Choose The Tool That Works Best For You
Your business is booming, and you’re looking for a tool to help take your social media to the next level. I say bring it to the next level because if you’re looking for a free platform to use, you won’t find it here.
I’ve been in the social media world now for five years, and RFP’d countless social vendors, and I’ve learned that the best free tool to manage your platforms is yourself. Download .csv insights from Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin and glean insights from your Instagram account (I show you how here *link to IG Insights). Doing it yourself will get the most accurate data at the level you need. Take the top 3–4 numbers that impact your business social goals and report on those monthly. I do this with most of my smaller clients.
If you’re ready to take the dive into paid platforms because you’re at max capacity, keep on reading.
Below are key terms to help you discover the best platform for you and your brand.
Publishing — Scheduling, curating, and publishing your content to each social network on a single dashboard.
Engagement — A dashboard where you can monitor all your incoming messages on social media and engage with your customers
Listening — A dashboard that scours the internet for mentions of your brand, product, or developing trends across your customer base from local conversations or global mentions.
Reporting — Analyzing and reporting how well your content performs against benchmarks and competitors, as well as owned social network pages.
**Disclaimer** You will not find a single platform to fit all of your needs. If someone ever comes out with a tool that has all of the appropriate API’s and accurate reporting, they will be making bank.
When you’re researching top platforms to use, take the time to research what is important to you and your brand. If you’re looking into developing new products and nurturing your customer base, invest in a platform that excels with Customer Engagement and Listening. Other features are a bonus, but finding the tool that tailors more towards your needs will make you more successful in the long run.
I researched over 20 sources, and on average, these five platforms ranked the highest (in no particular order).
Buffer
I’m sure you’ve heard of Buffer before, it’s the second most popular tool behind Hootsuite. They offer two separate products, Publish and Analyze. Publish facilitates in planning, collaborating, and publishing content, and Analyze does what it says, dives deep into your analytics to measure your post performance. Unfortunately, Buffer does not have Engagement and Listening capabilities that other platforms would have along with limited Instagram capabilities.
Networks Supported: LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Publishing
Plan, collaborate, and publish your content with Buffer. You can work with your team to preview and organize your content in their media calendar with built-in approval workflows and account management. Buffer makes it easy to create content and tailor posts to the social network within the platform with a click of a button.
Reporting
Get in-depth insights into brand growth by measuring your post performance with templated and custom reports. A benefit the Buffer is they provide recommendations with actionable insights on how to grow your reach, engagement, and sales. Unfortunately, you are unable to search by hashtags or keywords.
Pricing
The publishing product ranges from $15 to $99 a month, depending on the users, sites, and capabilities. The Analyze product is an additional $35 or 50 dollars a month.
Overall Rating: 3.9/5 stars
Test out Buffer with a free trial here.
Sendible
Sendible touts their platform as a place to “manage and amplify multiple brands on social media.” You will improve your communications through collaboration, reporting, and analytics.
Networks Supported: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Ads, Linkedin, Google My Business, YouTube, Pinterest, Medium, WordPress, Canva, Google Analytics, and many more. (here you can use icons)
Publishing
Sendible has templates and tools to help you create and edit social content collaboratively with team members or clients. You can schedule your posts in bulk or individually, and make adjustments with their simple drag and drop features. Once you discover what works with your customers, you can seamlessly recycle your content.
The best feature that Sendible provides is its content recognition engine. The Content Recognition software analyzes previous posts and suggests content likely in increasing engagement.
Engagement
Efficiently and effectively engage with your audience by having all your social messages into one inbox. Here you can monitor your brand health, track results, check message sentiment, and easily download engagement reports. It can be challenging to understand the inbox as you start to use the tool, but the more you’re in it, the quicker you will get a grasp on the functionality.
Listening
Track what your customers are saying. Learn what your competitors are doing, stay on top of industry trends, and quickly turn a conversation into an earned win. An added feature that can take your brand to the next level is mention alerts, Sendible will send you a notification when a conversation around your brand has reached a threshold. This way, you can be “always-on” without being always on.
Reporting
With eight pre-laid out templates, you can easily export data to your team or clients with a click of a button. The reports are presentation-ready but have the option to create a 100% customized report, albeit, they have limited analytics features. Once you discover a reporting flow that works for you, you can arrange to have them delivered to your inbox regularly.
Pricing
Based on your business size, prices start at $9 a month with limited capabilities (think, one user, six services, eight reports) and can cost as much as $299 a month depending on the size of your organization.
Overall Rating: 4.9/5 stars
Test out Sendible with a free trial here.
eClincher
eClincher offers a complete set of tools, and an excellent platform for social media managers, businesses, marketing professionals, and agencies. eClincher provides a simple and efficient way to manage social accounts in one platform. There are a few complaints about bugs in the software, and the software is not intuitive, but again things take some time to adjust and navigate.
