Regardless of their organization’s size, social media management has become one of the core focuses for marketers and community managers.

Having an active presence on most popular social platforms is as important as learning how to manage them effectively and make the most of their features and benefits.

Managing various different networks at the same time can be challenging and that’s where social media management tools come in handy. Such platforms let you keep an eye on and promptly reply to messages on social, monitor all your social accounts in one place, schedule posts in advance and analyze your online activity.

There are plenty of tools out there, so choosing the right one for your business can prove difficult. For this article, I decided to have a look at the top 10 most useful and popular social media management tools and ease your decision of choosing the one that suits your needs.

Buffer

User-friendly and clean, Buffer is great for staggering content throughout the day across multiple social platforms: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest.

If you’re looking for a simple and efficient management app for scheduling updates, helping you save time on administrating your networks, Buffer can definitely help.

Also, all available accounts (Individual, Awesome and Business) allow users to track engagement metrics such as shares, favorites, comments and clicks, which can help you discover with little effort which are your best performing posts on social.

Buffer’s free Image Creation tool, Pablo, can help you create engaging images for your social media posts quickly, without any hassle. The app has stock images you can use, but there’s also an option to upload JPEG and PNG images. Very handy and worth trying out!

Cons:

If you manage numerous social accounts with lots of followers, and have an interest in responding to comments/tweets and interacting, Buffer has its limitations, and in this case, it’s probably not the best option.

Pricing:

The Individual Plan is free, but you can also opt for one of their paid plans which range from $102 to $2,550 / year.

Hootsuite

Integrated with over 25 social networks, Hootsuite is the right management tool for you if you’re looking for engagement, great publishing and workflow features, analytics and managing campaigns, all in one place.

One of its core strengths is definitely facilitating audience engagement. On a single dashboard, anyone on your team, in any region or department, can quickly respond to messages, mentions and comments. There is also an option to save responses for future use, which can be handy.

Another useful feature is the ability to target your posts and share content with your customers based on location, language and demographic details, helping you reach and communicate with your online communities in a smart and effective way.

Due to its integration with Brandwatch (and uberVU?), Hootsuite is the ideal solution if you’re seeking to combine publishing and engagement with a social analytics solution.

Cons:

Being such a complex and multifunctional platform, Hootsuite can be a bit daunting for social media rookies and it takes a bit of time to get used to. However, once you pass that stage and start exploring all its benefits, it’s all worth it.

Pricing:

There’s a free plan available, great for personal use, and also 2 additional options: Pro (from £6.99/month) and Enterprise, recommended for big corporations and organizations.

Spredfast

Spredfast allows users to monitor online conversations through keyword searches and it’s also recommended for managing multiple social media sites and its reliable publishing capabilities, as it also suggests optimal scheduling time.

If reporting is what you are looking for, Spredfast is unmatched. It provides advanced analytics reports and all data is clearly presented in formatted graphics which you can easily export.

Their dashboards are a good source for a quick reference of what is happening across your pages and it’s also very easy to track what type of content is performing best on specific channels.

Cons:

For those who aren’t that familiar with social media, Spredfast requires a bit of a learning curve, and while there is an extensive amount of training documentation available, it can take some digging to find an answer to some user questions.

Pricing:

Not available

Percolate

Using Percolate’s customizable marketing calendar, you can schedule content for multiple channels, organize and collaborate with team members on campaigns.

Its user-friendly interface makes it easy for you to find what you’re looking for. For instance, you can easily find all images that you have tweeted out or look at the calendar to find out how many times you have posted in a day across various social channels.

If one of your core focuses is content creation, Percolate is a great choice. It provides everything you need to build visually appealing content, such as access to Getty Images and your own built in media database.

The Brew, Percolate’s content suggestion feature is extremely useful for finding shareable content, which is a real time saver.

Cons:

At the moment, there is no possibility to change time zones for different users, an issue which can be tricky to tackle if being part of a global team.

Pricing:

Not available

Tweetdeck

If you’re simply looking for a Twitter-focused managing tool, with a clean and responsive interface, Tweetdeck fits the bill perfectly.

Tweetdeck makes it easy to engage with streams and posts quickly and it is also extremely flexible, as it allows you to add all Twitter streams you’re interested to keep an eye on. Also, desktop notifications can be set up to make sure you respond to comments or questions in real time.

