THE WORLD MOST POWERFUL 7 TOOLS FOR MANAGING SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS

Managing social media takes more than 15 minutes a day. This is true whether you work for an agency or brand, or you own your own business.

The need to engage is at an all-time high. That’s because 80% customers are more likely to buy from brands that are responsive on social media.

Even the most experienced social media managers who have watched Instagram transform into Facebook are struggling to keep up with the engagement demand.

Someone needs to be representing your brand all day on social media – responding to and engaging with users.

Without using tools to help manage social media, there truly aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything that needs to be done, from researching new content ideas to keeping an eye on your competitors Facebook ads.

Luckily for you, we’ve compiled a list of some of the top and most practical social media management tools. All of these tools will help you work smarter, not harder.

If you discover a new tool (or a few tools), consider signing up for a free trial and taking a test drive.

1. BuzzSumo

Running out of ideas for your social media content? BuzzSumo is the perfect idea generator for new content topics and articles to share. Just type in a topic and see what they suggest.

You can use filters to see whatever types of content you want, whether you’re looking to share:

Articles
Infographics
Videos
Giveaways
Interviews
Guest posts

You can export this data and even set up alerts to receive a daily inspiration of content.

Another bonus? You can search for key influencers by topic and start following them directly from inside of BuzzSumo. Once you have followed a few key influencers, you can then see what content and topics they share most often and the domains they share from.

See what’s happening here? You’re able to follow and see influencer and competitor data all within the tool.

2. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a lot of fun to use. You can pick topics like recipes, humor, or questions and schedule these types of topics to publish on whichever days you want.

If you ever get into a content lull with social media, which everybody does, MeetEdgar is a great solution. MeetEdgar will add a bit more fun to your social media calendar. It only publishes content that Edgar thinks is worthy of engagement.

One of the best features of MeetEdgar is that once your favorite topics are defined and scheduled out, Edgar makes sure the content never runs out. So you don’t have to constantly refill or pick new topics. Edgar does it for you.

Once everything from a topic has been published, Edgar starts to re-share old content that people may have missed the first time around. Considering the limited amount of organic reach on social media, resharing content gives it another chance for engagement.

3. Post Planner

Post Planner is one of my personal favorite social media content tools. To see what types of content are being shared around a specific subject or person, search by

Topic
Trend
Keyword
Hashtag
Facebook
Twitter handle

Search through their recommended feeds based on industry and interests and explore new content ideas.

The tool will also give each piece of content a performance engagement ranking. This ranking, which is based on Post Planner’s custom algorithms, helps determine whether a post is worth sharing.

Post Planner can determine such ratings by reviewing past performance and predict future engagement specific to your audience.

4. SEMrush

I’m a bit biased here as I do work for the company, but SEMrush is one of those one-stop-shop kinds of tools and they recently improved their social portion. Their emphasis is on keyword research and SEO, but the tool has over 30 different features for content marketers, link builders, social media marketers, and just about every other digital marketing role there is.

Which to add on to their new features, SEMrush recently launched a new addition to their suite of services that allows you to schedule and monitor social media posts.

Social Media Poster: This brand new tool lets you plan, schedule and create posts and analyze your social media performance on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media Tracker: Need analytics? Head over here to the Tracker to track and analyze your competitors across major social media channels. This isn’t a new tool like the Social Media Poster but will give you some pretty sweet stats on what your competitors are doing socially.

5. Hootsuite

Hootsuite allows you to connect, monitor, and schedule posts for 35 different social networks. They are also Sprout Social’s biggest competitor for social media management.

Very rarely will you meet someone who uses both Hootsuite and Sprout Social, and that’s because – frankly – you don’t need both. These tools are both fantastic and offer an array of social media features, but are very familiar in what they offer.

Hootsuite is free up to 3 social media profiles. Sprout Social has a free 30-day trial, but then it’s time to break out the credit card. Sprout Social is completely international when it comes to languages. Hootsuite is slightly limited, but not by much. Hootsuite has a hugelist of programs they integrate with, like Salesforce, Marketo, and SocialFlow. Sprout Social integrates with all of the social media networks, and then just five others (Uservoice, Bitly, Feedly, Zendesk, and Google Analytics). Both of their dashboards look completely different when you log in. Hootsuite offers more of a wide angle approach showcasing everything you need to see (scheduled posts, brand mentions, engagement, feed, etc.). Sprout Social has a cleaned up version of this and only displays one portion at a time with top menu and side bars offering the rest.

6. Social Bakers

This is a tool every social media manager should have. Regardless of what scheduling tool you use, this is a tool you’ll want to log into on a daily basis to access everything you need to know about your social profiles.

With Social Bakers, you get real-time insights for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn. You can track engagement, share reports, and see social advertisement results all in one platform.

But this social media tool does more than just measure analytics. You can generate reports to compare the performance of up to 10 social media profiles or industries at a time, which means you can track your competitors and/or industry’s social performance.

What an incredible opportunity to one-up your social competitors!

7. TweetReach

Need to know how your Twitter account measures up?

TweetReach used to offer everything you need to know in terms of performance and engagement for Twitter. They’ve recently expanded with Union Metrics and now also provide analytics for Instagram and Facebook.