What is social media management?
Before we go into the tools to use, we should first explain what social media management is and why it’s so important. Social media management simply refers to a platform or tools that reduce the amount of effort it takes to use social media effectively. They streamline processes and create better collaboration across teams. They’re particularly useful for complex organizations, but they’re also great for small teams. The best social media management tools meet a variety of needs, from marketing to customer service to social selling. They also allow different teams within an organization to use social media because it encourages collaboration and makes social media efforts more effective and efficient.
Here’s a list of 13 of the best social media management tools:
Social media scheduling tools
It’s important to plan your posts—both created and curated—in a social media content calendar. Creating a content calendar can help you:
- Balance types of social messaging
- Publish posts when they are likely to receive the highest engagement
- Curate compelling content to share with your followers
- Plan for seasonal and release-specific messaging
Many social media professionals use spreadsheets to plan and organize their social posts. Once you’ve created your plan, social media scheduling tools make it much easier to implement and adjust on the fly. A scheduling tool also keeps your social platforms active even at times when your team is not at work.
Bulk uploading and scheduling tool
You can save time by preparing many social media posts in advance, rather than having to interrupt your other work to post throughout the day. This allows you to better plan content and improve your posting consistency. It also frees up time to work on other aspects of your social strategy.
Geo-search tool
For many businesses, the local audience is the most important. A geo-search tool allows you to find conversations happening in the areas most relevant to your business.
By using a platform with a geo-search tool built-in, it can allow you to track conversations within a specific radius of any address. This focus allows you to make the most of your team’s social engagement efforts.
Listening and search streams
You need to know what’s being said about your brand, your competitors, and your industry. Listening and search streams allow you to monitor multiple channels from one central dashboard. You never need to switch between browsers, and you never miss relevant conversations. Some tools will allow you to create unlimited custom streams to track all the important conversations in your field. Stay on top of your own business—and one step ahead of the competition. You can filter by keyword, hashtag, and location, so your streams are targeted directly to your needs.
Content library
Keeping content consistent across multiple channels and teams can be a challenge. A content library can help make it easier. A content library makes it easy for teams—even those separated by geography and time zones—to share appropriate content. This ensures all of your social channels remain on-brand and on point. Social media teams can store and organize approved assets, including images and message templates. You can also integrate the content storage solutions you already use. (For example, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, and Google Drive.) This allows you to access a wide range of content and resources directly from the post composer.
Message tagging and assigning tool
Use a message tagging tool to assign messages or streams to specific team members and ensure nothing slips through the cracks. This reduces the risk of multiple replies by different team members and ensures that all messages receive a timely response. A good team collaboration tool also allows you to save a bank of responses to commonly asked questions. Team members can then reply quickly to the messages they are assigned.
Content curation tool
Listening and search streams have an added benefit for social media marketers. In addition to finding conversations about your brand, you can use streams as a powerful content curation tool. Use them with appropriate industry keywords and hashtags to source great third-party content that complements content created in-house.
Permissions management tool
It is a truly terrible idea to share passwords among members of your team. When multiple people need access to your social accounts, you need a permissions management tool. Certain management tools will allow you to control passwords and set specific permissions levels so that every team member has the access they need. When someone leaves your team or changes roles, you can remove or adjust permissions immediately.
Analytics tool
It’s important to use real data to evaluate your social media strategy. Social media metrics tell you when your content strategy is performing well—and where it might need to be reworked. A good analytics tool helps you crunch the numbers that matter to measure performance. Try to find a tool that will allow you to analyze content across channels from one dashboard. You can get a complete overview of key metrics and unlimited real-time reports. You’ll also be able to measure team performance and share custom reports to prove the return on investment (ROI) of your social efforts.
UTM parameters
UTM parameters are important social media management tools for tracking where traffic comes from. You can add UTM parameters to any link manually, but this is a tedious process. Since UTM parameters must be tracked precisely, manual tagging also creates huge potential for errors and lost data.
Make sure to find a platform that allows you to add custom UTM parameters to work with an analytics system like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. On team plans and up, administrators can create link setting presets that ensure consistent tagging across posts and campaigns.
Link shorteners and vanity URLs
Once you start adding all those UTM parameters to your links, the links can get pretty long and unwieldy. Link shorteners allow you to get all the benefits of UTM parameters in a short, simple link. Sometimes using a built-in link shortener like Owl.ly can get the job done.
Post-boosting tool
Boosting your top-performing organic content can help increase reach and engagement—while making your advertising dollars go further. Some post-boosting tools use custom rules to automatically boost your top-performing content to the exact audience you choose, for a set amount of time and cost. If you prefer, you can manually choose which posts to boost.
Social media ad management and optimization tool
Some management sites will allow you to manage your social media ads alongside your organic posts from a single platform. You can create and manage social ad campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads.
It’s also easy to optimize your campaigns for cost efficiency. Boost top-performing organic posts, target your social ads, and view analytics to measure the success of your efforts.
To summarize, using these tools can make your social media process much easier and quite frankly less of a pain in the butt to tackle. With tools like this, content can be created months in advance which will certainly take away from the stress of the ever changing social media world. We hope this was helpful to you and if you have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask! We are available anytime during our business hours to discuss your business strategy and help you in any way we can.