10 Social Media Marketing Tools That Will Make Your Competitors Weep

What is the best social media marketing tool on the market? All of its features, such as the social media inbox, monitoring and publishing, are all at the top of the dashboard and easily accessible. The interface is easy to use and all of the features that we’re all usually looking for in a social media marketing tool are all there. In fact, PostPlanner claim that their features have helped marketers and other users get 650% more engagement than any other of the top social media marketing tools. Conclusion: While Hootsuite is still definitely one of the top social media marketing tools, its high prices and its bland, sometimes confusing interface are definitely worth considering before deciding on the perfect tool for you. Sendible Sendible is a full feature social media marketing tool that allows you to engage with your audience, schedule updates, monitor social activity and measure your results. You can use Buffer to publish and schedule content, curate your favourite websites and blogs to easily share new content with your followers, see quick analytics for each of your posts and get more detailed analysis with the Business plan. Oktopost also provides detailed analytics and beautiful reports, and helps you track any conversions you make on social media. The G2Crowd and Ian Anderson Gray’s infographic on the top social media marketing tools has found, through detailed customer reviews, that Agorapulse is the best dashboard of 2016. What do you think is the best social media marketing tool?

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What is the best social media marketing tool on the market?

This is a question that has sparked many heated debates among marketers. With so many different social media management tools available and their importance to any social media marketer, it can be very difficult to find the right tool for you.

Ian Anderson Gray of the Seriously Social blog has partnered up with G2Crowd to find out which tool amongst the top 5 rated social media management tools on the market is the best.

The resulting infographic provides some very interesting results:

The Best 5 Rated Social Media Management Tools

Infographic brought to you by Seriously Social and G2 Crowd

In this post, I will be looking at all of these tools and five others to find out which one is the best.

The importance of social media management tools

First, let’s look at what makes social media management tools so important to those who use social media for promotional purposes, as well as what features and results most of us need to get out of them.

The main things to look for in a social media management tool is if it makes you more productive and efficient.

Does it take you less time to manage all of your social accounts? Are you creating better social media campaigns and generally getting better results by using the tool? Is it making the process of managing multiple accounts easier?

With those end goals in mind, you’ll want to examine the following features in social media management dashboards:

  • Multiple accounts: Can you manage multiple social media accounts across all major platforms?
  • Team collaborations features: Can multiple team members work on the same accounts? Can you assign tasks to team-members?
  • Analytics: Do you get detailed analytics reports on your social media activity?
  • Monitoring: Can you monitor keywords, other accounts, hashtags, etc.?
  • Scheduling: Can you schedule posts for when you can’t go online?

The infographic also looks at some interesting criteria for rating each of the tools:

  • Overall user satisfaction
  • Product direction: Are the tools keeping up with all the latest trends and changes in social media?
  • Easy-to-learn
  • Customer support
  • Usability: does it improve your productivity?
  • Ability to meet business needs

Now, let’s look into each individual tool to see how they fare against each other.

1. Agorapulse

According to the infographic’s results, Agorapulse is the best social media marketing tool on the market. I’ve been using it myself for a few years now and I have to say, I agree with the reviews that made up the results from the infographic. So let’s examine this tool first.

The Agorapulse dashboard is very straightforward. Switching through all your accounts is easy, as they are all clearly listed on the left hand side of the dashboard. All of its features, such as the social media inbox, monitoring and publishing, are all at the top of the dashboard and easily accessible.

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One of Agorapulse’s best features in my opinion is the social media inbox, because it makes it very easy to check all of the social media updates that require your attention. It works very much like an email account would – as you go through your inbox and read your notifications and respond to them, the queue grows smaller. You can create automated moderation rules, meaning that Agorapulse will then tag, flag, hide or assign content so that you get all the most relevant messages in your inbox.

If you find an update or comment as you go along that you want to save for later review, you can easily add custom tags and categorize them.

Another big feature is publishing and scheduling. You can publish posts to any of your networks, as well as schedule them, but the best part is the editorial calendar. Basically, you can schedule all of the updates that you want and see them in a beautiful calendar that makes it so much easier to stay organized and plan your social media updates.

Next comes the monitoring tool. You can use it to monitor all of your shares and mentions on social media, find out when someone mentions your Facebook Page, create searches for certain keywords on Twitter and monitor hashtags and places on Instagram.

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When it comes to reporting, Agorapulse has created some of the most beautiful and detailed analytics reports among social media marketing tools. The reports focus on your audience, engagement and brand awareness – some of the most important metrics, especially to clients. Another really cool thing is that you can see how many posts and comments you’ve reviewed and what your response time and rate are.

I think that the feature that sets Agorapulse apart from most other dashboards is the CRM function. This feature makes it very easy to keep track of all of your followers and friends and find out whom your most engaged users are. You can also use Agorapulse to find out who your influencers and brand ambassadors are and who among your followers has the most followers themselves.

The more followers and friends you have, the more difficult it is to keep track of them, but with Agorapulse you can add custom tags so that you know who is a prospect, who is an influencer and so on. You also can see exactly what you’ve talked about with each user so that you’re never out of the loop.

Something else that’s worth mentioning is that the guys and gals of Agorapulse are very quick to respond to new features and changes coming out on various social networks.

Conclusion: Overall, Agorapulse is a truly great dashboard and I honestly can’t think of anything that I don’t like about it. The interface is easy to use and all of the features that we’re all usually looking for in a social media marketing tool are all there.

2. PostPlanner

Postplanner used to be the tool for scheduling Facebook updates. Now, this is a much more widespread feature, so Postplanner has evolved quite a lot to include more cool features. Its main focus is now on helping marketers increase their engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

With Postplanner, you can easily identify the top performing content for any hashtag, topic or social media account, ranked by their virality. With this information, you can more easily come up with updates that will increase your engagement, reach and ultimately your traffic.

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It’s also a pretty good content curation tool; all you need to do is add your favourite social accounts, blogs, hashtags and keywords to have a list of awesome content that you can easily share, as well as use for inspiration for your future posts.

Postplanner helps you decide what the best content is with their star rating, so that whenever you see a post with 4 or 5 stars, you’ll know it stands a better chance of getting you more engagement. The content is also categorized by Photos, Articles and Statuses so you can easily diversify your updates and keep your audience more interested and engaged.

postplanner-2-for-social-media-marketing-tools

In fact, PostPlanner claim that their features have helped marketers and other users get 650% more engagement than any other of the top social media marketing tools.

Scheduling content is also very easy. Their Plan feature lets you quickly schedule posts for Facebook and Twitter and arranges them in an easy to use calendar. You can also schedule reoccurring updates and use their cool Re-Cycle feature to revive all of your top updates so that you can make the most out of them.

Conclusion: PostPlanner is the perfect tool for those who want to increase their engagement and publish more targeted, engaging content, all from one place. That said, those who want more monitoring and reporting, might have to look elsewhere.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is probably the best-known social media marketing tool on the market, but also one of the most criticized. In the beginning, Hootsuite was the answer to all marketers’ prayers; now, though, more and more are…

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