Networks Supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Business, and others. (here you can use icons)
Publishing
eClincher gives you the ability to plan and schedule your content to multiple owned accounts and pages. They will automatically shorten your URL using Google shortener, and there is already a built-in integration with Canva.
Like Sendible, eClincher allows you to recycle your content via three queues; Recycle, One-time, and end-date (recycle content until a specific end date)
Engagement
You can view all of your social interactions in one manageable inbox. eClincher collects all comments, messages, mentions reviews, retweets, and the list goes on. But they put it all in one inbox, so it’s easy to use, track and report on conversations. You can engage with your audience in real-time with their Live Social Feed feature enabling you to like, comment, and reply in the tool instead of responding natively.
Reporting
Combining Google Analytics and Social Analytics, you can fulfill your reporting needs in one platform. Review and analyze real-time post performance with their live reporting features, find out how social impacts your web traffic, discover and engage with top influencers, and create generic reports with your company logo.
The drag and drop functionality allows you to monitor your brand mentions using keywords and hashtag monitoring, keep a pulse on how your competitor’s activities, and how they are engaging with their audience. eClincher allows you to stay abreast of any new products or services they may be releasing.
Pricing
You can access unlimited scheduling/publishing, Instagram direct publishing, social inbox/CRM, auto post queues, listening & monitoring, social and web analytics, suggested hashtags, and other features for just $59. With more access to the tool, but specifically geared towards agencies, you can pay up to $219 a month.
Overall Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Test out eClincher with a free trial here.
Hello, World!
Sprout Social
Sprout is the leading social media platform for all business sizes. Sprout Social provides you with functionality and insights that are easy to understand, along with a seamless platform set up.
Networks Supported: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. (here you can use icons)
Engagement
Streamline and save time by combining all of your monitoring and engagement efforts in one simple inbox. Having all your insights into one inbox will increase your message visibility, responsiveness, and efficiency. By utilizing Sprout Socials automated features, you save time, increase productivity, and nurture new and loyal customers.
Their core features include, but are not limited to, Smart Inbox, message spike alerts, review management, Bot Builder, task management, message tagging, CRM, team reports, and a help desk line.
Publishing
Save time and collaborate efficiency with Sprout’s publishing tools. Sprout easily integrates with all platforms and helps you build out your content calendar to drive engaging conversations, and optimize your outcomes.
Core features include; Scheduling, optimal send times, asset library, content suggestions, approval workflows, tagging, content calendar, URL tracking.
Reporting
Speed up data collection and save some time. Sprout wants to help you drive impactful results with their in-depth reporting functionalities. You can view your network, profile, and message level insights for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram while measuring your team member responsiveness and engagement. All dashboards are easily downloadable in a CSV or PDF format.
Core features group reports, tag reports, sent message reporting, competitive reporting, team and task management reports.
Pricing
With a free 30 day trial and an additional discount, if you pay yearly, prices start as low as $99 a month to $249 a month depending on user preferences and plan features.
Overall Rating: 4.7/5
Test out Sprout Social with a free trial here.
Later
A new player to the game Later focuses on their ability to drive your Instagram profile to the next level, just a bonus that they also provide support for other platforms. The value that Later provides is not only their content calendar, but they also have a free link tool to use on your Instagram to link to the shoppable Instagram feed, websites, or blog posts.
Networks Supported: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest. (here you can use icons)
Publishing
Later utilizes their drag and drop functionality so you can easily schedule your photos, videos, stories in a few clicks. Auto publish your posts and videos Instagram with no additional pushes (a push is required for stories or carousel posts), schedule your first comments, view your content weekly or monthly.
My favorite feature Later has to offer is the Visual Instagram Planner. This planner allows you to create the aesthetic you love. You can see what your feed will look like with your scheduled posts, and easily arrange photos so you can balance out your feed. Their Media Library provides you with a library of your media, filtered by used or unused.
Reporting
Increase your engagement and optimize your stories to drive traffic with their Instagram analytics. Track your hashtags and discover audience insights to upgrade your content. Unfortunately, Later has yet to come up with viable Facebook insights, but does give you access to your Pinterest insights.
Pricing
Later has a free option available with limited functionality. Paid packages start from $7.50 a month to $41 a month, depending on users, analytics, and platforms.
Overall Rating: 4/5 stars
Test out Later for free here.
There you have it! Like I had mentioned above, take some time to discover what features you need in a platform and prioritize those needs when looking into a new social media management platform. This is an investment that will help take your business to the next level, so make sure you audit your pages and potential new tools, so you can focus on your priorities.