Social Media Management Tools: How to decide in 2024
Whether you manage the social media presence for a single brand or you work for a large agency with dozens of clients, social media management software can help streamline your work. One of the biggest benefits of using a social media management tool is that it brings under one roof all the profiles you manage such as Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and Snapchat. These tools allow you to schedule posts to one or multiple social media accounts, monitor brand mentions, provide reporting and analytics, as well as view and manage incoming posts, comments and reviews to your accounts. For agencies, many of these tools also provide collaboration tools allowing multiple people to work on a client’s social media and user management tools to define the permissions of team members and clients. Finally, as like seemingly every other industry, AI is revolutionizing social media marketing and more and more social media management platforms are incorporating AI into their product offerings.
In 2024 there are now many great options for both individual brand managers and agencies to select from. The challenge is determining which one out of many options best suits your needs. There are many, many articles online that will compare one product to another or list several options with a quick description of each. Instead of doing that, this blog post will attempt to provide criteria for what to look for when choosing between multiple options. As an agency, we recently went through this exercise so feel confident we can share some of the things we learned to hopefully make your search process quicker and successful
In this blog post, instead of listing a bunch of social media management tools and comparing and grading their features (there are plenty of these blog posts out there, you won’t have trouble finding them!), we are going to attempt to lay out the criteria that you should use when evaluating these tools yourself.
Core Features
Publishing
Central to all of these services is the ability to post content to social media profiles. At this point, it is table stakes to be able to post to one or more platforms at the same time. The tool should also be able to schedule posts into the future. One area to research is how these future posts are presented. We have found that having the option to view upcoming posts in a calendar layout has been helpful for understanding the flow of content over the course of a month or quarter. This is an area where the addition of AI can most readily be found. Test if and how AI is integrated and if there are any limits to its use (often tools will have a limit of characters or words that can be generated per month). Many tools also feature integrations with 3rd party tools such as Dropbox or Canva which can help bring in assets for use in posts. Our agency has not found that to be a gamechanger, it is more of a “nice to have” feature. Finally, pay attention to not only what platforms the tool can publish to but also what content types. Instagram in particular seems to be fussy and sometimes tools will require you to post natively on a mobile device (simplified through the use of push notifications) and/or will not allow posting of Stories, Reels, or multi-image posts through social media management tools.
Post publishing (what platforms)
Post Scheduling
Calendar view
AI integration
3rd party services integration
Post types (can it post Stories, Reels, etc.)
Engagement / Social Inbox
Brands that succeed on social media understand how important it is to foster direct relationships with your community. This is done by actively monitoring posts, comments and reviews on your profiles. Social media management tools make this easy by presenting all of these messages into a unified social inbox that can be managed similarly to how you would manage your email inbox. When these messages come in, brands can take multiple actions on these including; responding to the message either privately or publicly, deleting the message or blocking the user in the case of vulgarity or harassment, and assigning or forwarding the message to another team member (or client) inside the social media management tool. It is also important to note that incoming messages can take many forms so you will want to review what types of messages are included in the unified social media inbox. Some of the most common messages types are: direct messages, posts to your profile’s wall, posts to a user’s wall @mentioning your profile, a comment on one of your posts, a direct message, and review.
What actions can you take on a message
What types of messages are pulled into unified social inbox
Reporting
A successful social media strategy is rooted in data. Whether that data is detailed demographics of your audience, performance of content, or an analysis of your competitors, understanding what works best for your goals is critical. When vetting social media management tools, you will first want to make sure that the data you are used to looking at is included and accessible. Often tools will have pre-built reporting templates that can be helpful out of the box, but if you are used to certain metrics that are not included in those default reports they won’t be of much use. There are two solutions to this problem. The first is the ability to create your own custom reports that allow you to add or remove metrics, charts and graphs to suit your needs. The second is to export all of the raw data as a spreadsheet, which you can then perform calculations on or create visualizations with. Our agency believes that being able to download all of the data for a given platform is vital, so we can access any piece of data necessary to helps us make decisions. In addition to being able to download the data as a spreadsheet, some tools will offer multiple formats of their reports such as pdf and ppt. We have found that most of these platforms have the capability to schedule these reports and automatically deliver them to your clients. We do not often use this capability, but it is nice to have.
Customizable reports
Data spreadsheet download option
Report formats (pdf, ppt, etc.)
Scheduled sending of reports
Additional Features
There are many other features that these tools often include. Below are a list of common features as well as a brief description. Although these features are helpful and can be powerful, we believe that they are not core to the value proposiution of a social media management tool; schedule posts to one or multiple social media accounts, monitor brand mentions, provide reporting and analytics, as well as view and manage incoming posts, comments and reviews to your accounts.
Listening
Monitor social media posts based on search queries you set up such as keywords, competitors to evaluate sentiment, trends, and customer feedback.
Media Library
Upload, organize and use official, approved assets.
Influencer Marketing
The ability to find, vet and connect with the right influencers.
Content Discovery
Search, curate, and share the top-performing content in your industry.
Leading Social Media Management Platforms
Although the purpose of this article is not to compare various solutions, we did want to share the social media management tools that we researched and vetted when making our agency’s decision. We hope that the below tools offer a helpful starting place for your decision making process.
Sprout Social
sproutsocial.com
Hootsuite
hootsuite.com
Content Studio
contentstudio.io
Buffer
buffer.com
Social Pilot
socialpilot.co
Sociality
sociality.io