Social media’s significance as a marketing tool increases every year. Businesses spend billions of pounds on campaigns to ensure their social channels serve a purpose and ultimately, drive revenue.
This is reflected in the increasing social media budgets over the past decade.
Whether you represent a multinational organisation, personal brand, or something in between, you’ll understand the work that goes into every post.
While many can appreciate the time it takes to create content, it’s easy to overlook other important tasks, like examining analytics reports and assembling ad campaigns.
To fully utilise its potential, social media management is a full-time job and often, a team effort. Marketing managers rely on social media tools to improve the quality of their work, create smoother processes, and increase the value of their social media.
Choosing the right tool is a critical decision but by no means easy.
In this article, we answer the question, what is a social media management tool? We’ll then discuss the importance of using quality tools to manage social media before helping you find one that fits the needs of your business.
- What is a social media management tool?
- Why do businesses need to invest in social media management software?
- What are the key features of social media management tools?
- What are the benefits of social media management tools?
- How to choose the right social media management tools
What is a social media management tool?
A social media management tool is a piece of software or a program used to control and manage your social media accounts.
These tools typically provide you with a unified platform so you can access and run all of your accounts from one place.
With a quality social media management tool, you don’t need to log into individual platforms to create content, post, schedule, and engage with your community. Rather, you handle each of these tasks through the tool’s interface.
Social media tools also provide analytics and reports so you can monitor social media performance.
Why do businesses need to invest in social media management software?
On average, each person uses close to seven different social media platforms every single month.
As social media’s prominence in marketing strategy increases along with the demand for quality content, there is a growing need for comprehensive social media management tools among businesses of all sizes.
Failing to optimise your social media due to poor management may lead to missed opportunities.
What’s more, losing time jumping between platforms or researching the latest TikTok trends creates a seemingly never-ending loop of frustration. Your social media should be deeply ingrained in your overall marketing strategy.
Today, casual engagement, likes, shares, and other vanity metrics are no longer sufficient.
Investing in management tools is a strategic decision that can have an enormous impact on your brand, your market presence, and the growth of your organisation.
With this in mind, here are some important reasons businesses need to invest in social media management tools.
Optimise branding and improve online visibility
Having a digital presence is no longer enough for a modern business. You’ve got to stand out among your competitors.
A social media management tool not only helps businesses increase brand awareness but can also act as a strategic guide and general assistant for all aspects of your social media campaigns.
Leading providers like Sendible include a range of useful features, such as:
- Content planning and scheduling
- Optimised posting times
- Content generation from trend analysis
- Data analytics (e.g. demographic information, content performance reports, reach, etc.)
- Targeted posts
Unified messaging through shared workflows
One of the most important reasons for investing in social media management software is gaining access to a centralised hub for all your needs.
Rather than having to log into each platform separately, you control all social media activity through a single dashboard.
This saves you time and also makes it convenient to keep your brand’s voice consistent. Having unified messaging is essential for reinforcing messages and building trust among your target audience.
Management software, like Sendible, allows collaboration and approval workflows, so multiple people can work on campaigns and access accounts without stepping on each other’s toes.
You can even access messages from all platforms through a centralised inbox.
By setting up real-time notifications, average response times may be slashed, ensuring customer queries or potential issues are dealt with quickly and efficiently. To boot, a shared inbox makes it much easier to monitor interactions and the type of topics that come up.
Adapt to the latest trends
Approximately 62% of the global population uses social media, with the daily usage average coming in just shy of two and a half hours. Viral trends come and go in a flash, making them easy to miss.
That’s why you might find yourself Googling the meaning of a TikTok video every 10 minutes.
Being on the cusp of the latest social media trend can be rewarding, whether you’re a small business or a multinational organisation.
Take Ryanair for example. You’ll struggle to find a review online that surpasses three stars. Yet, their TikTok account has a huge following and garners millions of likes and views.
Why? Because Ryanair uses social media predominantly to entertain. Its social media team is ready to react to big news or a viral trend, resulting in Ryanair's social media posts going viral with regularity.
This creates positive sentiments among audiences and may retract from the criticism it receives on review sites.
Social media management tools, such as Sendible, provide you with detailed analytics on all of your platforms as well as real-time data on trends and hashtags.
Having condensed information at your fingertips provides you with the adaptability to react to trends and create content that resonates with the audience.
Sendible integrates with other tools, like Canva and video editors so you can prepare content for each platform on your user dashboard. This adaptability and convenience help you hit your social media targets and your overall marketing goals in the long run.
What are the key features of social media management tools?
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by social media management tool options. There are plenty of competitors promising a variety of features that you may not fully understand.
