User Review
( votes)Social media provides one of the most powerful business promotion tools that help popularize any type of product or service with the proper approach. Social networks help to boost sales, brand and company awareness as a whole. That’s why so many market players out there are so focused on their social activity on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
But are their efforts ultimately efficient and how properly do they pick tools to fit particular goals? Let’s find out about some important ins and outs of SMM tools for sales departments and teams.
About Social Media Publishing Tools
Every day, variously-profiled marketing experts not only have to generate new content and maintain user interest and engagement. They also have to make systematic summaries. That’s where lots of cumbersome manual work can spawn numerous mistakes and errors, occupying much working time as it is.
Up-to-date social media management software, however, will help you avoid such hardships and focus on client attraction for client-base expansion, as well as plan out workflows, implement analytics, optimize business processes, and reduce expenses at a new level of efficiency.
Why Your Sales Team Needs Social Media Management Tools
It’s easy for any potential buyer to get lost and confused in the modern IT environment. The promotion of any goods is based on the fundamental notion that nobody buys from you if they don’t know about your existence. The more people are familiar with your company, the more profits you can get.
The times when an advertising video feature or some external promotional efforts were enough to enter the global market are far in the past. Only creative, standing-out ad efforts can help you efficiently promote your goods and attract the target audience by taking a strong position among the mass of similar business offers.
Elements of the Best Social Media Management Tools
There are many efficient ways to manage social media. At the same time, you cannot cover the whole marketing campaign cycle, from starting efforts to results analytics, with just one tool or approach. The best social media management app you can pick should meet your key goals, providing the following major capabilities.
Engagement
A centralized tool for managing the inflow of messages from various chats and messengers allows us to gather lots of important info in one place and process it at a better level of quality, reducing the chances of missing details. With certain tools, you can assign messaging channels to responsible experts and group everything by categories.
Scheduling
SMM scheduling tools enable you to plan out publishing by time for every targeted social network. You can set regular posting – the more frequently your content updates, the more attractive your active social media page becomes to your common users.
Reporting
This is a feature that helps you visualize the statistics related to all the work done in terms of your SMM efforts. Customizable reporting templates can help you adjust the thorough demonstration of the user activity levels, social media pages engagement, tendencies of users reacting to certain actions, etc. All that allows you to delineate the most efficient types of content and promotion approaches.
Top List of Social Media Management Tools for Sales Teams
Generating quality, engaging content isn’t a simple task to handle. Maintaining the publication flow, optimizing and adapting that content is even more difficult, however, requiring lots of time and expenses. Dedicated social media manager software makes your experts from the sales department or team painless by optimizing many managing processes.
Thus, some of the most popular social media management apps to help you with that include the following.
Sendible
One of the most prominent social media management platforms up to date, which allows communicating with followers and subscribers and analyze all your interactions via a single panel. Sendible also lets you:
- gather messages from different communication channels in one place, lowering the risks of missing something important;
- Configure content posting by a certain schedule while analyzing and recommending relevant posts based on the previously-posted materials;
- Form reports based on the readymade templates or customizing them from scratch and visualize users’ social activity.
The solution costs either 29$/month or $288 per year of use.
eClincher
An advanced content management system that helps you to keep it all relevant while making automated posts in various social networks. Features capabilities for interacting with followers and subscribers, planning and analyzing. Allows planning publications, including RSS feed posting planning, shortening links, posting GIF images and videos.
The basic price starts at $49 per month.
AgoraPulse
One of the social media management systems based on CRM principles. Connects with 4 leading social channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. All in all, AgoraPulse:
- provides tasking & content planning features;
- analyzes & defines the most active users among the masses;
- stores the history of interaction every other user, making it easier for in-house managers to carry out fruitful conversations with potential & existing clients;
- has a range of customizable features for your particular needs.
The basic monthly plan starts at $99 per month. If you pick an annual subscription, however, the monthly cost will be reduced by 20%.
Hootsuite
A good analytical SMM tool for starting out projects with moderate budgets. There is a freeware version for one user with a possible connection of 3 accounts from different social media. If you need more operational freedom, be ready to spend about $300 annually.
