Do you want to grow your business with social media?
You need to become good at managing your accounts. But it’s easier said than done.
Yes, managing social media accounts on different social networking sites can be overwhelming especially if you are an agency owner, you own multiple businesses, or you have to manage multiple social media accounts as part of your job.
More than 90% of the businesses use more than two social networks to engage with their customers.
When there are as much as 2.3 billion active social media users out there, businesses have a solid reason to use social networks to take their marketing to the next level.
The following social media statistics for 2016 shows why every business should use more than one social network.
Of course, managing multiple social accounts is a pain.
Around 60% of the businesses and marketers say that measuring ROI for their social media marketing is one of their biggest challenges.
In another study, 49% of the marketers said that social media marketing is the most difficult type of marketing they do.
Do You Really Need A Social Media Tools?
Yes you do. A social media management tool helps businesses and marketers manage, monitor, and analyze social media accounts and activities.
Not sure if you need a social media management tool? The following statistics will reveal why it is the right time to start using one:
a). More than 52% of the marketers find it difficult to measure ROI.
b). Forty-eight percent of the businesses lack a robust social media marketing strategy.
c). Some 67% users are of the view that brands do not do a great job of dealing with their customers on social networks.
d). Over 81% of the businesses reported that they will increase the social media marketing budget if they can better track ROI.
e). More than 42% of the social media managers have no clue how they can make use of the data collected from social media and how to hook it to the business strategy.
f). As much as 86% of the marketers do not know which social media marketing tools they should use.
g). Over 42% of the customers expect to receive a reply from a brand on a social network in less than 60 minutes. (Source)
h). Businesses are unable to respond to 8 out of 9 important customer messages on social networks and it can take more than 3 days to respond to a valid customer query. (Source)
While your business might be running smoothly and there must be a lot happening on the Facebook page but who knows, you might be underutilizing your resources and losing customers at the same time.
In essence, every business needs social media management tool, at least one if not more. If you don’t use one, you are leaving food on the table.
The following 18 tools will help you manage your social media accounts, engage with customers, analyze and monitor progress, and will help you stay at the top.
1. HootSuite
HootSuite is one of the leading and most used social media management tool that lets you manage multiple social media accounts and profiles all from a single easy-to-use dashboard.
It supports 35 different social networks, is available in 16 languages, and it is used by 744 top 1000 fortune companies. It is an enterprise level tool that is used by 1600 enterprises and it crossed 10 million users back in 2014.
It is one awesome tool that your business cannot live without.
Here is a sneak peek of what you can do with this tool:
Manage social media accounts and profiles from one portal.
Create, schedule, and send posts and messages to all the accounts simultaneously.
Engage and collaborate with customers at a personal level without failing to respond on time.
Advanced analytics help you track, monitor, and analyze your social media marketing.
Increase social media reach with more than 80 different apps.
Assign tasks to your teams.
Manage multiple campaigns smoothly from the dashboard.
Available for all types of businesses including enterprises.
Comes with a free plan for small businesses.
Case studies like these are encouraging and show how powerful, effective, and result-oriented HootSuite is.
Unfortunately, businesses do not use this amazing tool to its fullest capacity. It is much more than a mere dashboard to use all social media accounts.
It has some of the best features that are not available with most of the other similar tools such as it measures your team’s performance, reports that help improve ROI, and third-party smooth app integrations.
2. Buffer
Buffer is an easy-to-use app that helps you track engagement, schedule posts, and measure the performance of individual posts by engagement numbers.
It is more of a post-scheduling app that is widely used to schedule posts and track and monitor them.
As Moon said, “Sharing more than once is an essential part of providing your audience with the value you promised them. If you don’t share your links a few times, they may never see any of your updates.”
Sharing a single post or any resource multiple times using different messages can double your traffic and sharing your message multiple times has the chances of getting your post viral. Buffer is just the right type of tool to achieve it.
Of course, Buffer is not just about scheduling your posts, it has a powerful analytics tab that will reveal information and statistics beyond your imagination. Other perks offered by Buffer include:
It has built-in support for shortening links.
You can assign tasks to team members.
Not just that you can schedule posts but you can set the frequency of the daily posting.
It supports multiple profiles and accounts.
It has a browser extension and mobile apps that make it a piece of cake to use Buffer on the go.
In simple words, Buffer allows you do pretty much of all these three:
Planning the social media post
Implementation
Measuring
What else do you need?