To give you the best chance of making the right call, we’ve outlined the essential functions of social media management tools below. Look out for these components and make sure they align with your business needs.
- Unified platform: Having a centralised dashboard to access your accounts and handle tasks is a crucial feature of a social media tool. It presents information in a single place, making it easy to access and interpret. This can save your team a lot of time.
- Integration possibilities: To effectively manage your social accounts, your tool will need to integrate with apps as well as other useful platforms, like video and image editing software, analytics tools, and file-sharing platforms.
- Scheduling tools: Scheduling tools allow you to plan and prepare content months in advance. Plus, they ensure you can post at optimal times for your target audiences, even if they’re located in different time zones.
- Analytics and reports: Quality tools provide you with in-depth reports and analytics to help you better understand how to use social media optimally. It’s worthwhile to compare the analytical details offered by different providers to determine which presents the best value for your business.
- Content creation tool: Not all social media tools help you to create content. Rather, they act as hubs to schedule, publish, and report on your posts. However, some software, like Sendible is optimised for creators and offers content ideas as well as image and video editing integration.
- Collaboration: One of the biggest advantages of using management software is collaboration. Social media teams can work on projects together from remote locations seamlessly. Look out for platforms with approval systems, communication widgets, and other innovative workflow software.
Naturally, there are other considerations when choosing a social media management tool, which we’ll get to. However, these are the key elements that all systems share.
What are the benefits of using social media management tools?
We’ve discussed the need for investing in social media management software on a strategic level. However, what do the benefits of these tools actually look like day-to-day?
Below, we break down the key benefits of management tools and discuss how they can impact a business from a practical perspective.
Time management
As most social media managers can attest, one of the biggest challenges of running multiple accounts is time management.
Even a simple post can take hours if you have to optimise it for several platforms. Unfortunately, repurposing social media content takes time.
Once your content goes live, you have to deal with notifications, messages, and engagement across each app, further eating into your work day.
Occasionally, you experience issues with content or repurposing for different platforms. Putting out consistently engaging content is a real challenge and time is one of the biggest obstacles.
It’s no surprise that so many businesses churn out generic social media posts and stick to informational topics.
For a lot of companies, straightforward content is a more efficient use of their time. However, with the right management tools, juggling various campaigns across multiple platforms becomes much more feasible.
Firstly, management tools provide you with an ideal channel for strategic planning. You can create workflows and collaborative systems (more on these later), allowing several people to work together at the same time.
From here, content may be scheduled way ahead of time, using integrated scheduling tools.
With Sendible’s centralised dashboard, you can monitor and manage interactions and engagement from one place. Social Reach founder, Scott Cox, and his team saved 50% of their time spent on social media management with Sendible software, which you can read more about here.
Data-driven decision-making
Data-driven decision-making essentially means using data to come up with solutions or ideas and subsequently validating your final decisions with the said data.
Rather than relying on your “gut” or instincts, you crunch the numbers and let the evidence pave the way.
Business shouldn’t be a guessing game, and so, data-driven decision-making is the optimal process for many businesses.
Social media provides businesses with a treasure trove of information. By digging deep into the analytics, you can spot trends, discover insights, and use valuable data to inform your decisions.
With Sendible, you can quickly generate in-depth reports for social media accounts, gaining insights into your audience on each channel. The platform offers more than 200 models so you can find the precise information you need to make the best decisions for your business. Plus, all reports can be tailored to you or your clients.
Generating comprehensive reports that incorporate data from multiple channels helps you make the right decisions quickly.
For example, you might find that your posts at particular times perform best, helping you to optimise your social media calendar schedule for an upcoming campaign.
In addition to making decisions quickly, you’ll be able to:
- Act with confidence
- Back up reasoning with data
- Be more proactive
- Quantify marketing efforts
- Manage your budget effectively
Enhanced collaboration and workflow
When discussing the benefit of time management above, we touched on collaborations and workflow. Social media management tools can be used as virtual collaboration hubs that streamline workflow and support teamwork.
This is more important than ever with many companies operating remotely and having project members working from different locations. This type of collaborative environment also makes it easier to collaborate across multiple time zones.
Here’s an idea of how a collaborative social media project might look using a social media management tool, like Sendible’s:
- Collaboration on tasks: The marketing team may communicate, share assets through libraries, assemble best hashtags, and create social media content using integrated design programs (e.g. Canva).
- Tasks pass through the approval workflow: Collaborators can be assigned specific roles and permissions. Certain team members approve of tasks at various stages, allowing the project to progress.
- Content scheduling: Once the tasks receive approval, they can be scheduled in advance using the Sendible scheduling tool. Once scheduled, users may view posts through the social media calendar. Those with permissions can edit, rearrange, and create new tasks as needed.
