Choosing The Right Social Media Management Tool

Managing social media is an essential part of any brand’s content marketing strategy. With Twitter and Facebook constantly evolving, not forgetting Google+ and LinkedIn, there are a ridiculous amount of ways to engage with audiences around the world.

Social media has evolved to become something greater than anybody could have ever imagined. Whether it’s being used to promote products, as a customer service platform, or something unique that can entertain and inform followers, its uses are endless.

As a brand’s following grows, the requirement to keep on top of a multitude of social channels is crucial. There becomes a point where multiple team members logging into one Twitter account to manage thousands of mentions and replies can become impractical. Not only that, having multiple logins across all of the different social media channels can become a chore.

This is where a social media management tool can really come into effect. With hundreds of apps, tools and widgets available to choose from, how do you pick one that works best for you?

Identify Your Needs

Searching for the right social media management tool can be a laborious task, especially with so many of them out there offering different features and benefits, not forgetting the omnipresent ‘FREE TRIAL!’. It can become overwhelming very quickly.

That’s why identifying your needs is absolutely key. Are you looking for a quick way of answering customer service questions across a team on Twitter? Do you need to automate your posts over the next few weeks across a series of networks?

Make sure that you know what you need to achieve from the get-go and it’ll help you find what you’re looking for much faster.

Establish a Budget

Pricing for social media management tools varies wildly. Starting from free of charge (TweetDeck), right up to thousands of dollars per month (Radian6), it’s worth having a think about the budget that you have to spend on a monthly basis.

If you’ve already identified your needs, you should have an approximate idea of the budget you have to spend. For example, how much time have you wasted due to recurring issues across your social media channels that could have been resolved quickly using a social media management tool?

Explore Your Options

The next thing to do is to begin your search. There are hundreds of them out there so search for your specific needs on Google, and take a look at some of the options presented to you.

See what other digital agencies or partners are using, or get some recommendations from colleagues or friends. Try them out and see if they help to achieve your goals.

If word of mouth isn’t an option, why not try looking through some blogs written by the social media evangelists across the world? There are a lot of platforms out there, some that are popular, and some not known at all. Always remember that you’re looking to be a step ahead of your competitors so don’t be afraid to try something different.

The Features

Once you’ve done a bit of digging, your next step is to review all of the social media management tools and see how they meet the list of requirements you set at the start.

Investigate their features and see how they’ll affect your day-to-day social media management.

Here’s what to look out for:

Publishing – Are you easily able to publish from the tool? Can you share updates, images and videos with ease?

Collaboration – Can you use the tool as a group effectively? Can you see what each other have been doing or assign each other tasks?

Monitoring – Can you easily see what’s happening across all of your social channels? Can you listen out for particular keywords relating to your brand? Are you able to see interactions easily?

Analytics – Is there an option to see trends across your social channels? Can you build and export reports? Is it easy to get in depth information about those following you?

Mobile App – This is always a bonus, but does the tool have an app so you can work whilst you’re out and about?

Many of these tools can go a lot further, including features such as comprehensive reporting, advanced listening capabilities, and assignments amongst others.

Once you’ve identified a tool that will help to solve your problems, it’s worth trying them out. As we mentioned previously, most of them will allow you to have a free trial so don’t worry about getting locked into a lengthy contract.

Assess

Okay, so by now you should have enough of an idea of which tool will work best for your business.

You’ll probably have tried a few out, weighed up the pros and cons and compared their features against each other. Before you do make a final decision though, think back to the first two questions:

• Identify Your Needs
• What’s Your Budget?

Make sure that this tool addresses all of the needs that you’ve set out and it’ll help your social activities step up to the next level.

Some of our Favourites

Hootsuite

With a free version, a ‘Pro’ version at £7.99 per month, and an enterprise option, Hootsuite has a multitude of options available. One of the most popular social media management tools on the internet, Hootsuite has exceptional reporting tools and ways to schedule future posts.