3. Sprout Social
Are you struggling to communicate with your customers? Do you find it hard to keep your users engaged on different social networks?
Sprout Social is exactly the type of tool that will aid you in staying connected with your customers on five leading social networks including:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
Google+
Besides it integrates with Google Analytics, Feedly, Bitly, Zendesk, and User Voice. Yes, Sprout Social helps you integrate Zendesk with your social networks, assign customer tickets to your team members, listen to customer queries, and keep track of everything. A lot of brands are already using Sprout Social. Trello is one of them.
Trello has replied to more than 2K messages in three months using Sprout Social. “Sprout allows us to build a better product by hearing and engaging from our users and better supporting them”, says Brian Cervino of Trello.
Brands like Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Wahl, Raen, Hurrdat, and many others have had massive success with Sprout Social.
Over 30% of the customers reported that they will switch to a competitor if a brand doesn’t reply them on time, while another 36% customers have bashed at least one company on social media for poor customer services. There is no solution but to use Sprout Social to listen to your customers and to engage with them.
Sprout Social has a lot to offer:
It helps you and your team collaborate seamlessly.
You can link and use multiple social media profiles from a single dashboard.
Its social CRM is definitely the next big thing in the market.
Monitor, track, and analyze social interactions, response time, team performance, and much more.
Create, publish, and schedule social media posts.
Integration with third-party apps is a huge add-on.
4. SocialOomph
As much as 6000 tweets are sent every second. Are you doing any special thing to make your tweets stand out from the crowd?
Are you sure your followers read your tweets and messages and posts on other social networks?
SocialOomph is the tool that automates pretty much everything. Schedule social media posts, messages, and send auto-messages to new followers on Twitter.
These are some of the basic features of the SocialOomph:
It is capable of doing much more.
If you think automated tweets are worthless, you should read this case study. Automated tiny tweets changed the life of this girl forever. It’s no joke!
SocialOomph is a powerful tool and can magically do awesome things for your business if used right. Here is an overview of what it offers:
Works with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, RSS feeds, blogs, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Plurk, and App.net.
It will automate everything ranging from posts to direct messages to photo uploads to video shares and more.
You can add unlimited accounts, monitor profiles, create reports, and devise a better social media marketing strategy with its analytics.
Other cool features include SPAM filter, mimic follow, keyword searches, profile filters, and many others.
5. IFTTT
IFTTT is an interesting and a unique kind of social management tool that puts you in the driving seat. You can create recipes to control your social media automation. It is a social media automation tool that gives you full control over everything.
In a nutshell, IFTTT connects two social networks and lets you create formulas (known as recipes) using ‘if this then that’ logic.
An action on Facebook will trigger a responding action on Twitter (or any other social account). For example, a customer query received on Facebook can be posted on Twitter as a post.
In reality, this is an exceptional tool that doesn’t just automates but it connects and link multiple apps and social accounts together. IFTTT works with all the leading social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and others.
There are hundreds of recipes already available on the IFTTT website so you don’t necessarily have to create a recipe.
Not just social media but it works with tons of other apps and tools.
You can work with multiple apps, social networks, and can automate your entire business and social networking. It is not just easy but fun.
Not sure how to get started with IFTTT? Don’t worry, Moz social media automation will help you with it and here are a few ready-to-use IFTTT social media automation recipes.
Social Media Examiner
Search engine people
6. Oktopost
Oktopost is the social management tool for businesses which helps them gain leads and earn money. It is different from the other social management apps in the sense that it focuses more on the analytics and tweaking your strategy.
The real power of the Oktopost is its ability to track clicks on the posts, profiles, and networks. This is clearly something that is not common with other tools.
Social media automation.
Ability to run multiple campaigns from one account.
Editorial calendar will keep things on track.
Lead attribution and customer acquisition are perhaps the best features of the Oktopost analytics.
Content analysis and data portability are a couple awesome features.
Keep track of the customer engagement and social interactions.
Team collaboration is super-easy with Oktopost.
Social reach amplification helps you generate leads.
Panaya reaches 23% conversion rate using Oktopost. The director of marketing at Panaya says:
“Oktopost is invaluable for tracking leads and analyzing the value of our social media activities. This enables us to ensure that our social media campaigns are effective, fully optimized, and reach the right people at the right time.”
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/oktopost/co-direct-case-study-32436717
Oktopost is used by businesses all over the globe and most of their customers are able to gain a competitive edge with this amazing tool.
