Social Media Marketing Tools Open Source

Social media marketing is a great way to build your brand and engage with your customers, but it can be hard to manage all the different platforms, especially if you’re running a small business. If you’re looking for some help, we’ve got some great open source social media marketing tools that can help you save time and keep things organized.

Social Media Marketing Tools Open Source

People came to Facemash in a Stampede, Right?” Even if you have not watched the 2010 American biographical drama the Social Network, still most of you can relate with the above statement of Mark Zuckerberg to Eduardo Saverin in the film.  Zuckerberg played by Jesse Eisenberg is speaking about the popularity of his first social media attempt –Facemash. That was the year 2003. Facemash, a social media site designed by Zukerberg for a small college community, was an immediate success. The popularity that social media enjoyed since its genesis is still intact, and it has only increased with time.

The popularity of Social Media:

The global 2019 social media statistics, states that there are around 3.499* billion social media users (around the globe with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and Pinterest being the most popular social media platforms.  One can estimate the popularity of social sites that after Google, (which is a search engine), the two most visited sites in the world are both social network sites-Facebook and YouTube. It gives us a clear idea of why social media management is so important in the present business context.

 Using Social Media for Customer Engagement by Businesses:

Social media has stretched its boundaries from being just a social network platform for friends and acquaintances to becoming an inevitable avenue for businesses today.

It is often quoted that – ‘trend is your friend,’ and in the current business environment, social media engagement is the trend. The growth of a business largely depends upon the customers’ engagement with the brand. Customers are very sensitive about the online reputation of the brands they use. Any dent to the online credibility of your brand can ruin the business, therefore maintaining the online stature of the brand is extremely important for the growth of any business. Research suggests that companies that engage their customers efficiently on social media platforms are more likely to get business than their rivals. This makes the social media management strategy a deciding factor for the success of any brand.

Why is social media management so important for businesses?

1. Providing customer care services through social media:

Customers appreciate when brands reply to their grievances on social media platforms; it makes them feel more connected to the brand.

2. Increasing your credibility:

Brands that have a presence on social media platforms are seen as more trustworthy by customers than those who are not. When customers see other buyers actively participating in discussions involving the review, feedback, or after-sales service of a brand, they become sure of the brands’ authenticity. 

3. Creating a story around your brand:

Your brand should not only satisfy your customer but should also create the emotional connect by inspiring them. No other avenue provides the ease of spreading a story around your brand as social media does. Sharing Instagram stories Facebook live, sharing videos of other happy customers and other engaging content helps you to communicate the story or the idea behind your brand.

4. Disseminating information in a creative way:

The growing popularity of social media can be attributed to its creative potential. Brands that use social media for disseminating information regarding new product releases, company news, promotional news, research, or any other expansion plans are likely to get more traction than any other medium.

5. Two-way communication:

When businesses use social media for reaching their customers, it allows them to get the customers feedback, views, or opinion about their action, which is not possible with most of the traditional modes. Social media ensures the willing participation of your customers in the business process. Social media has become a two-way information process.

It is very clear that social media management is an important factor to retain existing customers and add new ones. Social media management requires skilled people who can handle multiple tasks and social networks at the same time. These people are called as Social Media Managers.

Social media managers have to handle an enormous amount of social activity, and therefore, they rely on certain tools that increase their efficiency to manage their social media strategy. These tools are termed as Social Media Management Software.

What is Social Media Management Software?

Social media management software (SMMS) is an application or software module that is designed to integrate the activities on various social media networking sites so as to help the brands in managing and analyzing their social media presence and interactions. Primarily used for increasing brand awareness, this software can also help in managing social profiles for distinguished personalities. SMMS integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, and other popular social media platforms to provide the social media managers insights about customer’s perception of their brand on these platforms.

1. Socioboard

 Socioboard is a free and open source social media management software that has powerful social media suite for all businesses. It generates reports and analyzes data to help social media managers make informed business decisions.

Features:

• Live chat, a news feed, timeline, profiles, events, notifications
• Highly customizable and scalable open-source interface.
• Scheduling & publishing is easy with Socioboard
• It generates tickets to reply to negative comments
• RSS Feed to distribute a list of headlines, notices, and content to the audience automatically
• Google Analytics integration to track website traffic.
• The innovative feature of Sentiment analysis conducts language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics.
• Sophisticated analytics and interactive social discovery tools
• Team collaboration tools and 24/7 Technical Support
• Social CRM tools and Helpdesk integration

(Source- Socioboard)

2. HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite is a free social media management software that supports social network integration for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Hootsuite offers a free plan with features to manage multiple networks, scheduling content, and engaging with the audience in a single dashboard. In the free plan, one can manage up to 3 social media profiles. It requires only one password for three profiles on different social networking sites. It provides support and online help through the community forum. It also helps users to find and share important content from verified sources. It allows users to schedule posts to keep regular contact with the audience automatically.

