Choosing the right social media tool for community management can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Depending on the social media channels you are actually using, your budget and the time you are spending on social, it’s important that you get this right.
Getting your time back is more important than ever and the good news is there are thousands of options. Getting recommendations from colleagues might help, but why not consider the tools that are rated the best in the industry.
What the experts say
G2 Crowd is the world’s leading business software review platform, leveraging its 37,000+ user reviews read by 300,000 software buyers each month to help them make better purchasing decisions.
B2B software technologies are listed by industry (email marketing, CRM, Social Media, etc.) and reviewed by their own users.
Thanks to a strict authentication system, making sure that each review actually comes from a real user of the concerned software, business buyers now have transparency when evaluating their next B2B software subscription.
The infographic below published by Ian Anderson Gray relies on the quadrant published by G2Crowd here: Infographic brought to you by Seriously Social and G2 Crowd
AgoraPulse
Agorapulse includes a helpful reporting function that helps you to see what your competition are up to. There is no cookie cutter approach to social media, but Agorapulse make it easy for you to see what others in your niche are doing. The reporting feature also allows you to download a really cool powerpoint presentation that can be edited and include your own branding.
If you are looking for a platform that shows you easily what conversations have been approved and if there are any outstanding, the inbox within this CRM platform is a keeper. Simply review the tweets or direct messages from your followers, and reply from within the platform if you wish.
Monitoring what people say about you and your brand is an essential component. Agorapulse have a simple monitoring stream where you can set specific keywords and keep an eye on the conversations around them. If you want to take things a step further you can also tag users and make sure that you have people to reach out to when you need to.
It’s difficult to keep up with the stream of social activity on your platforms, but Agorapulse have made it infinitely better to do that.
Running dark posts on Facebook? It can be hard to monitor all the comments, but again Agorapulse have included the option to do this in a couple of easy steps.
More recently, Agorapulse has included a new publishing platform so that you can save time and get your content out across your channels.
Social media accounts currently supported include Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with others on the way.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite have a cool publishing feature that helps you automatically discover, schedule and post content on your social media channels. We all know how important it is to be free to have conversations with our customers, and Hootsuite allows you to do this.
You can share over 100 social networks and work with your team on Hootsuite. The really cool thing is you can analyze what everyone has been doing on one simple dashboard.
Sendible
Sendible also make it easy to interact with those people who are most important to your business. With integrated social media analytics and tracking, you can measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Making it easy to respond to comments, you can pick up on what is being said about your brand as soon as it has been posted, leaving you free to respond in a timely manner.
You also have the ability to manage multiple accounts with Sendible and with a friendly interface you get instant results.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps you to build and maintain your social communities online. Like the other tools mentioned here there are great options to find and reach out to the right people, publish your content and analyze what’s working best across your channels.
If you are working with a team Sprout Social make it very easy for you to have that integration, meaning you never miss a beat online.
Whether you are a small business or a large agency, there is a plan that suits everyone’s budget. From a support standpoint, Sprout Social has a dedicated online team waiting to look after your requests and typically they answer within the hour.
If you are a beginner the analytics are presented in an easy to understand way, that makes the decision-making process a whole lot easier for users.
It can be a real struggle to choose the right social media tool. Which one should you pay for and what exactly do you need it for. This infographic gives you some clear offerings.
Over to you
Which community management tool are you using? Let us know in the comments.
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