Social media is one of the most powerful tools available to small and medium businesses. You can use it to find new clients, drive traffic to your site, and keep in touch with existing customers. But like many powerful tools, you have to be careful with how you use it. Trying to manage multiple inboxes, post on all the different platforms, and keep things consistent is next to impossible using the regular consumer apps. To do it properly, you need a social media management app.
The best social media management tools -
Buffer for straightforward social media scheduling
Hootsuite for all-in-one social media scheduling, monitoring, and analytics
MeetEdgar for automating your social media posts
SocialPilot for small teams
Sendible for an affordable option with all the features
What makes a great social media management tool?
Social media management apps have one purpose: to make managing your business's social media presence easy and efficient. Most small businesses don't have the staff or the time to waste posting individual updates and checking in on each site a few times every day. With this in mind, we set out some pretty firm criteria on what we felt made a great social media management tool:
Each app had to support multiple social networks: at the very least, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Support for other networks or services was a bonus but not essential for inclusion.
It's easy to waste time on social media—whether you're posting for yourself or your business. It shouldn't be a hands-on job that takes time every day. This meant we required apps to enable you to schedule future posts and updates so you could batch your social media work into a couple of blocks each week. Also, it was ideal if apps offered access to your social media inboxes away from the distraction of the feed, so you could reply to customers without getting sucked in.
Social media shouldn't be a crapshoot. Different audiences will engage differently with different kinds of content. To make it easier for you to identify what content works for your audience, the best social media management tools will offer detailed analytics on how your posts do. (Unfortunately for marketers, not all social networks allow the same kind of analytics, which means you won't necessarily get the same features for every social network you use.)
Finally, all the apps had to be cost-effective for small and medium businesses. There are plenty of enterprise- or influencer-focused apps out there that charge a serious premium for features you'll never use. Price wasn't as much the issue as value for money.
It's also worth noting that every app has a free trial or even a totally free plan. Don't decide on one based just on our observations; try the two or three that sound like they might suit you best, and go from there.
Which social media management tool is best for you?
As with most things, there's no one best social media management app—just the most appropriate for your business needs. We suggest you check out the free trials for any of the apps that look like they could work for you and go from there.
While we've focused on complete social media management apps, there are also some apps that are designed to work best with a single network—like TweetDeck for Twitter or Later for Instagram—that are worth considering if you want to prioritize your marketing efforts on a single platform. You can also use Zapier to automatically post to your social media accounts, if you want an even more hands-off solution.