Features:

• Two RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed integration to easily distribute content to a large number of people.
• Users can curate their content by searching for popular hashtags or keywords.
• Its content library feature their content efficiently.
• Its hootlet extension allows to post or schedule content without even the need to login into the social accounts.
• Users can track the social post-performance in different timeframes through customizable reports with over 200 metrics.
• Allows searching and filtering social conversations in multiple languages.
• Users can see messages and comments on multiple social networks in one place.
• The metrics measure the influence of social media content across multiple channels and campaigns.
• The reports can be exported in Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and CSV formats.

(Source- Hootsuite)

3. Everypost

            Everypost is a free social media management software that facilitates handling customizing and scheduling posts with visual content to create a greater impact on the audience. With this tool it is very easy to inspect the latest multimedia content from different social networks.

Features:

• Every Post focuses on Visual content as a strong and effective social media strategy to gain more engagements.
• Users can create groups of social networks.
• Users can share content from other sources to increase engagement metrics.
• Everypost gives  users the ability to customize your content to suit the style
• Various post customization options are available, and each Post can be customized differently.
• Collaboration and managing roles and permission levels between team members.
• It allows custom scheduling of posts, previous multimedia post-viewing, and option to delete previously scheduled posts.

(Source-Everypost)

4. Social oomph

Social oomph falls into the category of free social media management software that has features of an advanced scheduling and publishing tool. It automates social media activities across various social networks.

Features:

• Social oomph enables the users to manage their own social posts and those of their clients, in one account.
• Scheduling at the preferred time slot.
• Creating posts and uploading multiple posts is allowed.
• There is an option to separate client data from users.
• Users can make assign associates and subordinates to their account; assign special roles and authorize admin to work on selected profiles and blogs.
• Videos/images are restricted from the bulk upload.
• Allows Tagging and grouping posts to search them easily.
• Users can create social, and blog posts from RSS feed entries automatically.
• Social oomph has a feature to set a limit on the number of the posts users post in a given interval of time.
• This prevents social media managers from posting too frequently.
• Creating posts with the help of other services such as IFTTT is possible.
• It’s content planning tools helps to implement marketing campaigns easily.

(Source-Social Oomph)

5. SM Hack

It is a powerful free social media management software for publishing and scheduling posts for increased traction on social media platforms. Its inbuilt features support social media managers to increase their reach and engagement on various platforms.

Features:

• SM hack allows assigning user roles to team members.
• Replying, commenting, and re-tweeting option.
• Admin can allocate tasks, approve conversations, and close interactions.
• Users can compose relevant content and post them to their social profiles
• Postpone posts by auto-scheduling
• It generates a report of the user’s content and publishing strategy
• It tracks and unveils your competitor’s complete social media strategy
• It creates useful and detailed team progress charts
• It analyzes patterns in your rival’s brand followers growth rate
• Learn your competition’s fan behavior to create an engaging strategy
• It creates categories for content based on contemporary popular themes
• A high performing post can be up-cycled from one platform to other

(Source-SMhack)

6. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a free social media management software that is used to manage multiple social media platforms, unlimited schedule posts, and track keywords from a single dashboard. Zoho Social is a social media suite that has all the features required to build a brand reputation in social media. In its free edition, it lets one user work on one brand. It also provides URL shortener & zShare Browser extension in its free version.

Features:

• Its SmartQ feature can predict the most active time of your audience.
• Posting in such unique time slots can be very beneficial for social media managers.
• Managers can create a spreadsheet to create and schedule multiple posts for days in advance.
• Create spreadsheets to track reviews, keywords, or comments.
• Facebook Lead Ads account can be integrated with Zoho Social to monitor leads in real-time.
• Monitoring ad campaigns’ performance to drive leads is easy with this feature.
• It has an inbuilt ticketing option that converts social media updates into tickets.
• Each ticket can be responded separately to deliver support to your social media followers.
• It provides the entire context of a previous conversation to respond to everyone who interacts with your brand on social media.
• Assigning roles to your team members and determining the access they will have to admin rights is possible.
• Know the demographics of the audience and the content they are interacting.
• Use analytics to customize reports for multiple social channels.
• Options to make reports visually appealing with colorful graphs and charts are available.
• Lets user schedule posts and automate reports.
• zShare browser plugin curates interesting articles that the user is viewing.

