Are You Struggle with Social Media Management?

 You Struggle with Social Media Management?

If so, you’re not alone! Many of us struggle to keep on top of all the tasks required to be effective in marketing our businesses on social media. When it comes to SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, there are many jobs including…

• Publishing and schedule quality content
• Engagement – responding to all the mentions and comments
• Monitoring – keeping on top of all the mentions of certain hashtags and keywords for you and/or your competitors
• Analytics and Reporting- to check how effective you’re doing with your social media efforts, digging deep into the data and making decisions on improving your strategy and systems.
• The ability to delegate engagement and tasks to team members.

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Tools to the Rescue?

So, maybe social media tools can come to the rescue here? Well, kind of… They’re certainly not going to solve all yourPROBLEMS. They’re not a replacement for planning and implementing a social media strategy. However, the right tool or series of tools can help you become much more effective and productive. It can also help you make smarter decisions and be quicker at reacting to opportunities, events and situations. Make sure you have a plan and a strategy first, but having the right tool or series of tools at the heart of your work is going to be vital – particularly as you scale things upwards.

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What is a Social Media Management Tool?

There are so many social media tools out there. Many of us feel overwhelmed and confused by the choice. Many tools promise to solve all your problems without really explaining how they actually work. The “Social Media Management Tool” is a particular type of tool that tries to do it all. It aims to be “The One Tool that Rules them all”. Such social media management tools will allow you to publish and schedule content and help you engage with your mentions and comments across all your social networks. They aim to help you monitor important keywords and hashtags, whether that be your business, brand or product name or perhaps a certain hashtag or even words to do with your competitors. Social Media Management Tools also aim to help you analyse how you are doing by providing analytics andREPORTS for you to study. This can also communicate the effectiveness of your social media use to your team.

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In Search of the “One Tool”

I’ve mentioned quite a few jobs and features there! Does this “One Tool” actually exist? A tool that will integrate with all your social networks and fulfil all the jobs you want it to. Well, no… there is no perfect tool out there. I think you expected me to say that, but there are many tools that try, and there are some that do a pretty good job. ThePROBLEM is, that it’s a tricky job to find the best tool for your business. It’s a topic I spoke about at the New Media Europe Conference last year on HOW TO FINDthe Best Social Media Management Tool for Your Business”. I hope that the infographic will help you in your journey to find your One Tool.

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What is G2Crowd?

On their about page, G2 Crowd, describes themselves as “the world’s leading business softwareREVIEW platform, leveraging its 70,000+ userREVIEWS read by nearly 600,000 software buyers each month to help them make better purchasing decisions”.  All the various B2B software technologies are listed by industry (email marketing, CRM, Social Media, etc.) and reviewed by their own users.

Is It Reliable?

G2Crowd have a strict authentication system for theirREVIEWING system. This makes sure each review actually comes from a real user of the respective software. It definitely takes quite a bit of effort to leave a review on G2Crowd. However, this means that the review can be trusted as from a real user. Business buyers now have transparency when evaluating their next B2B software subscription.

How did we choose the tools to create this infographic?

We usedINFORMATION from this quadrant published by G2Crowd. I might be a little pedantic, but not all the tools listed in the quadrant are true Social Media Management Tools. As I mentioned above, Social Media Management Tools have to offer the following features:

• Publishing
• Monitoring / Responding to Social Media fans & followers
• Measuring /REPORTING
• Team Management and Workflow
• Available for several Social Networks

As a consequence, in producing the infographic, we eliminated the tools that only helped managed one Social Network (Tweetdeck or Facebook Pages Manager, for example). There is an exception to this, however. When I produced a similar infographic last year, I excluded tools that only focussed on publishing such as Buffer. Although, as I mentioned above, Buffer isn’tTECHNICALLY a social media management tool, it is one of the most popular social media tools and its exclusion was felt. Therefore, I have decided to include in the top 5 this year, with the caveat that it only focuses on publishing with some analytics. In addition, we have only included tools that offered self-service access and transparent pricing. Enterprise tools such asViralHeat, that require a demo and do not provide public pricing (enterprise tools usually above $1,000 per month) have not been included.