Social Media Management is a beast and can become overwhelming, quickly. From keeping up with content each week, to responding and interacting with your online communities, to tracking post performance – how do you stay on top of all of it? Lucky for you, there are plenty of tools to help streamline and speed up some of the monthly social duties. However, sifting through your options can be daunting, and signing up for the first “all-in-one” solution could be a mistake. Sometimes an “all in one” solution can seem to do everything, but doesn’t offer the right suite and capabilities for your specific social needs. How do you find the right tool with the features that can make your life easier and improve performance? Let us break it down for you.
Simple Scheduler
The heart of social media management is in the content, but remembering what you’ve posted and what’s on the docket can get muddled when you don’t have a place to track and manage it. Save yourself some hassle and stay organized by finding a tool that allows you to plan and schedule a week or a month in advance. Buffer and Later are great options if you’re looking to plan ahead. Both tools offer a visual calendar planner to see how your month will look at a glance, as well as a bulk uploader to get everything scheduled quickly and easily. Later also offers a visual planner for Instagram where you can see how your posts will look on your profile grid before they post.
Community Management
A smart social media manager knows the key to an engaged community is all about being present and actively responding and interacting with followers and fans. When trying to keep track of multiple platforms, a tool that keeps all of your comments, mentions and messages in one place is a great help.
Tools like Agora Pulse or Sendible offer great solutions that roll up engagements for different platforms in one location so you can keep track of items that need to be addressed or responded to easily. Both tools offer the ability to assign mentions to different team members who can respond best.
If you’re looking to up your game and stay a step ahead of your followers, utilize a tool that offers social listening capabilities. With social listening, you can keep an eye on competitors, keyword mentions or anything else you consider relevant to your property via different streams. Check out Hootsuite’s Insights tool for this.
Report-zilla
Utilizing data to make informed decisions and improve marketing efforts is our mantra here at Digible. That’s why we say it’s important to look at reporting capabilities when finding a tool for your social media efforts. Most social media management tools offer some analytics and insight into the performance of campaigns, but more robust tools give you the ability to create custom reports, compare channels and more. Sprout Social offers advanced social analytics to dig deep in to your performance. It also offers the ability to export presentation-ready reports to show off all your hard work.
We could go on about social tools and capabilities, but a tool can’t define your strategy or create killer content for you. Struggling with where to start with social? Let us be your guide.