(Source- Zoho Social)

7. CrowdFire

Crowdfire is a free social media management platform that supports scheduling content and managing all your social accounts from a single window.

Features:

• Lets users curate content from across the web from multiple sources.
• Schedule and publish content to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
• Posts are customized according to the social media platform.
• For each platform, there is a tailored post with enabled preview option.
• Customizing for the optimal time for posting is possible.
• Users can also set the timing for the Post with the inbuilt best time option.
• Users will never have nil post days. The queue meter makes sure that users have enough posts scheduled for a week in advance.
• If users enter topics they want to post, then Crowdfire will suggest them relevant articles and images.
• Users can Connect Shopify, WordPress blog, Youtube account to schedule product updates.
• Post Engagement metrics gives the user a clear picture of the Post’s performance.
• Good posts can be segregated from the bad ones.
• Users can add the RSS feed
• It provides Image editing suggestions for sharing images for Instagram.
• Monitor your past performance with detailed analytical charts.
• Crowd fire tracks every mention, comment, and reply, and users can reply to multiple platforms using a single dashboard.

 (Source- Crowdfire)

8. Juicer

Juicer is a free social media management software. Juicer has over 60,000 active users. It is a great tool to aggregate brands’ hashtag and other content into a unified, beautiful social media feed. Images and photos from various social media channels can be embedded into one feed.

Features:

• Add and assign user roles to team members
• Planning and scheduling of social media posts.
• It allows featuring loyal customers on the website as well as social media
• It has an easy to use dashboard with navigation for all of your social media content.
• Social media moderation and filtering features
• It integrates with over 15 different social media sources allowing social media managers multiple options to find relevant content.
• ‘Send All Posts to Moderation’ button for checking before posting.
• It curates content before final posting.
• Social walls to display social content aggregated from the various social platform.

(Source-Juicer)

9. Sprout Social

      It is a social media management software that has a very sophisticated platform to monitor and engage with messages across multiple social media channels with  a unified social inbox.

Features:

• Set actionable tasks and assign them to a teammate
• Monitor and manage your business reviews
• Track activity on your paid posts by monitoring and engaging with comments
• View real-time indicators on the message dashboard
• Integrate your Google Analytics
• Easily email presentation-ready PDF reports
•  View and manage social posts across multiple networks
• See conversation history across profiles
• Monitor and engage with comments
• Set customized mobile alerts
• Build and save drafts on your calendar
• Add filters and optimize images for each network
• Report  in PDF/CSV exports

(Source- Sprout Social)

10. Buffer

      Buffer is popular social media management software that allows users to create, schedule and post from a single platform. It has its own image curator-Pablo. Buffer provides advanced analytics and reports about post performance. It is a complete social media management solution.

Features:

• Customized posts for each social network
• Overview of all the planned content on a single screen
• Team collaboration
• Review and moderate  posts for quality before publishing
• Planning and scheduling  posts
• Plan posts in advance and turn on the reminder notifications
• Measure social media performance,
• Create appealing analytical reports
• Create reports and track performance for one dashboard
• Provides reports of your performance in multiple social networks.
• View engagement metrics for each social media account
• Respond to social interactions
• Resolve customer queries

(Source-Buffer)    

 Conclusion:

Social media can fetch a company plethora of customers, leads, and sales. Social media managers can skillfully gain customers and business by channelizing their strategy appropriately. 

For instance, Facebook suits more for building brand loyalty, whereas Twitter can be utilized for building public relations. Companies selling fashion brands can focus on Instagram, whereas food businesses are likely to get target audience on Pinterest. LinkedIn can be strategically used for building B2B relationships. Youtube can be used for sharing informative videos about your brand. 

Brand Reputation is an intangible asset that has a lot of inherent value in it. A tarnished brand reputation can fail a fundamentally strong business. Customers are inclined to buy a product from a company that they often read about, regularly hear about, or see frequently. Brand awareness itself is a robust asset that very few companies can boast of possessing. Brand management is crucial to the success of any organization.

Social media managers aim to avail the opportunities that social media offers in the present business world to attain the goal of efficient brand management. They oversee the marketing campaigns on social media networks to grow their company’s businesses. With 3.499 billion people using social media, marketing managers cannot afford to ignore the potential that social media offers as a brand awareness tool. 

It is also prudent for social media managers to leverage technology to ease the process of creating, scheduling, posting, responding, and analyzing the content across various social media networks.  The social media software discussed in the article can immensely benefit social media managers to implement their social media strategy efficiently.  