Get on the train and improve the way you interact with your customers on social networks.
7. Tweepi
Do you take Twitter lightly? You shouldn’t because Twitter has 1.3 billion accounts. Whether it’s for fun or random thoughts, the fact is people use Twitter – businesses should use it too.
Tweepi is all about Twitter. It is a Twitter management tool or more precisely, it is a tool to get more followers and to grow your business on the Twitter.
Here is how Tweepi works:
Find relevant users on the Twitter based on interest and other filters.
Engage with the right users using mentions and other tactics.
Increase brand awareness and get new followers.
Twitter is growing rapidly and the businesses that are not on Twitter will suffer. It is least likely that a business in 2016 is not on Twitter. The problem isn’t to be on Twitter or not to be on Twitter but the issue is making it convert for you.
Generating leads, get targeted followers, and drive traffic to your website is the hard part of the Twitter strategy. This is where Tweepi is great. It makes Twitter work for businesses by doing all of the following.
Follow the most appropriate people.
Reciprocate your followers by following them back.
Identify and unfollow irrelevant people.
Identify inactive users.
Grow your business on Twitter using geo-location, filters, and multiple account management.
Perhaps the best thing about Tweepi is that it lets you get rid of the useless followers. There are hardly any other tools that let you do this.
Having hundreds of useless followers on Twitter is of no use at all. It makes analysis and monitoring difficult. Why waste resources on analytics and reporting when you have nothing but irrelevant users following you?
8. CrowdBooster
Need a simple yet effective management tool to track and analyze your social media marketing strategy for Facebook and Twitter? Try CrowdBooster.
CrowdBooster is all about Twitter and Facebook analytics. Nothing fancy here. It will provide you with clean real-time data from your social accounts.
It’s one of the best tools that has the potential to give a decent boost to user engagement. It’s all based on measuring your campaigns – to improve them.
It is useless to spend heaps of money on social media marketing if you cannot measure the progress and engagement. CrowdBooster is the most appropriate tool for small businesses that measures and optimizes your social media strategy.
Here is how it does it:
It generates ready-to-use reports that can be exported to Excel with one click.
It only works for Facebook and Twitter thus it keeps you focused.
Based on the real-time analysis, it gives suggestions on the best time to post. You can schedule posts.
It also finds the most engaged users on both the networks.
CrowdBooster has the potential to keep track of everything that’s going on Facebook and Twitter. For small businesses, it is no less than a blessing. It will change the way you interact with your audience.
Perhaps the best feature of CrowdBooster is its ability to suggest the best time to post on Twitter and Facebook.
As pointed here, this is one of the best features.
“This is by far the most impressive aspect of Twitter analytics on the site. It feels like they may have gone a bit overboard with the analytics offered beyond this, such as looking at your followers and follower growth, which provides too much information without any real need.”
9. DashBurst
Are you struggling to source images, videos, articles, audios, and other types of content for your social accounts? Sit back because DashBurst has got you covered.
DashBurst is a social network and content management tool for creators and designers.
Now you don’t have to worry about images and videos to post on Facebook and Twitter, you can get everything from it. The best thing about this tool is its ability to post content on social networks automatically.
For example, if you like an image, Burst it which means to repost it on the DashBurst network. The same image can be scheduled to go live on your Twitter account as a new post.
In essence, DashBurst doesn’t just provide you with content but it acts as an automation tool that will publish content on your social networks.
Besides, you can curate content and create your own boards – just like you do on Pinterest.
Social media posts without images and visual content perform poorly. More than 46% of the marketers say that a photograph is critical for their marketing strategy.
Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than posts without an image.
DashBurst solves this very issue of the businesses. It is an open content network that allows hundreds and hundreds of ideas and content pieces to post on your social accounts.
DashBurst is a relatively different kind of a tool for social marketers but it is indeed very useful.
10. SocialFlow
Does your business spend a major portion of its marketing budget on social PPC campaigns? SocialFlow is the best tool for businesses that helps them keep track of paid and free social media campaigns.
SocialFlow is the most appropriate tool for social media publishing and advertising.
Find the best time to publish posts.
Schedule posts for massive reach and engagement.
Increase ROI and revenue per customer with detailed analysis, reporting, and insights.
It guides you where to spend money for best ROI. Which posts to boost, when to boost them, and what results to expect from the campaigns.
