Best social media management tools in town – Pick the right one for you | socialexcerpts.com

With so many social networking channels to post, share, monitor and manage, undoubtedly, social media management tools are the need of the hour for you. They help you to schedule your future posts, keep an eye on your social mentions, track related keyword-centric conversations and offer updated insights about your content. In a nutshell, they streamline the entire social media activities and save your time and energy.

Do you want one for your business too? Let’s find out what are the best options and what would be the best fit for your business requirements.

• HootSuite: HootSuite helps you manage multiple social channels at once and offer multi-column view for each one of them.
• Buffer: Buffer is a social media management tool that lets you schedule and queue your posts on different channels.
• Sprout Social: Sprout Social has no free version but it has a gorgeous interface, power packed with advanced discovery system and great customer support.

Now the pros and cons:

HootSuite:

Pros:

• Multi-Columned display for each network, easy to monitor.

• Under each tab, there is an option to set up streams, which can be further customized to track any social segments.
• A user can customize a stream with a keyword as well.
• Unlimited social networks and apps can be connected with the Pro plan.
• 1 monthly free report
• You can do all social actions from HootSuite that generally could be done on the concerned network.

Cons:

• Additional analytics reports come with a large price tag, sometimes as much as $50.
• There is no Content-Grabbing Extension.
• No browser extension to offer easy bookmarking and articles sharing.
• It supports only Ow.ly URL Shorter. You cannot track these URLs outside of HootSuite.

Will HootSuite fit your requirements?

If you have five or less social networks and apps to manage, HootSuite allows it for free. And the bonus is, you will get almost all the features of a Pro account, including 1 monthly report. You can bulk-schedule 50 updates at one time. You can upload from a CSV file. And no one can beat the multi-column cleanliness.

Buffer:

Pros:

• Simple and easy to understand interface
• Great tool for Segmented Scheduling

• Easy user interface for queuing and scheduling

• It suggests the content, you might want to share on your social profiles, as it is integrated with WordPrss, Chrome, RSS, Twitter and many more to offer cool content to share.
• If offers browser extension for Chrome and Firefox
• You can even schedule times to repeat throughout the week or each days of the week separately.
• You can reshuffle the posts any time
• You can post as many updates a day, you want.
• There are options to choose your preferred time for each and every day of the week
• You can select your Link Shortening service

Cons:

• Analytics shows only some basic insights
• It does not allow you to integrate Google Plus

Will Buffer fit your requirements?

If you are looking for a high-end tool to schedule and queue your social media updates, Buffer is probably the best option for you. But the downside is, Buffer is best only at scheduling. Apart from advanced scheduling feature, it has no noteworthy features, as of now.

Sprout Social

Pros:

• Stunning interface
• Amazing Publishing feature

• Offers advanced customer support and technical training.
• Offers a clear dashboard with brief snapshots of your entire social media activities.
• It allows you to have several tabs to monitor, schedule, publish and analyze your social campaigns.
• Sprout Queue Extension is available for Chrome and Firefox.
• You can manage your queue settings any time here.

Cons:

• There is no free version, but you can try for trial version for a month.
• Scheduling feature is not as advanced as Buffer.

• You cannot ‘Like’ a Facebook post, even though it allows you to reply or comment.
• Google Plus is not supported. Strange, isn’t it? But hopefully, they will fix it soon.

Will Sprout Social fit your requirements?

Sprout Social has similar features of scheduling and queuing like Buffer, but not advanced as the latter. The bonus with the tool is the Social CRM tools to monitor and manage social contacts. Unlike HootSuite, the analytics are 100% free, but do not forget the signup charges after you complete the free-trial.