One of the best things about Tweetdeck is its search features. You can easily stay abreast of latest Twitter trends and join discussions about hot topics.

Cons:

It is quite difficult to manage more than one Twitter account, and also, scheduled tweets including images can’t be edited. Lack of analytics can also be an issue, but I’d highly recommend this as a first Twitter management to use for beginners.

Pricing:

Free

Oktopost

With an incredibly easy to navigate interface, Oktopost doesn’t take a lot of time to get used to.

Some of the pros that our community management team has identified include being able to track the total number of clicks on your posts, bulk scheduling and access to a single-dashboard where you can publish and schedule posts across multiple social channels.

Its “Message Assets” feature is extremely useful as it houses all content posted to social, making it really easy to reuse when relevant, without having to recreate the same content.

Cons:

If you are looking to share a piece of content across multiple channels at the same time, there is no option to do it automatically, you’d have to copy and paste the post for each platform.

Pricing:

All four plans (Basic, Basic+, Business and Enterprise) come with a free 30-day trial and range from $55 to $1870 per month.

MavSocial

MavSocial pushes the fact that it’s an easy-to-use platform. New users shouldn’t struggle to get to grips with it. It has all of the features you’d expect from a social media management tool, including content curation, scheduling and reporting. Generally, a good all round option.

Cons:

The interface is fairly simple, but it also feels clunky and a bit dated compared to other platforms.

Pricing:

There are a range of packages going from $19 to $499 a month. At the lower end, you might struggle if you run multiple accounts, but the bulk of features are still available in this range.

Sendible

Sendible pulls in posts and comments from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr making it easy to manage and respond to all from one place. Each post is analyzed and messages requiring urgent attention are highlighted, helping users prioritize important mentions and deal with messages that require an immediate response straightaway.

Like other social media management platforms, Sensible allows you to engage with your online communities across multiple platforms, analyze and track your social media and email campaigns, measure the success of the content you share and plenty of other things.

Cons:

If you’re managing a large, fast-paced account, this service is probably not the best. While it seems that some posts come in through Sendible immediately, others can take up to several hours to show up, which can be a tricky issue if you’re looking for real-time social media engagement and management.

Pricing:

Depending on the size of your business, you can opt for a Taster, Startup, Business, Corporate or Premium Plan, ranging from $10 to $442 per month.

BuzzBundle

Their coverage includes a broad list of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, LinkedIn as well as forums, blogs and Q&A websites.

You can post comments, replies or posts, send retweets and private messages across all these channels without leaving the workspace. It may attach images and it can also shorten URLs if needed.

BuzzBundle allows you to set up a number of Personas, which can be set up for different departments or individuals, or even for a specific audience or community. This is extremely beneficial as when scheduling, you can choose which persona this message is coming from or going to within the same screen across different social platforms, which is a huge time saver.

Cons:

The tool can sometimes be slow to pull in results and there is a steep learning curve attached to it.

Pricing:

You can either opt for a free account, which give you access only to a sample of mentions, or you can choose the Professional License ($199), for unlimited personas and 100% of brand mentions.

CoSchedule

Coschedule is a content marketing tool that lets you plan your posts as well as create and schedule social media messages from right inside your post editor.

The app supports LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google+, Facebook and Twitter and there is also an option to integrate with your Bitly account and track clicks across all your social media channels.

The social media posts are displayed in the editorial calendar and in the post editing view. This makes for two very simple and intuitive ways to visualize both your content planning and your social media posts.

CoShedule is very easy to set up, so there’s no need to invest a lot of time and effort in learning how it works.

Cons:

It is worth mentioning that CoSchedule is only for WordPress, so if you’re using a different content management system you might need to consider other options.

Pricing:

CoSchedule’s pricing plans start at $15 per month and can get up to $60/mo , depending on the number of social profiles you want to track.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a cost-effective option for growing businesses and agencies.

The bulk-scheduler allows you to schedule multiple social media posts in one go, across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Instagram, all in one dashboard.

Additionally, the collaboration feature makes it easy for teams to communicate, brainstorm and plan all together.

Intuitive and easy to use, Zoho Social has great reporting capabilities, as well as the capacity to shorten links and suggest the best times to post on social media to maximize community engagement.

