Must-Have Tools For Social Media Management For Small Businesses

For entrepreneurs, maintaining their brand’s presence is not just paramount but rather an intimidating process: keeping on top of trends, producing content and promoting your business without coming off as a generic sales-y brand.

While you could delegate these tasks to an expert, aka a social media virtual assistant (Check out how you can leverage a virtual assistant for social selling).

But if you do wish to not completely dissolve control of your social media management responsibilities and also empower your team to pitch in ideas over content and posts, social media management tools might just be your knight in shining armor. But with a bevy of options available, we’re here to help you out with the must have tools for your business:

1.Buffer:

The largest and the most well known social media management tool with over 4 million users has also been one of the longest running in the market. It offers an easy to use dashboard to allow for effective scheduling of social media accounts for business owners to drive engagement. It’s effective customer support, features like an analytics report of each post and ability to connect multiple social media accounts is what makes it a robust experience for marketers. It’s also ideal for medium to large scale companies that work with groups as it allows for easy team collaboration. It includes 3 social media management tools:

• Buffer Publish- hosts multichannel posting & a social media content calendar
• Buffer Reply- helps manage conversations with their audience and collaborate more effectively with their colleagues.
• Buffer Analyze-  reports and markets analytics with options of setting up customized templates to monitor marketing KPIs from within this product.

With options of various plans with differing features, choose what’s best for your business!

2. Hootsuite:

Created in 2008, it has over 15 million users and over 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies. Being the first software to let users monitor all social media accounts in one place, it’s clear interface, convenient support and effective array of analytics tools makes it an all-in-one social management tool. It’s sleek dashboard helps marketers manage their social presence on all major networks: be it Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, name it!

It’s analytics feature measures performance and shares insights with team members through easy-to-create customizable and dynamic reports. Hootsuite also offers probably the largest integrations with partner apps, tools and networks on the internet. The software provides over 250 integrations and technology partners for its users.

3. Aritic

Aritic PinPoint is a unified marketing automation software platform for marketing operations teams or SMEs.

With social media integration, you can collect more leads via various groups and communities.

Aritic helps you build your social presence and drive engagement with your B2B leads and customers. It will help you get all your social platforms streaming side-by-side. See what is happening where, what you posted where, and when - all at one glance. Add as many B2B social pages as you need to stream, track and monitor.

Social Media Engagement Automation :  Seamlessly automate your social media updates to trigger real time engagement and create a social brand image.

Use Social Calendar to post social updates : Simply upload your social media posts to the social calendar and schedule it across multiple social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more

Stream Your Social Updates : Get all your social platforms streaming side-by-side.
Leverage RSS Feed option : Use RSS Feed to immediately publish a blog that you've made live on your official brand blog.

4. FS Poster

A social media auto poster plugin for scheduling and auto-posting from WordPress to 18 social networks and services. By automatically distributing your WordPress posts, FS Poster helps you grow your online community and the number of people engaging with you online. The plugin has a lot of features. Here are the main ones:

• Auto-posting and scheduling - allows users to schedule and auto-post their content to social networks
• Posting interval - allows users to control posting frequency
• URL shorteners - users, can shorten URLs with TinyURL or Bitly services and self-hosted URL shorteners
• Configuration of unlimited social media accounts - users can add unlimited accounts, pages, groups, and communities on each social network
• Customizing post URLs and post messages - allows users to customize URLs and post messages
• Bulk scheduling - this feature allows selecting multiple WordPress posts and schedule posts with the bulk action
• Proxy support - lets to use different proxies for each social account
  

FS Poster has a free and premium version. The price of the premium version is $45.

5.  MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is narrower than some social media management tools, but it goes deeper into the tasks it covers. MeetEdgar focuses on getting the most out of your content without using advertising, with prime focus on publication and scheduling,

It’s major features include:

• Content categorization- Meet Edgar let’s you organise and categorize your content in a library allowing you to post a balance of different content types.
• Gathers content- when it connects with your social media accounts, it begins its search and identifies content and suggests additions for your content library
• Content syndication from other sources- allows users to import content from website or from external sources, allowing for content curation.
• Recurring weekly schedule- recommends ideal time slots to post based on review of past responsiveness of your audience .
• Auto variations- with most networks, content reaches less than 10% of your audience because of incorrect timings. MeetEdgar repurposes using the auto variation and suggests variations of the original content for you to review and repackage your content to reach out to more users.

6. Sprout Social

A comprehensive social media software from publishing to social listening, with an intuitive interface, it’s a perfect choice for medium to large scale organisations! Some features include:

• Content planning- allows teams to map content themes and optimise content for social media networks.
• Campaign management- allows users to monitor, prioritize, collaborate and respond to messages all from a single inbox.
• Analytics- dashboards contain detailed reports with options of customized reporting tools to measure social campaign performance.

It also has advanced team workflow tools, all in one inbox, insightful reporting templates and automation tools.