After posts go live, you can access real-time analytics or publish in-depth reports after a day, week, month, or a custom time period.
You’ll also have a data trail of all content created through the platform, ensuring easy access to project details, analytics, and other important information. This is vital for learning or identifying where a failed project might have gone wrong.
Integration with other tools
Top social media management software allows integration with multiple social media platforms as well as other important tools.
The system operates as somewhat of an ecosystem, connecting all accounts with other important components, such as video and image editing programs.
Since the centralised dashboard already hosts collaborative projects with multiple team members, the integrated systems make for even more streamlined workflows.
Sendible allows integration with popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Business accounts, and more.
However, it also provides direct access to other tools, like Canva, Google Drive, and Dropbox. This makes it fast and convenient to share files, create content, and edit image and video assets.
Leveraging integrated tools within your management software allows you and your team to execute campaigns with efficiency.
It strengthens messaging consistency, ensures you can adapt quickly to market dynamics, and ultimately, helps you deliver more effective content to your audience.
Quantifying impacts with ROI
Analytics provide you with valuable information to help you understand what makes your audience tick.
Through detailed reports, you can discover optimal posting times, engagement rates, and other nuggets that help you create more compelling content.
However, that’s not all that analytic reports do. They also allow you to quantify the impact of your investments in campaigns.
Even if you don’t engage with paid advertising on social media, all marketing efforts require time and personnel. With combined analytics from all platforms, you can determine the trust cost and return on your work.
This is extremely beneficial for social media managers who struggle to accurately demonstrate the true value of their work.
By proving the effectiveness of your campaigns, you may get more buy-in from management or clients. Plus, you can justify budget increases or more investment in future campaigns.
How to choose the right social media management tools
By now, you understand the importance of having a social media management tool to assist you with your marketing efforts.
However, given the growing need for quality tools, the market is flooded with options. To boot, management tools offer different features, some of which may suit your business better than others.
To make your decision easier, we’ve identified the key considerations when choosing social media management tools. Choose which ones best apply to your business.
Brand reputation
With so many social media management tools now available, there’s no sense in going for the first one that crosses your path. Be sure to put in the necessary research, starting with investigating the brand’s reputation.
Scroll through the website, read online reviews, and consult with professionals in your network to get a read on the best available options.
If possible, check out testimonials or case studies to get a better idea of which provider best fits your needs.
If you need help weighing up your options, check out these comparisons:
- Hootsuite vs Sendible
- Agorapulse vs Sendible
- Sprout Social vs Sendible
- Buffer vs Sendible
- SocialPilot vs Sendible
Price
Price is always a factor when weighing up business decisions. While some tools may offer more functions for a higher price, you may not need all the features.
So, firstly it’s important to identify your needs.
Then, you can determine what price points represent the best value among the various options.
Sendible offers a free 14-day trial so you can test the main features without paying a penny (no card required). When your trial ends, choose between four price packages according to the size of your business and your specific needs.
Interface and usability
The interface and usability of the platform are important factors. A smooth and intuitive system ensures efficient workflows, seamless collaboration, and quicker turnaround times, each of which can impact your bottom line.
Sendible’s software is purpose-built to optimise your social media activities. You can centralise tasks through the singular dashboard, mitigating the need to jump between tabs and access accounts separately. Sendible helps streamline social media, saving you a lot of time.
Sendible lets us create a month’s worth of content in one week for our clients, allowing us to spend the rest of the month engaging and optimising.
Sophia Rabe, Founder & CEO @ Olive + Milo
Standout features
Most social media management platforms have at least one standout feature, whether it’s a content calendar or collaboration component. Certain providers may even offer something unique that others don’t.
For example, consider Sendible’s White Label software for agencies. This system helps you grow your agency with seamless client account management in separate dashboards. Not all providers have similar services.
Take a look through each company’s features to see what stands out to you.
Schedule a consultation
If you still can’t decide on a platform after comparing all of the factors outlined above, reach out to the providers directly. Sendible’s social media consultants are available Monday to Friday to discuss offers.
In a nutshell
If you’re looking to improve your social media, investing in social media management software is worthwhile. Although the major apps might change, social media’s influence is here to stay.
In fact, it’s expected to grow, especially considering the number of popular platforms and the significance of each to different demographics.
Centralising your activities through a comprehensive social media management tool is becoming more of a need than a luxury. If you’re sceptical about investing, why not try out Sendible’s free 14-day trial?
That way, you’ll get to enjoy the full benefits of the platform before you commit to a payment.
We’re confident you’ll save time, improve efficiency, and notice the benefits right away. If you don’t, you can cancel anytime. We don’t even require a card for the trial. You’ve got nothing to lose.
