What is a good list of social media platforms?
I’ve talked about the usual suspects before such as Hootsuite. Though there are many choices which despite growing popularity tend to get snipped off the top choices lists. So I’m doing a shorter list and taking the responsibility of deciding on what are the top 6 social media marketing tools in 2022. Yes, top 6, as I want to make this a quick insight so you can easily decide which tool suits you.
You will be able to make an informed choice based on the details here. This guide is going to explain what social media tools are and what the 6 choices here can do for your business.
What is a social media tool?
Social media tools are a must for any marketing team. These tools help you manage and measure your social media presence. What they do exactly will depend on the type of tool, though. A social media tool is anything that helps you organize your social media workflow. There are more choices than you can shake a stick at quite frankluy and new apps appear daily. Many tools are simple to use, others have a learning curve and demand your time.
Here I want to focus on the low learning curve tools as your time after all is the reason you want a management tool.
Some of these tools, like Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer, are full-featured platforms that can help with almost every aspect of your social media efforts. Others focus on specific tasks or needs, like scheduling content or analyzing your metrics.
Influencers who manage several accounts across LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, tend to use tools to help ease the daily process of posting to their – for many – millions of followers. For the small business, it’s also useful by allowing you to schedule posts for the week or even the month ahead.
What are the 3 main types of social media tools?
- Content curation tools.
- Social media scheduling apps.
- Social media analytics tools.
Here I will talk about 6 tools that allow you to easily carry out those tasks: curating content for sharing, scheduling posts for a time and day in bulk, and gaining analytics so you can track the performance of your social posts.
Hootsuite – My best choice of a social media marketing tool
Hootsuite is by far the better and easier social media management toolset that many people like.
Today the company is over a decade old and has over 16 million users. It is a well-known name in the social media management space and some people love it, while others could take it or leave it. The basic app lets you schedule posts and manage interactions with followers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.
- Hootsuite is affordable. It’s free for up to 3 social profiles and then around $30 per month after that, depending on what you need.
- I like how easy it is to manage my social media through it. It’s a very user friendly platform that gives me a great bird’s eye view of all my social channels at once.
You can add your most used networks as tabs to the home screen for quick access to each one. I also like the post scheduling function which lets you bulk schedule 5 posts at a time at specific days and times.
Good post scheduling, easy to use interface, good for beginners and for more advanced users.
As for the user-interface, you will find it rather simple and easy to use. Hootsuite is a tool that is good for beginners as well as more advanced users. The drag-and-drop interface surely contributes to this. You can easily add columns and filter them by network or by your preferred hashtags. You can also schedule posts with ease and simplicity just like in the free version of Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is an inexpensive way to schedule your social media posts easily.
Hootsuite currently offers a 30-day free trial, with no credit card required. This is great for trying out Hootsuite before committing to a plan or making sure it’s the right tool for you before signing up for any paid plans.
If it doesn’t suit your needs, you can cancel at any time during the trial and get a refund. There’s also plenty of free tutorials and other resources available online that can help you learn more about how Hootsuite works, as well as how to use all its features effectively.
After deciding that Hootsuite is right for you, the next step will be signing up for one of their plans. They offer two types of plans: monthly and yearly subscriptions, which both have different pricing tiers based on their features and how many social media profiles they allow access to.
Sprout Social – Best choice for small business social media marketing
Sprout Social suits the small to medium business when the need for fast management of accounts is necessary. It combines a neat set of tools that allow for engagement, viewing analytics, posting and listening to your niche tags i.e. what tags should you be using to reach your audience?
It’s built for teams, small or large, and it helps you perform tasks like publishing content to your social media channels, managing your inbox and engaging with your customers through Sprout’s inbox service. Sprout Social also has a free trial so you can test the tool out before committing to anything. You can start using Sprout Social for $99 per month.
I have been using Sprout Social alongside Hootsuite for the past 6 months as I am impressed with the range of features and ease of use, and it helps me manage workloads for clients. It is a great tool for all my social media needs!