Hootsuite provides:
- centralized management of accounts from different platforms;
- connection of over 150 additional paid solutions;
- content publication planning;
- tracking of followers’ dynamics & interests;
- reposting or relevant posts from reliable sources.
Sprout Social
This one may be among the most optimal tools for social media management in the aspect of price-quality ratio. Apart from an ability to manage social media profiles via a dedicated panel, it also offers:
- a single email inbox for all notifications with in-depth analysis – when you see how many & which messages were actually opened, you may reduce the number of duplicated letters;
- Sprout ViralPost allows picking the most optimal time for posting;
- analytical reports help you to track not only the user activity but also the level of engagement of every marketing team expert.
There’s a 30-day trial period, after which, the software costs $59 per month, with an offer to save 10% monthly with an annual subscription.
MavSocial
This is a multi-service platform that puts emphasis on visual effects – quite a budget option for managing social resources that also has a complete freeware version. The major features include:
- User activity tracking;
- Messaging distribution;
- Interaction tags search;
- Digital library for content generation;
- Built-in photo editor;
- One-time & regular posting;
- Analytical reports highlighting the best posts, optimal posting time, & level of user engagement.
TweetDeck
A freeware tool for managing Twitter accounts that monitors the results of user interaction in real-time. It ultimately helps you to plan to post for every other Twitter profile. This is an utterly basic option as of yet that doesn’t have analytical features right now, but will have them in the upcoming premium version.
Social Pilot
The app allows you to interconnect over 200 social media profiles in a single account, boosting your business profitability through SMM without any limitations. Among other things, it makes recommendations as to the overall efficiency of content and has mass newsletter features.
Buffer
One of the most popular and recognized social media scheduling tools that helps you plan, post, manage, and assess your social media content. The only drawback here is an inability to manage network interactions, which makes the marketing promotion cycle incomplete.
The basic option is free of charge and fits starting SMM purposes. The extended pro version starts at $10 a month.
Snaplytics
It provides a unique ability to manage your Instagram stories. Schedule the stories, analyze follower searches and feedback, define the most engaging topics, and adjust your marketing strategy as a whole with SMM efficiency in mind.
Brandwatch
Yet another tool for standing out among similar products and services. It analyzes all the data related to your engaged users, tracks various data sources for companies to stay up-to-date, and helps you promptly react to any fluctuations in user interests and tendencies.
Tips For Choosing the Right Tool for Your Team
There is a huge selection of social media analytics and promotion tools out there. Your tool of choice should fit the basic needs, scope, and purpose of your major marketing strategy.
In our personal opinion, the solutions should be employed in the following way:
- Experienced marketers or bloggers are recommended to use Sendible or eClincher, either separately or in combination with MAVSocial. Variations with these pieces of software help you more efficiently plan and manage content with a high level of visual attractiveness. All these solutions work well with managing a big number of profiles.
- TweetDeck, Buffer, Brandwatch are perfect for startups and companies with a moderate budget. Using these solutions’ features in combination with free versions of MAVSocial and Hootsuite, you can diversify your content and make your ad campaigns more attractive overall.
- Sendible and AgoraPulse are best suited for teams and departments of marketing experts. The first is pretty intuitive and accessible for a mixed set of users while the second offers some insightful ad campaign features.
If it is still difficult for you to select something from the heap of available SMM software, let our experienced specialists recommend or pick for you the most fitting individual option based on the specifics, scale, goals, and needs of your particular business.
Conclusion
At the modern competition rates, promoting goods and business in social media requires quite a lot of work. Specialized software will help you avoid lots of routine, cumbersome efforts and turn multitask performance into an exciting automated affair that optimizes ad expenses.
Every SMM tool highlighted in the article has its pros and cons. But it’s crucial to make a final choice based on the particular capacities and needs of your business.
As such, with some of these solutions in hand, not only will you be able to sufficiently keep your company’s or project’s head above the water – you’ll be able to take on the leading positions in the market.
