at the best times to post based on data from Socialbakers (now a part of Emplifi).
Best time for content scheduling & publishing
Best Time to post on Facebook in 2020 in the US East Coast by Impressions
Social media listening tools
Keeping tabs on online conversations around your brand is crucial to understanding the real impact of your campaigns that goes beyond just likes and comments.
Social listening – monitor social media for topics and queries, uncover the conversations about your brand and analyze the sentiment around them
Google alerts – create alerts for relevant phrases and topics appearing online and receive regular email reports, so you never miss a mention of your brand
Influencer collaboration tools
Managing influencer relationships is a relatively new addition to social media managers’ scope of work. Yet, it’s also become one of the most important tasks on their to-do lists.
Here’s how you can effectively manage influencer marketing-related activities:
Find influencers tool with AI – discover the most relevant influencers for your social media audience in seconds. Get an instant overview of their demographics, audience size, and engagement, along with an easy-to-understand performance score, so you can pair up with the most effective influencers.
Social customer care tools
Social media is a go-to channel for many customers to express their opinions or ask questions about your business. To be able to manage all the incoming messages, you might need:
Community management – interact with your community in an organized way with automated notifications, and defined team roles and responsibilities. View your incoming messages across channels in one spot and monitor your teams’ efficiency with filterable feeds, so you can provide top-notch customer service.
Social media analytics tools
Monitoring social media performance is critical to understanding the impact of your campaigns, identifying the most successful tactics, and fixing the shortcomings – which is why it’s so important to have the right tools.
Social media analytics – get a detailed understanding of your performance across channels in terms of all the key metrics, including:
Overall engagement
Distribution of interactions
Most engaging post types
User activity
Number of interactions per 1,000 fans
Number of fan posts
Most engaging posts overview
Share of promoted posts and interactions they generated
You will also be able to see how you compare to your main rivals in terms of these metrics to find out who’s ahead of the game. And to add even more context to your performance, you can benchmark your ad spending and video strategy effectiveness against your industry, region, or country.
Google Analytics – understand which social media platforms drive the most traffic to your website
Conclusion
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