By: Anna Cave As social media becomes an essential marketing tool, having a firm grasp on the management of all platforms is so important. Social media may seem like a simple tool, but there's actually a lot that goes on behind the scenes. Social media for brands and businesses is usually planned in advance and is becoming one of the most popular ways to advertise. Brands don't limit themselves to one platform and are usually active on multiple social media sites. Though having a wide social reach is great for business, it can be hard to manage and plan for so many platforms, which is why social media management tools are essential. Social media management tools bring all aspects of a business's social media to one interface to simplify the process. They allow you to schedule posts and updates, engage with your audience, and even keep an eye out for specific followers or competitors. They can analyze your performance on social and give you suggestions on how to improve your campaigns. Some platforms even consolidate direct messages from all platforms into one inbox to make it easier to address consumer concerns. Here are a few of the most popular management sites that you might want to keep an eye on: Hootsuite: Hootsuite is perfect for someone who has multiple social networks to manage at once. It is compatible with 35 networks, but in the off-chance they don't have what you're looking for, they also offer a database of extensions where you can add your own. Hootsuite allows you to choose between manually scheduling posts and letting Hootsuite schedule for you based on optimal posting times. Hootsuite allows you to make streams of posts from social media platforms where you can separate posts based on keywords, which can help you find new users to target or ways to improve your campaign. Hootsuite is one of the strongest platforms for analytics, as they measure over 200 metrics about post performance and make it easy to download the data for interpretation. Hootsuite is a tool that was used by members of Live Oak Communications at Elon as a way to schedule social media on Instagram and Facebook for one of their clients. Hootsuite's offers a 30 day free trial and then the professional plan is $39/mo for one user, 10 social profiles, and unlimited scheduling. SproutSocial: SproutSocial covers the bases for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It is a great platform to be used with a team due it's many collaborative features. You can do things like assign tasks and watch in real-time as team members respond to direct messages. Like Hootsuite, they have options for posting manually or optimally. SproutSocial allows you to tag and track updates for different parts of your campaigns, which is a great analytics feature. Tags allow you to compare different campaigns, which can help see what is working and what isn't and to ensure that you are improving over time. SproutSocial also allows you to track a large amount of metrics that can easily be exported as PDFs or CSVs. They have many tools to monitor hashtags and keywords, which can help you find feedback or potential issues with your brand or business.
SproutSocial has a 30 day free trial and then the standard plan is $99/mo for 5 social profiles. ShortStack: ShortStack is a different platform than most. They focus a majority of their efforts on contest management to optimize online marketing. Businesses can utilize contests as a way to collect relevant data about entrants before selecting a winner. ShortStack offers contest tools on multiple social media platforms with customizable options to make it easy to follow brand standards. They offer a wide variety of integration tools to allow campaigns made by third parties to integrate seamlessly to a business's website. ShortStack offers great analytics tools that monitor real-time traffic, which makes it easy to detect spikes in campaigns. These tools make it easy to compare views and unique views, as well as making comparisons across a set chunk of time. ShortStack presents a business with their sources of traffic which can help a business determine where and when they should focus their promotions. ShortStack is also easy to integrate with Google Analytics that may already exist for a business. ShortStack offers a free trial that is limited to 1000 views in 30 days and 250 stored entries. The business plan is $99/mo. TweetDeck: TweetDeck works as an alternative interface for Twitter. You can perform all the usual actions on the platform, such as liking tweets and following accounts, but with a few more advanced features. TweetDeck shows all parts of the Twitter interface on one screen and allows you to manage multiple accounts at once. You can schedule tweets and organize them by mentions or hashtags in different columns to make it easier to view at one time. TweetDeck allows you to filter within your columns by content, users, engagements, location, and alerts. The filtering tool is a great way to gather analytics on specific Tweets. If you want more information about filtering columns, Social Media Today has a great article about TweetDeck that includes a full list of search parameters for columns. TweetDeck is free for anyone with a Twitter account. These are a few of the most popular tools, but it is by no means an extensive list. For more recommendations, check out Zapier's article on some of the best social media management apps.
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