Social media managers have a lot on their plates — particularly because social media management is often just one part of their much broader marketing roles and responsibilities. With all the potential of social media, organizations shouldn’t push these tasks into the corners of their workers day but bring them into a more reasonable and manageable workflow. The right social media management software can help ease the burden of posting quality content at the right time, but choosing between the vast array of solutions is another chore in and of itself.
What is Social Media Management Software?
A social media scheduling tool is a software that allows users to write social media posts and schedule them for publication on specific days and times across popular social networks. For example, a social media scheduling tools will allow users to type out a status for Facebook and LinkedIn for example, and then schedule it to be published on the following Tuesday at 8 PM, Pacific Time. This process can be replicated at scale, resulting in weeks or even months worth of social media posts being scheduled in advance.
Many social media management tools offer further functionality revolving around social media analytics and monitoring. It’s also common to find marketing automation systems with social media management features baked in.
The Benefits of Social Media Management Software
Having accurate control over when social media posts get published is a great benefit to marketers. Here’s how:
- Publishing at Peak Times: Being able to schedule your posts on different social networks is a great way to publish at times when your audience is most active.
- Less Time, More Organization: By mass-scheduling a week, month or year’s worth of social media content in advance, marketers can be more mindful of their social media strategy while saving time on a daily basis.
- Reaching New Geographic Locations: Without social media management software to hand, you’d only publish content when you — and the people on your side of the globe — are awake. With the right platform however, you can publish content at various times throughout the day, allowing you to reach people in different time zones.
Social Media Management Tools for Enterprise Marketers
With those social media scheduling benefits in mind, you may now be on the hunt for the right platform for your brand. If so, then look no further, because we’ve leaned upon the most recent Forrester Wave for Social Media Management Systems (Q2 2017) to compile a collection of some of the best social media management tools for enterprise marketers currently available.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite lets you schedule posts to multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube Instagram and WordPress profiles. Plus, you can use the platform to monitor keyword usage on social media, curate content from other publishers and measure progress through analytics.
2. Sprinklr Social Cloud
As part of a broader Sprinklr customer experience platform, Sprinklr Social Cloud allows for social listening, scheduling, and data analysis. However, the true potential of the platform is unlocked when you use it as part of the wider Sprinklr platform, as you can boost posts with advertising campaigns without leaving the platform.
3. Oracles Social Cloud
Oracle’s offering is a no-nonsense dashboard that enables brands to monitor their social channels, engage with their audience and automatically categorize actionable opportunities. There’s no scheduling functionality, but it does pretty much everything else an enterprise needs to optimize their social media activities.
4. Spredfast
Spredfast compiles data via social listening to help marketers create and publish content that resonates with thought leaders and influencers. Features include audience targeting, post scheduling, campaign planning, analytics, and configurable workflows.
5. Salesforce Social Studio
Salesforce’s social media manager empowers brands to create, approve and publish content across networks. Larger brands can also create workspaces and configure access based on role or group to ensure brand consistency. Social listening, data collection, engagement, and analytics are also part of the package.
6. Facelift
As a centralized social media monitoring hub, Facelift allows for cross-channel publishing, social micro-site deployment, and customer relationship management. It also empowers marketers to launch social media advertising campaigns without leaving the platform.
7. Sprout Social
On top of social media scheduling, monitoring and analytics, Sprout Social offers customer relationship management (CRM) features to help keep your contacts close, even on social media. Plus, the platform is able to produce PDF reports on a monthly basis, making it handy for marketers and agencies who need to prove their progress to seniors and clients.
8. Lithium Social Media Management
Lithium’s social management tool uses Klout data to publish content at the right time for the sake of engagement. Plus, it allows brands to respond to comments in real-time across platforms, all from the same dashboard. With that in mind, Lithium also excels as a customer support solution for socially active brands.
9. Sysomos
Marketers can use Sysomos to search and discover new trends on social media, gather data through social listening and manage their social media content across channels in a single view. Sysomos also offers engagement features and a detailed analytics dashboard.
10. Percolate
Percolate is a content marketing platform that boasts a social media management arm. That arm allows marketers to create content, optimize it for each network, align it with other marketing initiatives, manage workflows and analyze the results.
Source: CmsWire