Forrester Research summed it up nicely:
“At its best, this new breed of SRPs goes one step further to automate actions based on these insights. Witness SocialFlow’s ability to automatically post content at the right moment.”
When posting on social media, timing is everything. An awesome tweet posted at the wrong time will not get any attention while a poor tweet at the right time will get all the attention. Understanding when to post on social networks is the real key.
Instead of scheduling posts manually, why not do it automatically? This is where SocialFlow comes into action.
It suggests the best time to post based on the past data from your own social accounts. It doesn’t look at anything else which makes its prediction top-notch.
SocialFlow has taken the social media post timing to another level. It has already helped several brands including BBC, Allrecipes, New York Magazine, and many others.
11. Audiense
Previously known as SocialBro, Audiense works similar to SocialFlow. The only difference is that Audiense only works with Twitter and Instagram. It’s the official Twitter partner so you can expect a lot from it.
It helps you target and engage with your followers and target audience on social networks like never before. It’s an all-in-one Twitter and Instagram tool for businesses.
Find key influencers.
Find the best time to post on Twitter.
Increase user engagement.
Track and analyze competitor Twitter accounts.
Monitor the timeline of your followers.
It recommends the type of posts based on competitor analysis and follower analysis.
Increase followers, reach, engagement, and ROI with recommended tweets.
Create ads and schedule them.
Detailed analysis and reporting.
DHL Africa reached more than 65K influencers on Twitter in more than 45 African countries in 2015 using SocialBro via HaveYouHeard.
Adami, the social media manager at HaveYouHeard said:
“We were able to help share DHL’s love of Africa, rugby and CSR projects with the use of Audiense. The tool helped us identify top influencers in both Africa, and the world, making it easier for us to gain leverage on the twittersphere.”
Audiense is the tool that you should use if Twitter is the main social network that your business is hooked to.
12. Socedo
Managing social accounts is one thing and generating leads from social networks is a different game entirely. You must have noticed that most of these tools just help you manage social accounts. Thanks to Socedo because it is different.
Socedo is a social lead generation tool that helps you find and identify leads from Twitter and LinkedIn. Now this is an amazing software because generating leads mean real business. What else does a business needs?
But wait, there is more…
It finds the best and the most appropriate followers and potential leads based on their interest.
The leads are automatically entered in your sales funnel.
It tracks the prospects in real-time.
Create multiple campaigns and manage all of them from Socedo.
Ability to A/B test different messages, posts, images, and other variables.
You can create workflows for qualified leads. The workflow can be customized based on the individual customer journey.
It pulls all the information about the leads from the social networks including their job, email address, postal address, company, etc.
Easy integration with third-party tools and software such as CRM software, Marketo, Hubspot, and others.
Socedo is one of the few social media management tools with hundreds and hundreds of success stories. Some of the top brands like Lenovo, Ceros, Inside Sales Team, and others.
13. TweetDeck
TweetDeck is the official platform owned by Twitter. It is an extremely simple-to-use browser that lets you monitor your Twitter accounts. You can manage multiple accounts and it works smoothly with teams.
You can share your Twitter account with others without sharing your password.
Track your Twitter account and feed in real-time.
Schedule tweets.
Manage multiple personal and business accounts.
Activate alerts and notifications based on keywords, mentions, and interests.
Share accounts with your team.
Personalize your feed based on your personal and/or business preferences.
TweetDeck is a simple and easy-to-use tool that is often compared with other big names like HootSuite and Buffer.
Though it has no match but for small businesses that are only interested in basic Twitter management such as scheduling, real-time analytics, and managing multiple accounts from a single dashboard, there is nothing better than the free TweetDeck.
14. AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is more than a scheduling tool for social networks. It is a complete CRM software that works smoothly with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
You can use AgoraPulse to:
Manage multiple social media profiles and accounts from a single account.
Get better with social engagement by monitoring and responding to tweets, messages, and comments on time.
Use filters to moderate content and posts.
Real-time integration with social networks.
Create, schedule, and publish simultaneously to all the profiles.
Track mentions and use keywords and filters to find opportunities on social networks.
Monitor hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
Assign tasks to teams. Collaborate and work together.
Graphical reports that show engagement, audience, and brand awareness.
Identify your best content and posts.
Competitor analysis and comparison.
Define and measure ROI.
Identify the best day and time to post that will boost engagement.
Identify top followers, commenters, and reward them.
The powerful CRM tool helps you build strong relationships with your audience right from the dashboard.
Run Facebook contests and manage them.