7. BuzzSumo

A content marketing tool that allows you to explore and discover content and what’s best for your audience. Analyzes numerous pieces of content, making comprehensive data accessible to businesses of all sizes. The 4 main features of BuzzSumo:

• Content Insights: It allows you to search what content is popular on all social networks.
• Influential Search: searches influential people and what they’re sharing to help reach out to them for promotion.
• Query: It allows you to set a query on a particular keyword and Buzzsumo will tell you when the content is published that contains that term.
• Competitive Analysis: It allows you to search when your competition is getting mentioned and by whom.

Perfect tool in today’s world with it’s trends section allowing you to stay on top of topical content, and also allows you to filter results by various factors.

8. Social Champ

Social Champ is a social media management tool for easy automation and fast scheduling. The tool provides solutions for enterprises and companies of all sizes, from startups to bigger agencies. Social Champ supports six significant platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter.

Other amazing things that Social Champ offers are as follows:

• A unified content dashboard allows you to do everything, from creating to scheduling to repeating under one roof.
• Social Champ has an easy-to-navigate UI with vibrant colors and a streamlined workflow.
• Social Champ has a fully functional social media calendar that provides a grid view of all scheduled and published posts with options to create, edit, and reschedule using the drag/drop feature.
• Social Champ has an impressive workspace feature that makes your life super easy while dealing with multiple clients, as it can help you group all profiles together.
• Social media management automation features, including Auto RSS, recycle, and repeat, keeps your profiles active without creating new content at all times.
  

Social Champ has four amazing pricing plans starting from as low as $10 per month.

9. HopperHQ

HopperHQ helps businesses visually plan and execute social media campaigns through a more simplified process of automation and task management. The main feature of HopperHQ is that it focuses on proper scheduling based on real data and social media insights.

But there’s more!

Its most popular features include:

• Plan ahead. Hopper’s visual content calendar lets you organize and set social media goals ahead. The drag-and-drop option makes it even more simple to figure out what visuals will be posted, the best time to post them, and what additional text will be used.
• Get insights. Audience data gets gathered and filtered properly. As a result, your company is able to create and share social media content tailored to its target audience. Find out which types of content work best for your brand awareness, who is your most active following group, and get insights on what to focus on in your further strategies.
• Auto-post. HopperHQ lets you automatically post on various social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even LinkedIn. So, not only the B2C, but the B2B sector can benefit from its advantages. No more additional apps nor reminders are needed. Moreover, you can also post right from your Desktop without scrolling through your gallery for hours.
• Special for larger companies. HopperHQ takes complete care of all your social media strategies and operations so that you can focus on other aspects of your business such as customer care and branding. It helps you avoid creating multiple accounts, allows you to gather your teams in one spot, and helps plan your Instagram grid.

10. Social Status

Unlike the other tools, Social Status only focuses on analytics and reporting which means it is the most powerful tool for gaining insights into your social channel performance and creating reports.

The tool is split into 4 separate analytics tools:

Profile Analytics: for tracking the pages and profiles you have Admin access to

Ads Analytics: for tracking your Facebook Ad Accounts and reporting on your paid campaigns

Competitor Analytics: for comparing your performance against any public competitor profiles

Influencer Analytics: for tracking and reporting on your influencer marketing campaigns

You can white-label and completely customize your reports and download them in CSV, PDF, PowerPoint PPT, and Google Slides.

11.  Planly

Planly is a freemium social media scheduler tool. It is very convenient for content creators and marketing teams. It can schedule posts and their special features from social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google Business Profile.

• 100% auto-posting, without notifications-  The main difference between Planly and other social media schedulers is that it does not send any notifications to the user when auto-posting Instagram posts, carousels, stories, reels and TikTok videos.
• Drag & drop calendar planner- You can download the images you want to share on social media with drag and drop or from Planly's unlimited Media Library.
• Team management- With Planly Team management, you can group social channels into teams and add users to them.
• Easy-to-use interface- Scheduling posts with Planly is quick and easy.
• Scheduling of specific posts- You can schedule specific posts of social media platforms. For example, you can schedule posts on Instagram reels, tweets, Pinterest pins. Also, you can schedule posts on Facebook groups and personal pages, Linkedin business and personal pages. There is also link insertion and first comment scheduling, which will affect the impression of the posts.
• Free plan- You can use Planly for free as much as you want. To get features that are not included in the free plan, you can switch to the paid plans that suit you. Each plan has a 14-day free trial.

Final Note

As a small business owner, time to scroll through various tools and subsequently training your employees is something that you hope to not spend time investing in. No matter which one you choose out of the list, as a small business, the key is to do your homework. Determine your social media plan, figure out your budget you’re willing to allocate and the features that best fits your needs (e.g. whether you want to monitor Facebook ads comments or not), and then choose your ideal tool that will help add efficiency to your workflow.