While it can provide numerous benefits to your business and your brand, social media management is a complex process. You need to be able to carefully balance receiving and interpreting the signals your followers give you with the messages that you want them to receive and measuring how effective those messages were.
As your social following grows larger or more specialized, this process becomes exponentially difficult. That’s why we’re going to take a look at the top social media management tools of 2015.
Each tool listed here is already outstanding by itself for general social media management purposes. Rather than ranking each tool on a more generalized basis, we’re going to examine six powerful tools that perform best in certain situations.
1. Best Monitoring For Major Brands: Brandwatch
Major brands tend to have problems identifying key messages and thoughts amongst followers because of the sheer volume of data that exists. Most tools are unable to deal with this data, and even fewer are unable to sort useful messages from noise.
Brandwatch is one of the top social media management tools for brands simply because it’s built to deal with large amounts of data.
It excels are:
- Gathering data from conversations using a custom-built data crawler.
- Cleaning data of spam, advertisements and other extraneous information.
- Analyzing and presenting data in a way that makes sense to humans.
- Exporting data for further analysis or presentations.
2. Best Social Media Publishing: Sprout Social
A common problem for businesses of all sizes concerns creating messages that are appealing and able to be tracked. The process itself tends to be complicated, which can lead to errors down the line.
Sprout Social takes the element of chance out of the picture. It allows you to easily publish your messages while intertwining the ability to create group, engagement and team reports for major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
In a nutshell, here’s why Sprout Social excels at social media publishing:
- It offers detailed analytics that integrates with your social media messages.
- Saving drafts of your posts for later dates.
- Sprout Social has gentle learning curve, which makes it perfect for companies interested in building in-house social media teams from the ground up.
3. Best Curation of Content With Hashtags: Tagboard
Understanding hashtags and how they relate to other content is a full-time job. It’s too easy for any member of your social media management team to interpret a tag incorrectly, which in turn could lead to social media blunders.
Tagboard offers an easy, succinct way to get the entire story of a hashtag. You no longer need to worry about jumbled interpretations potentially sabotaging your social media management when you use this tool.
You can also utilize it to publish your own messages on other social media websites, which in turn makes them far more effective.
4. Best Budget Metrics and Analytics: True Social Metrics
Obtaining a simple understanding of your own brand and the competition is often a costly practice. Sometimes, it’s too costly for small businesses to employ.
True Social Metrics offers some of the most reasonable metrics and analytics for your social media management around. While it doesn’t have the most features, it is one of the best social media management tools for businesses on a very strict budget.
You can start using this service for as little as $20 a month, and you can save even more if you purchase packages in yearly plans.
5. Best Free Photo Editing: Pixlr
Acquiring a full understand of complicated image editing software is often too much for any social media management team to have. That’s why knowing what tools can streamline the process is essential to making sure strong, branded images can be used.
Pixlr is not only a free option for image editing, but it’s also one of the easiest to use. It is a must-have social media tool if you plan to have parts of your team rebranding, editing or even just adding filters to your photos.
6. Best Stock Photo Resource: Big Stock Photo
Photographs are an essential part of any social media management strategy. Without them, your followers will quickly grow unresponsive to the same text messages and the effectiveness of your social media strategy will suffer.
Big Stock Photo is one of the best places to acquire photos for you to use. Coupled with something one of the top social media management tools for photo editing like Pixlr, this allows you to significantly cut the costs associated with including media in your social media while making your messages even more effective.
Summary
With this brief overview of the top social media management tools for 2015, you should have an idea of what you need to use to keep costs under control while having the ability to perform everything your social media campaigns require.
It’s imperative that you take advantage of these incredibly powerful tools, as your competitors may already be trying to integrate them into their own campaigns.
We would love to here your thoughts on the tools mentioned or other tools you use. Send us an email at info@socialmediadata.com or comment below!