Cons

At times, there can be issues with receiving notifications in real time, and the engagement capabilities (likes, replies, etc.) for comments can be limited.

Pricing

The pricing is transparent and highly flexible — it ranges from £8 – £100/month, depending on how many logins you need and the number of brands you’d like to track, as well as a number of additional features.

SocialPilot

Supporting nine social networks, Socialpilot helps over 75,000 agencies and social media professionals increase efficiency and save time.

A feature I find particularly interesting is content suggestions, for all those times when you’re struggling to find engaging content to share on your social channels.

There are several categories to choose from, including Business, Technology or Startups, and you can easily get those posts scheduled in your calendar.

Their iOS and Android app can come in handy for your scheduling needs whilst you’re on the go.

Cons

Some features are still in development, and it’d be great to see more in-depth analytics capabilities.

Pricing

There is a starter free plan available, which is a good starting point, especially for small businesses. Additionally, the paid options include four plans: Basic ($8/month), Growth Hacker ($16/month), Business ($25/month), and Enterprise (TBD).

AgoraPulse

Agorapulse enables its users to listen to their community and build meaningful relationships with them, as well as publish content across six social media platforms.

They stand out when it comes to engagement capabilities, picking up every single inbound comment and message on all networks, ensuring you reply, review, assign or tag every single important mention.

Their users mention the social inbox feature as one of their favorite platform characteristics.

Furthermore, their Facebook Barometer is a quick, smart way to get a snapshot of key metrics such as reach, engagement levels, or CTR. The Twitter Report Card and Facebook Page Contests are also interesting tools, worth having a look at.

Cons

Compared to some of the other tools we’ve listed, Agorapulse can be quite complex for novice users at first sight. Also, the search functionality and customizability could be improved.

Pricing

The pricing ranges from €49 to €299/month. Demos and free trials are available on request.

eClincher

eClincher takes automated social media publishing one step further. You can organize your content into themed queues, such as “blogs”, “industry articles”, “tips”, etc., and your updates will automatically get published across any social networks of your choice. Recycling content is also a popular feature.

Monitoring keywords and hashtags is an essential component of any healthy social media management strategy. With eClincher, you can easily follow discussions, mentions, and find new leads by always being on top of all conversation around your brand, industry, and competitors.

Due to the integration with Canva (a free graphic-design tool), you can even edit your images without having to leave the platform, and use them to enrich your scheduled across all social platforms.

Cons

The tool takes a bit of exploring and digging around to get used to, due to the slightly bulky UI.

Pricing

After your free 14-day trial, you can choose between their packages (Basic, Premier, Agency and Enterprise), which start at $49/month.

Falcon.io

Businesses use Falcon to oversee all social media platforms, publish, listen, engage and measure performance across channels.

In addition, it allows teams to work collaboratively and discuss ideas within the platform, as well as send posts for approval.

You can also run unlimited reports based on metrics of your choice, which you can then export and share with the wider team, via email, at set times.

Their Audience feature highlights the importance of gathering all customer information and enriching each audience segment with social data.

Users are able to create profile cards which automatically list social media messages, comments or mentions from the individual. Salesforce CRM records can be synced, too.

Cons

Users miss is the ability to schedule across different platforms (i.e. Facebook, Twitter and Google) with one click.

Pricing

Starts at $1000/month, due to increased complexity, as well as unlimited channels, teams and reports.

Do you have a favorite social media management or community management tool? Let us know in the comments.

Want to understand how social media is delivering value for your business?

Brandwatch Analytics is an enterprise social intelligence platform that helps social media managers track and measure the ROI of all their social activity.

Learn more by booking your free demo.

[bw_banner_cta type=2]Measure the impact of all your social media activity with Brandwatch.[/bw_banner_cta]

From the smallest independent store to the largest multi-national brand, every business knows they need to be on social media. Having the right tools to conduct social media analysis means you can benchmark your efforts and compare different strategies. You can see what is working and what isn’t to develop better campaigns.

With internet users having an average of 5.54 social media accounts, brands often have accounts on several networks. You can either have a dedicated social media analytics tool for each site or have a tool that covers all of the networks you are on.

Inbuilt Social Media Analytics Tools

Several social networks provide the ability to analyze your efforts from within the platform themselves. The functionality of these tools can be a little restrictive compared to a specialized analytics tool, but as they are free and available to all, they are a good place to start.