You may even share your thoughts in the comments section below. If you have used any of the social media management software mentioned above, then do share your feedback with us. 

socioboard github

Socioboard is world’s first open source social technology enabler and first open source product company from India. We build social technology which helps businesses and brands to better understand social media and harness its real power. Our vision is to provide easy to use tools to businesses and brands which covers 360 degree use cases when it comes to Social Media.

We are building innovative products for various social networks which fill the critical gap – Social Networks were meant for user’s not for businesses. Our tools and products view Social from a business point of view and fill those gaps which social networks cannot fill exquisitely. Business should own their social data and they should be incharge of what they want to do with it, generate reports and analyze data to make informed and improved business decisions. This is possible when things are open and businesses have freedom to choose, we believe open source is a way to make this possible. So that brands and businesses can embrace social technology with an open mind in an open and connected world.

We believe in providing our users with choice, we don’t push useless buggy bloatware to their throat and force them to pay for it.

Our products resonate with our vision to make social technologies more open.

Socioboard Core (Commercial and Open Source) –

Socioboard Core is an open source social media management, analytics and reporting platform. It supports nine social media networks. Using Socioboard Core you can monitor and manage multiple social media accounts and create useful reports and take business decisions based on them. Socioboard Core is available as a web app and mobile apps on iOS and Android. Its completely open source and fully customizable and extensible in the form of plugins. It has a commercial SAAS version at – www.socioboard.com and open source version at – www.socioboard.org

BrandBuzzPro –

BrandBuzzpro is a SAAS based Socioboard product which helps brands to recruits its employees and customers as its marketing crew. The best form of marketing is word of mouth marketing and those brands which can get their customers to as their brand ambassadors are the best brands out there. You don’t need Kim Kardashian to advertise your brand if you can create a thousand Kardashians from your existing customers and employees.

BrandBuzzPro helps you to engage with your employees and loyal customers and engage with them in a unique way to make them your social brand ambassadors.

BrandHit –

BrandHit is a SAAS based influencer marketing product to reach influencers in your niche and get them to tweet or share on facebook, instagram or linkedin about your brand on your product.

Influencers come to the platform, sign up and post a price per tweet or post on various networks . They also select categories or niches in which they would like to endorse posts/tweets about brands.

Brands can signup and find influencers in their category and pay them to post a tweet or make a share in their Facebook profile.

This personalized recommendation from top influences in the industry is much better than spending marketing dollars on useless media buys.

Socioboard has partnered with top influencers in multiple categories and will partner with more of them in future to bring the best online influencers to our platform.

This can become a huge marketing channel and a big customer acquisition channel for startups and brands who are just starting up and don’t have huge marketing budgets.

For startups in fashion, e-commerce , social e-commerce, social and mobile app companies looking to launch new apps, they can now reach their industry influencers and pitch them for a tweet or personalized Facebook post.

Socioboard BoardMe –

BoardMe is a self service platform which helps you to create Social Boards and stream them everywhere like web, desktop, mobile or any other screen.

Using Boardme, you can connect Social Feeds or Hastags into 1 place from all your social networks.

Socioboard Desktop Applications for Social Media Marketers –

Socioboard desktop apps are the swiss knife of Social Media Marketing Industry.

Socioboard desktop applications are not completely restricted by the various APIs of the social networks like Socioboard Web and Mobile apps. Rather they give you a complete competeting user experience with the original network but as a desktop application. The Desktop apps are a collective effort of the socioboard community spread globally.

Socioboard desktop apps must be used with utmost care to make sure you remain within the social network usage limits and don’t over do something. It’s best to use them under trained guidance from experts.

inBoardPro (http://www.inboardpro.com/) – inBoardPro is linkedin marketing on Steroids. Its a desktop application which helps you to automate everything you can do on linkedin. It helps you to manage multiple linkedin accounts, connect with new members in the linked community, post automated updates , manage all your linkedin groups and do a whole lot of things on linkedin. The open source version of inboardpro is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/inboard

faceboardPro (http://faceboardpro.com/) – faceBoardPro is an automated facebook marketing software. It helps you to automate your regular facebook tasks with few clicks. It helps to you manage multiple facebook accounts, manage your friends, groups, pages, apps etc. Basically it can automate all your day to day facebook management tasks and save a lot of your time. The open source version of faceboardpro is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/faceboard

gramBoardPro (http://gramboardpro.com/) – gramBoardPro is an instagram automation power-house. It can manage all your instagram tasks , likes, comments etc. Very useful software for instagram marketers. The open source version is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/gramboard

twtBoardPro (http://twtboardpro.com/) – twtBoardPro is an twitter marketing platform. It helps you manage multiple twitter accounts and automate your tweets, re-tweets, favorites etc. You can do a whole lot of stuff on twitter and get ultra productive on twitter by using this software. The open source version of twtboardpro is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/twtboard

Socioboard Mobile Apps for Social Media Marketers –

Socioboard Official App – The official app is an extension of Socioboard Core app on iOS and Android. It helps you manage all your social media accounts you have connected to Socioboard Web Core via mobile apps.

