Jewelry Industry and Retail News

Best Social Media Management Tools To Save You Time

When you’re running a business, time is money. You can’t afford to spend all day crafting tweets and scheduling Facebook updates. When you invest your time in social media, you need to make sure that you’re getting the best return on your investment. That’s why it’s crucial to use some kind of social media management tool.

At their most basic, these tools will save you time by keeping all your accounts accessible from one dashboard. Many of them offer other features to maximize your social media ROI, including analytics on your best performing content, tools for monitoring brand mentions and keywords, integrations with your CRM software, and the ability to assign tasks to team members. Looking for an all-in-one solution to managing your social media presence? We’ve gathered a list of the most popular and effective tools right here.

SproutSocial

SproutSocial is an all-in-one browser-based social media management platform. Their goal is to help businesses build lasting and meaningful relationships with their customers. SproutSocial integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, as well as ZenDesk, UserVoice, and Salesforce to allow you to manage all your customer support, interactions, and relationships from a single dashboard. With their team management tools and third-party integrations, it’s easy to take a tweet and turn it into a help desk ticket and assign it to a team member with just a couple of clicks. One of SproutSocial’s best features is their Smart Inbox, which gathers all your important messages and alerts in a single stream, saving you time hunting around to reply to customer questions and concerns. You can also set keyword and brand alerts to appear in your Smart Inbox, incorporating them easily into your existing workflow. SproutSocial is available starting at $59 per user per month, and is scalable up to enterprise level.

Sendible

Sendible is a browser-based platform you can use to manage all your content marketing from a single dashboard. You can compose and schedule content for your social media accounts and blog, and Sendible suggests the best times to post for optimal engagement. You can also plan a content calendar, assign tasks to team members, and use Sendible’s Social CRM tool to manage customer records. One of Sendible’s strengths is its wide range of integrations to help you create, manage, and publish your content including most popular social media platforms, WordPress and Blogspot, Canva, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Sendible is available starting at a monthly subscription of $59 per month, and they have several levels of service available for larger businesses and agencies.

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse advertises its platform as a complete toolbox for Facebook and Twitter. They have all the standard tools for managing your accounts and composing and scheduling updates, plus in-depth analytics, reporting, and competitor comparisons. AgoraPulse also includes a suite of applications for running contests, quizzes, and promotions on Facebook and Twitter. If run a lot of contests and promotions, it’s worth having a tool that specializes in it because of the ever-changing rules of Facebook and Twitter promotions. AgoraPulse includes plenty of in-depth, time-saving tools for managing your Facebook and Twitter accounts, such as automatic moderation based on keywords, influencer identification, and follower and fan data export to your CRM software. Agora Pulse is available starting at $29 per month. They also offer several free tools including a timeline contest manager and a Facebook page analysis.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite’s dashboard allows you to manage over 25 social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and others. You can customize your dashboard to display exactly the streams you need, and use it to schedule your content across platforms. UberVU via Hootsuite allows you to track and visualize influencers, keywords, and trends in real time with conversation maps. There are also tools for team management that allow you to assign permission levels to members, create and assign tasks, and approve scheduled content. Hootsuite’s free plan includes up to 3 social media profiles. Their paid plans start at only $9.99 per month, and are scalable up to enterprise-level plans.

MavSocial

MavSocial advertises itself as software for visual content management and social publishing. It has all the standard tools for managing your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Tumblr as well as Chinese networks RenRen and YouKu), and a few extra features that make it stand out. You can use it to upload and manage all your owned multimedia content, plus they’ve partnered with Getty Images and BigStock to make it easy to find and purchase more multimedia content. Their built-in photo editing tool makes it easy to create brand-consistent multimedia to include in your content marketing. MavSocial’s campaign calendar lets you plan out complex, long-term content marketing campaigns to keep your message consistent and effective across multiple social media platforms. You can also create, publish, and export customizable reports with graphics. MavSocial has a free plan that supports 2 social profiles (Twitter + Facebook) and a bunch of other helpful features. More features are unlocked with paid plans.GET

Rignite

Rignite is a social media management platform built for small to medium businesses. It offers tools for social media monitoring, analytics, engagement, goal-oriented marketing and coupon campaigns, and for running contests and giveaways on social media. Rignite is a great social media management tool for e-commerce businesses, because it integrates with Shopify to track your social media ROI for sales and coupon redemptions. There are also features designed for agencies, like the ability to group social media accounts by client. Rignite’s monthly plans start at $28 per month per user. The reasonable cost plus several unique features and tools make it a solid choice for small to medium businesses or agencies to manage their social media.GET RIGNITE

Friends+Me

Friends+Me advertises itself as a cross-promotion and content scheduling solution. It integrates with Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, App.Net, and Tumblr, and allows you to schedule posts at the best times for engagement, and cross-promote to all your networks. It focuses on Google+, and gives you tools to get the most SEO benefits from your Google+ updates. Friends+Me is available as a browser based tool, and as a Chrome browser extension. Their plans start at just $5 per month, and they also offer a free plan with up to three connected accounts.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a popular Twitter management tool that was acquired by Twitter in 2011, and is now available for free with your Twitter account. With TweetDeck, you can get the most out of Twitter by logging into and managing multiple accounts at once, customizing your dashboard to monitor multiple timelines and alerts, add team members to help manage your accounts, and schedule updates.

BY KERILYNN ENGEL