For the last few years (2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017) PakWired.com has been compiling a list of the best social media management platforms. Please find our 2019 list below:
Leveraging social media in your marketing plan can send countless numbers of organic visitors to your website. Including social media management in your digital marketing plan is essential for brand awareness online. One study found that 70% of the U.S. population uses at least one social media platform and 71% of online shoppers who have a positive experience with social media are increasingly likely to recommend the brand.
If you handle social media correctly, your marketing efforts can bring measurable increases in web traffic and sales to your business.
Here are top social media management platforms you should try in 2019 and beyond:
1. ContentCal
Free trial: Yes (30 days)
Minimum cost: $39 a month
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram
Best for: Delegation, cross-channel marketing, identifying the best time to post on social media
ContentCal is a calendar-based social media management app that offers some really nice collaboration and delegation features. Your team is encouraged to add their social media updates to the “Pinboard” from where an assigned moderator (or moderators) can drag and drop them throughout days and times of the week ensuring consistent, yet varied social media editorial calendar.
You can color-code your updates based on the content types you are promoting. This allows you to diversify your updates to make them more engaging.
Furthermore ContentCal creates comprehensive reports allowing you to see which of your content types are more engaging and which days and time of the day are best to publish your updates:
2. Sprout Social
Free trial: Yes (30 days)
Minimum cost: $99 per month
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest
Best for: Task management, enterprise-level cross-channel marketing, social media analytics and listening
Sprout Social is a central hub for managing multiple social media accounts your business uses. It is a useful tool for the management and scheduling of social media accounts and posts utilizing an easy-to-use interface.
One of the best features inside Sprout Social is their “Task management” feature that is integrated with their social media listening tools. For any brand or keyword mention, you can create a “tag” which populates a new task for your team to manage. For example, you can create a task to cover a certain question in the on-site FAQ section. This is a great cross-team management feature that allows to make the most of your social media listening strategy:
Sprout Social goes beyond management and includes an element of data analysis. It allows you to organize your web traffic by demographic and location, giving a useful insight into who is buying what, where, and why. You can then use your data to decide what content works and for who. Sprout handles the data of several accounts and monitors your keywords across social media platforms, so you know who is talking about your brand.
3. Awario
Free trial: Yes (30 days)
Minimum cost: $29 per month
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube
Best for: Social media listening, social media lead generation
Awario is a to essentially eavesdrop on the information that is potentially critical to your brand, reaching across Facebook, Twitter, blogs, news, and other sites. Awario’s social sentiment analysis provides the tone of the data gathered from your connected profiles, allowing you to understand trends and themes that can affect your business.
Awario offers powerful social media search tools allowing you to search by author name as well as use a variety of search operators. You can engage with mentions right from Awario’s dashboard for your conversations to be saved in one place.
Awario offers access to free reports as well as premium reports that delve deeper into the data it gathers. One of the better features, Awario offers date and time analysis and content analysis to help inform you on what type of content works and when for your target audience.
One of the best features inside Awario is “Lead generation” section that filters social media channels to find possible leads for you to engage with and nurture. For your reference you can also leave notes and tasks helping your team to take the lead generation to the next level:
Awario is an essential tool providing valuable data to enhance your brand awareness.
4. MavSocial
Free trial: Yes (30 days)
Minimum cost: $16 per month
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, Linkedin, Tumblr
Best for: Cross-channel visual marketing
MavSocial is a comprehensive social media management platform with a huge focus on visual marketing.
My favorite feature is MavRepeater which allows to schedule the same update to go live several times in the future based on the schedule I create.
This feature allows me to organically reach more of my followers, especially on Twitter. According to Moz, the average lifespan of a tweet is a mere 18 minutes (this is the most optimistic estimate. There are many more studies showing it may be much, much shorter). Therefore you need to tweet the same URL a few times at different time slots of the day, on different days of the week to reach more of your followers.
MavRepeater makes it easier to do that as you can easily schedule any campaign to auto-tweet days and weeks after you publish your content.
5. SocialOomph
Free trial: Yes (7 days)
Minimum cost: $17.97 per month, there’s a totally free version available
Supported social media networks: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, RSS feeds, blogs, and Plurk
Best for: Social media automation
SocialOomph is a comprehensive social media marketing solution that is best for bloggers and small businesses that want to save money. SocialOomph automates your post updates, allowing you to schedule them beforehand.
From weeks to months, SocialOomph enables users to prepare far in advance for specific posts, keeping your social media presence alive and moving. SocialOomph also grants access to a single dashboard used to manage multiple social media accounts, keeping them organized and active.
6. Sendible
Free trial: Yes (30 days)
Minimum cost: $29 per month
Supported social media networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook Ads, scheduling Google Posts to Google My Business
Best for: Local businesses looking to cross-market to social media as well as their local listings
Sendible allows up to 20 integrations with social media platforms, blogs, and other sharing sites. You can also include Slack, streamlining communication within your marketing network. Sendible is an easy tool to use for organizing and managing your social media accounts and keeping your posts and campaigns active, engaging, and timely.
Sendible provides a look into your performance in social media campaigns and posts, helping you learn your target audience’s activities, what they’re engaging with, and how you can utilize the data to your benefit. You can retrieve reports on demand. For a more extensive business, you can set up Sendible to create workflows for team members, assigning specific duties and increasing productivity.
7. PostPlanner
Free trial: No
Minimum cost: $3 per month
Supported social media networks: Facebook and Twitter
Best for: Affordable social media management (Currently the cheapest solution available)
PostPlanner offers efficient features for productive posting to your social media channels. It saves time and suggests best ways to cater to your audience better.
With PostPlanner you can:
- Easily search for most effective content and content ideas (PostPlanner rates content based on social media engagement as well as pull all images from articles)
- Create social media friendly images (e.g. visual quotes) to post on your social media accounts
- Repeat posts (especially for recurring occasions, e.g. regular events, yearly holidays, etc.)
- See and quickly implementmization recommendations (which are auto-suggested by the tool)
- Automatically recycle your evergreen content on social media
- See all your social media posts from all the authenticated accounts in one place
- Sort your posts by Likes, Comments, Shares or Clicks so you can make data-driven decisions about future posts.
- Add your team members to collaborate with your on managing your social media channels
8. Tailwind
Free trial: Yes (30 days)
Minimum cost: $9.99 per month
Supported social media networks: Pinterest and Instagram
Best for: Instagram and Pinterest marketing
Tailwind is a great social media marketing app for businesses that are focused on Pinterest and Instagram.
- The Browser Extension lets you easily create multiple posts, you can schedule posts far ahead into the future (using drag-and-drop calendar)
- Automatically optimize your Pinterest and Instagram schedules based on when your audience is most engaged.
- See and quickly implement optimization recommendations including popular hashtags (which are auto-suggested by the tool)
- Manage multiple accounts from one handy dashboard
Conclusion
Social media management shouldn’t be difficult or expensive. With the tools above, it can also be really effective in attracting leads and conversions to your website.
Whatever you do, don’t forget that your website should be the hub for all your digital marketing:
- Try and send your social media leads to your website (especially when you are helping your customers through your social media customer service efforts)
- 20% of your social media updates should be linking to your website
- Encourage your team to engage with those updates from their personal social media accounts
- Adjust your website to engage with visitors from social media through personalization
Which social media management platform have you picked to amplify your content and build brand awareness in 2019?
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