Facebook Insights

Facebook provides social media analysis through the Facebook Insights platform. This tool is available to any of the admins of your company page once you have over 30 fans.

It displays detailed metrics about your posts and the engagement they earn. Audience analysis can help you understand who is engaging with you, and includes demographic and location breakdown.

Engagement metrics can be seen for each of your posts, helping you to understand what type of content works best. It shows a breakdown of paid and organic, so you can understand the value of your paid ads.

There are also metrics on video views, actions taken on your page and the reach of your posts.

If you want something more, check out our list of Facebook analytics tools.

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest also has a built-in analytics platform. It is available to anyone with a business account once you have registered your website with Pinterest. This allows Pinterest to track traffic between the social network and your site.

Pinterest Analytics allows you to track a range of metrics. It splits the analysis into your pin activity, your audience activity and which specific pins are driving traffic to your website.

The metrics covered include average daily impressions and viewers, audience location, gender, language, total number of repins, total number of clicks, and total likes.

If that’s not enough, check out our list of Pinterest analytics tools.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter has a built-in analytics platform, and it’s available to individuals as well as businesses.

Your number of tweets, tweet impressions, visits to your profile, mentions and followers are all tracked. There are monthly stats on your most popular tweets, mentions, and followers for that month.

You can click on any Tweet to see the impressions, likes, retweets, and engagements.

If your business has Twitter Cards active, Twitter Analytics will show metrics for the performance of all of your cards too.

Want more versatility? Check out our list of Twitter analytics tools.

Instagram Insights

Instagram Insights is only available for business accounts, or big influencers who get a lot of engagement. Plus you can only access it through the app.

It’s handy addition to the platform, although it’s not hugely in-depth. You can get a load of different metrics here including looking at your overall reach and profile visits, while you can get the following on each individual post:

• Impressions
• Reach
• Calls
• Emails
• Likes
• Profile Visits
• Saved
• Texts
• Website Clicks

If you want to get more in-depth and have more ability to compare overtime, check out our list of free Instagram Analytics Tools.

YouTube Analytics

YouTube provides an in-house analytics tool so anyone who has uploaded videos can understand their performance.

The tool displays performance metrics, engagement metrics, and demographics. It helps you understand how people found your videos, how much they watched, if they clicked through to your website, and who they were.

Google Alerts

While not strictly a social media analytics tool, Google Alerts is nonetheless very useful. It allows you to monitor the web for new content, mentions of your brand, your competitors, or industry thought leaders. The alerts are extremely easy to set-up.

Creating an Alert means you will receive email notifications when Google finds new results on the topic across blogs, forums and news sites.

Google Analytics

Google analytics is primarily a web analytics tool, but it provides a small but important role in social media analysis: a breakdown of which social sites are driving traffic to your website.

Click on Acquisition, then Social, to see which social sites are referring the most traffic to your site. You may find that a particular network isn’t worth the time and expense if it isn’t driving traffic, or that a well-performing network deserves more attention.

Cross-platform social media analytics tools

These tools allow you to conduct social media analysis for all of your accounts. Generally, this functionality means that these are paid tools. Many have some free features or a free trial period. Like anything in life, you get what you pay for, and the level of detail and flexibility can be much greater with a paid tool. This means the level of insight is greater, and can go beyond counting up mentions and likes.

Brandwatch Analytics

Might as well start with ourselves in this section. Brandwatch Analytics is a powerful social media analytics tool. We take data from social platforms and the web in general, meaning you can combine data from different sources.

Everything is set up with hugely versatile boolean queries, while you can use rules to tag and categorise mentions as they come in. You can also easily generate data visualizations from basic charts to emoji and topic clouds. Our Explore and Entities tool even makes it so easy anyone can pull out great insights in minutes:

From monitoring conversation around your brand online to undertaking competitive analysis. From unearthing important consumer insights to undertaking campaign intelligence. The flexibility of Brandwatch allows you to undertake deep social media analysis that can inform real business decisions.

Brand24

A web-based dashboard that shows real-time insights and provides detailed statistics about your content and audience.

Offers a 14-day free trial, with a personal/small business package at 49/month

Twazzup

Search for a brand, keyword or a hashtag to find real-time monitoring and analytics.