Zoho Social – Best choice for bulk scheduling
Zoho Social is a social media management software that helps businesses like you manage your social media marketing campaigns. Zoho Social allows you to schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn at the best possible times and track performance with comprehensive analytics. You can also team up with your colleagues to manage multiple brands and accounts from one unified platform.
If you’re looking for social media management software that provides great functionality, easy-to-use features, and simple pricing plans and packages, then Zoho Social is worth taking a closer look at.
The main features of Zoho Social include:
- Publishing posts across all major platforms—Facebook pages and groups, Instagram business profiles (personal profiles are not supported), Twitter profiles, LinkedIn company pages and personal profiles, Google My Business (GMB) listings.
- Bulk scheduling up to 500 posts in advance across all major platforms. Buffer only allows you to schedule 100 at once.
- Comprehensive analytics reporting showing how many likes/favorites/comments each post has received along with impressions by platform—something not offered by Buffer or Hootsuite unless you upgrade your account—and what kind of engagement those metrics have driven so far as well as comparisons against industry averages.
Buffer – Easiest social media marketing tool to pick up
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool that provides a suite of tools to help you manage your social media presences. Buffer allows you to schedule, manage and measure all of your social media posts in one place. The analytics platform allows users to monitor engagement across all platforms and helps you evaluate the success of your organic posts.
It also allows you to monitor keywords so that your brand can respond whenever someone mentions them on social channels.
Buffer is extremely useful as it makes it easy for people to collaborate on content, allowing multiple team members access and permissions within a single account.
Rignite – Best for Post Analytics
Rignite is a social media marketing tool for scheduling and managing posts, tracking your social media interactions, monitoring your brand mentions and keywords, and getting reports on campaign performance.
This is a powerful, all-in-one tool for those who want to manage their social media accounts from one place. With Rignite, you can schedule your messages in advance and will never miss a post date again. You can also collaborate with other users by sharing your calendar with them or inviting them to join you in managing specific accounts.
In addition to this, the tool provides analytics so you can track the effectiveness of every post and every campaign. You’ll also get notified when someone shares or interacts with your content on social media. This allows you to reply immediately and engage customers right away.
Phlanx – Best for social media sharing and finding influencers
Next on my list is Phlanx. Phlanx provides the ability to monitor your brand’s social media accounts, find influencers in your niche, find good content for your social media accounts, and find the best time to post on social media.
Phlanx gives you a comprehensive overview of the performance of a particular post or hashtag across all social media platforms that it supports. For instance, when you search #SEOtips with Phlanx, you’ll see:
- The total number of impressions this hashtag has generated in the last seven days (1,663)
- The average number of likes per post that used this hashtag in the last seven days (25)
- The total engagement rate for posts using this hashtag in the last seven days (6%)
To Sum Up: Are social media tools necessary?
Social media tools can help you to get a wider audience. Make use of these social media tools, and you can improve your online reputation and increase traffic on your site. The most popular social media tool used by most is Hootsuite as it has features that are very useful and reliable.
Sprout Social have summarised a good list of features VS benefits if you want to read more
https://sproutsocial.com/social-media-marketing-tools/
Hootsuite is one of the best tools for managing your social media accounts. You can connect all your social media accounts at one place and manage them easily. You can schedule or post multiple posts at once by simply selecting the post and schedule them easily.
Hootsuite allows 350 across Pro plan accounts or 2,000 for Enterprise accounts; Sprout Social allows only five bulk posts per day for professional accounts but offers an unlimited volume for corporate/enterprise customers.
And that’s why many online marketers are now using social media as a key component of their campaigns.
But let’s be honest here, managing a business account on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc, can get pretty overwhelming – especially if you’re the only one managing all of these accounts.
That’s where these tools are both handy and critical to the management of your social media accounts.
Social media tools will save you time and money. Happy marketing!