Yes, AgoraPulse is a feature-rich tool for marketers. There is still a lot more that you will explore.
Not to mention the amazing case studies and customer reviews that you will find all over the internet.
Jason How compared the HootSuite with AgoraPulse and the results were astonishing. While HootSuite is very famous but it costs over $2K a month if you have to use it at its fullest capacity while AgoraPulse only costs $199 a month.
It depends on your business preferences. If Facebook is the most crucial social network for your business, then AgoraPulse is the tool for you. However, if your business needs to be on multiple social networks, HootSuite is more suitable.
15. Tailwind
Tailwind is the only tool, in this list, that focuses on Pinterest. Most of the other tools rely heavily on Facebook and Twitter but Tailwind is specifically developed for brands that want to focus on Pinterest and Instagram.
Tailwind helps you in creating, managing, scheduling, and measure growth and engagement on Pinterest and Instagram.
Optimize pinning with scheduling and advanced analytics.
Create boards to increase engagement.
Manage multiple accounts and assign tasks to teams.
In-depth analytics let you measure success.
The complete 360-degree view of your brand.
Three sisters received well over 20K Pinterest followers in five months and sent over 500K visitors to their blog in 5 months. Tracy (one of the three sisters) says:
“Before using Tailwind we were only pinning between the hours of 7am to 11pm, Tailwind has shown us how valuable is to pin on a 24-hour time frame, and now we can pin all day thanks to Tailwind.”
Amy Morrison is one of the few Tailwind users who managed to be in 1% users by total repins.
Tailwind app will make your business shine on the Pinterest with its easy-to-use user interface and detailed analytics.
16. ViralHeat
Argyle Social was the old name of the ViralHeat. It has now been rebranded.
ViralHeat is a B2B social media monitoring, lead generation, and customer engagement tool. It is a very powerful social media management tool. Unfortunately, it does not get as much attention as some of its competitors.
It is more of a lead identification and lead qualification tool that merges social data from different networks. This leads to identification of prospects and boost user engagement.
So what can you do with this tool?
Monitor social media conversations and see what people are saying about your brand.
Real-time analysis and social insights are useful in measuring and increasing ROI.
Publish and schedule posts on multiple social accounts.
Robust reporting reveals trends worth monitoring.
Sentiment analysis is a valuable tool that lets you identify and understand the sentiments of the people about your brand on social networks.
Identify negative social mentions via Sentiment analysis.
Manage teams with intuitive workflow management tool.
Find influencers in your target market and build relationships with them.
Find qualified leads on social networks.
Integrate apps and software with your ViralHeat account.
ViralHeat supports these social networks:
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
Tumblr
YouTube
Foursqaure
WordPress
And many others
The Info-Tech Research Group ranked ViralHeat as the innovator in the social media management tool industry. No doubt, it offers a lot to the marketers and businesses.
Aubrey Hinkson, the marketing and communication head at Georgia Regents Medical Center, said:
“We ran into problems posting photos with another tool and with Viralheat we don’t have any of those issues. It’s been great.”
The ViralHeat has not just helped the Georgia Regents Medical Center with social media management but it is trusted by more than 10K brands.
17. Percolate
Percolate is a simple-to-use tool that lets you manage all the social accounts from its dashboard. You can create, schedule, and monitor social posts.
It is a fairly massive software that covers pretty much everything ranging from content management to enterprise marketing management to growth marketing to social media management.
So social media management is just one thing that it does.
For social media managers, they can use it to:
Plan
Create
Execute
Analyze
It supports a whole lot of social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and many others.
As for the features, there is hardly anything that it misses. Percolate increases the brand awareness, lets you manage campaigns, and it monitors the progress of social activity in real-time. Here are the amazing features:
There are hundreds of Percolate case studies and success stories but the most prominent among them is the GE’s case study.
Here is what Katrina Craigwell, the Head of Global Digital Programming at GE, says about the Percolate:
“The new planning system that Percolate developed for our team is allowing us to scale our content strategy in a very meaningful way. Seeing all of our campaigns in a single location and collaborating with our colleagues has never been easier. The planner is helping us extract more value from our content and align a diverse set of teams across our organization.”
If there is one tool that you have to choose from the list, select Percolate. Period.
18. Raven Tools
The Raven Tools is a complete marketing platform that tracks and monitors SEO, social media marketing, paid marketing, and much more.
With its <a href="https://raventools.com/marketing-platform