Twazzup will show top influencers, all recent Tweets, top photos, keywords, and links. It might not be the most in-depth analytics, but it is free.

BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is an excellent tool for analysing content social performance. Entering a specific url will tell you how many shares and backlinks its received, while entering a keyword will show you all the top content for that topic.

It also has an ‘Evergreen Score’ so you can see which posts are shared regularly throughout the year as opposed to a spike on release. You can even analyze Facebook pages, find influencers, and look up trending content.

And best of all, it’s completely free.

Social Mention

Social mention is free and provides a real-time platform that allows search and analysis of social media. Mentions are organized into a single stream, and includes top keywords, hashtags, and sites. Influence is measured by Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach.

It provides social media analysis from 100+ sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google.

SumAll

SumAll is a cross-platform social media analytics tool that produces attractive charts to help you understand the correlation between your social channels.

Daily email updates allow you to keep an eye on top level metrics, and the platform allows you to dive in deeper. Costs $99/month, with a 7-day free trial.

Cyfe

Sign up for free to create a dashboard that can track a wide range of networks. A wide choice of widgets allows you to monitor networks, accounts, and pages. The paid account adds more functionality for $19/month.

Quintly

Quintly covers Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube, and it has a free tool for Facebook analytics. Quintly is a dashboard tool. It comes with a standard dashboard that can be customized with widgets to suit your needs and track the metrics that matter to you.

The free plan allows analytics for 3 Facebook pages, giving you a breakdown of follower and engagement statistics. Paid plans start from €129/month, with a 14-day free trial.

[bw_banner_cta type=2]Detailed social media analysis that leads to intelligent decisions.[/bw_banner_cta]

3 years ago we started building Brandwatch on top of the search engine we had developed. We asked prospective users what in particular they wanted from a system that ‘told them what people were saying about them on the internet’. The typical response we got was ‘sounds cool’ or at the most ‘yeah that would be really useful’. What, of course, I was really after was to find real pain.

The kind of I can’t stand up cos my left foot feels like it has been jumped on by an elephant type of pain. Or in the corporate world, something like, ‘we’re losing customers to our competitors and we don’t really know why, but we think it’s x,y,z….’ That sounds painful and if we take away that pain, they would most likely pay handsomely for it.

[random promotion] – Taking a tip from Felix Dennis to never miss a chance to promote yourself, here’s a shot of the new Brandwatch dashboard
[/random promotion]

Confusion reigns

Fast forward 3 years, and nowadays there seems to be a whole industry in our space and it’s a really messy, confusing, interesting, exciting place to be.

There are free services like John Markwell’s How Sociable, Google alerts, that one with the logo that looks like vacuum cleaner that I can’t remember and now Seth Godin’s SEO-jacking ‘brands in public’ service

There are paid services like ours, Radian6, Scoutlabs and plenty of others, but even doing a price comparison between them is hard.

And Microsoft has announced its arrival with Looking Glass.

So it goes – things get more complex before they get simpler.

A big question

So, is there a big play in all this somewhere (yeah, i know ‘big play’ sounds w**ky, but you know what i mean). The big answer is, no-one knows right now, but there is static in the air. People in and around the sector expect something pretty big to happen. It feels like lots of rivers coming together and there is turbulence, but it looks like something with real momentum and power could emerge. As evidence for that, we’re getting inbound VC enquiries every month at the moment. No kidding. INBOUND. It’s flattering, but I’m glad to say that we are making profit now, so it’s not something that’s on the near-term horizon.

What happens next and who wins?

Finally, the real point of this post is my take on who or what will come out well from the rather chaotic scene we have right now. It’s going to be about 3 things

1. utility – how useful are these applications/sites/systems – will we hit a vein as it were

2. execution – how well have they been implemented (ref youtube and spotify for superb executions on an idea which lead to mass adoption quickly)

3. price – the pull of the free is strong with this one – it’s like a new Darth Vader line. With consumer apps, free wins on the web (google, facebook, twitter, wikipedia, youtube……). Although paid works for b2b (salesforce). So is there a freemium model here? Whatever the model, it needs to be simple and affordable to get big adoption

So assuming 1 to be true and 3 to be something that will be solved across the market at some point, 2 is the key differentiator. As it should be.