5 Best Social Media Management Tools

Hootsuite is one of the most reputable managers to take care of your social networks. And for good reason! It allows you to manage 35 social networking platforms through a single tool!

With its multi-function dashboard, you'll be able to track all of your social networking activity on a single window that will compile the bulk of your business to follow what it says about you and what you're doing. In addition, Hootsuit allows you to automatically program different publications on your social networks. You can download a .cvs file and schedule hundreds of publications to publish at different times of the day, week, month and year at your convenience.

Advantages:

• Free trial: it offers a free 30-day trial period that allows you to try out the different features and get used to the ways to work with this tool.
• Multi-manager: it allows you to manage your accounts on 35 different social networks
• Analysis: it allows you to keep an eye on the statistics of all your social networks
• It's one of the few social media marketing tools to support managing multiple YouTube accounts from the dashboard, as well as the ability to schedule video posts on your social networking profiles.

Good to know:

• Old user interface that is not constantly updated
  Limited post-editing options: previews are difficult to edit, publications can not be moved to drafts after planning.
  Pricing: the professional plan for a user is $29/month. There is also a "team" plan that offers a package for a 3-user collaboration for $129/month.

Buffer is a leading player in the social networking tools market. It meets the needs of individual users and large teams, accommodating up to 26 people in a single account. Enjoy the free trial to get an idea :)

Advantages:

• Reasonable price: the first pro plan is at $ 15 / month for a user
• Analysis filter: you can filter the analyzes by publication type (video, image...), by date, or by popularity, and then download the data to analyze your performance.
• Multi-users: you can go up to 26 users on the platform
• Revision: a two-step content review process. A publication may be written by one person and reviewed by another member of the team.

Good to know:

• No view of the calendar, which does not allow to follow upstream its contents
• Lack of suggestions for best viewing times or content suggestions
• No social inbox, which forces the user to use the default tools
• No social listening function to follow what he says about his brand.

For major brands and agencies, Sprout Social is the most expensive social media management tool on the market. The lack of a free plan makes it difficult to access for a very small business for example. However, you can test the tool's capacity during a free 30-day trial.

Advantages:

• Interface: it is very easy to use and allows intuitive handling of the application
• Multi-user function pushed with different levels of users
• Viral Post: a tool that analyzes the activity of your audience to determine the best viewing times.

Good to know:

• Rather expensive: the first standard plan is $ 99 / month, which is higher than the market average.
• No integration with YouTube, that is very appreciated. 
• Unable to publish on Facebook groups offered by the competition
• Digital image library available only in the advanced map

The offer of AgoraPulse is similar to its competitor in terms of uses for a medium-sized brand. It covers the core functions of social media management - from publishing to queuing, to engagement with subscribers. A free 28-day trial is offered to test your abilities.

Advantages:

• Recycling: AgoraPulse is one of the few social media management tools that allow you to recycle permanent content.
• Inbox Assistant: It allows you to create rules to manage messages automatically.

Good to know:

• No media library or image library to aggregate its networks which penalizes the creation of content
• Impossible to boost the publications on Facebook to promote its activity
• Unable to customize reports
• Quite expensive: the medium plan is $89/month and allow you to add users for $15/user. A rather high price compared to other platforms.

TweetDeck is a social media dashboard app for managing Twitter accounts. Originally an independent application, TweetDeck was later acquired by Twitter Inc. and integrated into the Twitter interface.

Advantages:

• Easy to navigate interface: everything is centralized on one page!
• Multi-pseudonym: It allows you to view and manage multiple Twitter nicknames under a single browser tab.
• Planning: Scheduling messages is also very easy.
• It's free!

Good to knowv:

• No mobile app to track the activity on an external support
• Unable to compose tweets with GIFs, which are very popular (and appreciated) on Twitter

Social Mention is an online social media analytics platform that aggregates user-generated content into a single flow of information. This tool allows users to track and measure what other users say about them, their company, any new product, or any hot topic in the social media landscape of the Web.

Advantages:

• Displays all your brand endorsements on social media to follow who says what about you
• Define a score of your online activity to assess the quality of your communication
• Free: The free version allows you 100 real-time searches and 2 alerts by email to be notified of the mention of your name on the networks.

Good to know:

• The tool encounters problems of sub-filtering keywords by feeling or by source which does not facilitate the reading of the data
• No filters by sources: It does not offer the power to filter content sources and generate results via the API.

Each platform has its own differentiating elements and targets brand-specific needs that you will have to define. Before choosing a social networking software, it is important to clarify the goals of your marketing efforts but also the means you are willing to invest in achieving your marketing goals.

Need help to build your strategy on social networks? The 8P team knows a lot about it! Discover our social strategy services and tell us about your project :-)