Android Version : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.socioboard iOS Version : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/socioboard/id923398550?mt=8

t-boardpro — t-boardpro is a multiple twitter account management app, it helps you to login to multiple twitter accounts from your iOS or Android device and do various twitter activities like tweeting, re-tweeting, favorites, follow, unfollow, scheduling tweets etc. Its a a very powerful twitter marketing automation app. The open source version is called t-board is available on github – https://github.com/socioboard/t-board

f-boardpro — f-boardpro is a multiple facebook account management app, it helps you to login to multiple facebook accounts from your iOS or Android device and do various facebook activities like post, like, comment,managing pages, groups and much more. The open source version is called f-board is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/f-board

l-boardpro — l-boardpro is a multiple LinkedIn account management app. It helps you to login multiple LinkedIn accounts from you iOS or Android device and do LinkedIn activities like share comments, see user following companies details and user can see latest jobs in following company. The open source version of l-boardpro is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/l-board

i-boardpro — i-boardpro is a multiple instagram account management app, it helps you to login to multiple instagram accounts from your iOS or Android device and do various instagram activities like follow, unfollow,comment,like, scheduling posts etc. Its a a very powerful instagram marketing automation app. The opensource version of i-boardpro is hosted here – https://github.com/socioboard/i-board

Why Open Source ?

There are many great tools available for managing social media programs, from content management systems to analytics tools. But many of the systems available are rigid in their architecture, and cannot be customized to meet the specific editorial, workflow, and governance needs of various organizations. By creating a customizable, open source alternative, teams can model their system on the way they operate in the real world.

There is too much focus on vanity metrics. Marketers don’t focus on driving business results through social media. Brands are still using social media as a broadcast channel.

Social media marketers face the difficulty to access technology that is flexible enough to meet their needs for approval workflow, compliance, asset management, moderation, etc. The tools available for managing social media are often lacking, and perpetuate the issues in social media marketing by overemphasizing broadcasting content and vanity metrics.Marketers don’t focus on driving business results through social media. Brands are still using social media as a broadcast channel.

Open-source is a revolution in an industry which is mostly dominated by big names, in other words it’s a boon in an industry which generally talks about hefty amounts from end users. With many organizations reaching out to open source it is undoubtedly becoming clear that price is not the only advantage which open-source holds against proprietary softwares. We have listed some distinct compelling advantages for business users as well as individuals: Security : The more open the code is the more possibilities it holds to be tested in field and hence the more secure it can be made as is evident by example of Linux distributions.

• Quality : Thousands of developers contributing across international borders will obviously produce better quality outcome than a handful of developers.
• Customizability : Users can take a piece of open source software and tweak it to suit their needs as they please.
• Freedom : Open-source gives freedom from nasty vendor lock-in which people have to endure with proprietary softwares.
• Flexibility : Open source softwares are typically much less resource-intensive, meaning that people can run it well even on older hardware. It’s up to end user not some vendor to decide when it’s time to upgrade.
• Interoperability : Open source software is much better at degree of interoperability vis a vis proprietary software.
• Auditability : The visibility of the code behind open source software means you can see for yourself and be confident about the quality and functionality.
• Try Before You Buy : Costs nothing to try. No commitment required until you’re sure.

Technology :

Socioboard is created using ASP.NET, MVC 4.0, and JQuery with back end as MySQL.

APIs to be used to retrieve or post the data to social networking sites would be:

Twitter – REST API v1.1 – Wrapper Written in C#.net

Facebook – Graph API – Facebook C# SDK

linkedin – REST API – Wrapper Written in C#.net

Google Plus – HTTP API – Wrapper Written in C#.net

Instagram’s API – Wrapper Written in C#.net

The scheduler service, developed in C#, would run on a 24/7 server. This scheduler would post the message at the scheduled time to selected account(s).

Devices and Platforms :

Socioboard is available on web, desktop and mobiles. We have Android and iOS apps which work in tandem with the web app.

Build Instructions

1. Once you load the project in visual studio, you have see a solution structure with following projects.

2. Build the entire solution, if you face build errors like –

You need to go to the respective project and add references from the lib folder located inside the socioboard project folder.

All libraries are placed here

3. For build errors like – Source file ‘Web References\Api.LinkedinMessage\Reference.cs’ could not be found  follow these steps  

Some application screenshots

Conclusion

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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