There was a time when you couldn’t schedule Facebook posts in advance, or coordinate tweets to go out at a certain time. The functionality on fledgling social media sites was minimal, and other app developers jumped in to fill that gap with social media management tools. I remember being pretty amazed with how easy and efficient TweetDeck made it to manage multiple Twitter accounts, and choose which tweets went out to which followers.
But now, most social media platforms have filled in all that missing functionality. Facebook now allows you to schedule in advance, backdate posts in the past, and offers detailed analytics for your posts. Twitter also allows for scheduling and promoted posts now, and you can even link your Twitter to Facebook so you can post once and reach both platforms. So are those social media management apps now obsolete?
Related Class: Social Media Marketing Best Practices for SMBs
Not at all. If you’re a busy marketer orchestrating multiple social media accounts…I don’t know how you do it without an app to consolidate and assist you. We all make the mistake of thinking of social media as a free tool, but really it takes a ton of time just to maintain, and even more time to really advance your brand and your reach.
Get a Bird’s-Eye View of Your Social Content
And social media management tools aren’t just for convenience – the best ones will help you put together your editorial calendar in a clean, simple way that makes it easy to see what’s posting when. This can help you keep an eye on balance, timeliness, and variety, so you’re posting the best types of content you can. And if you’ve decided to stick to the 80/20 rule (80% non-promotional posts, 20% self-promotion) for your social channels, seeing your schedule laid out in full can help you get the proportions right.
The Reigning King: Hootsuite
The most popular social media management tool, by far, is Hootsuite. It allows you to manage and schedule for all your platforms in one place as you’d expect, but also includes detailed analytics and tracking, so you can see how your campaigns are doing in real time. If you’re invested in great analytics, and using them to shape your social media content choices (definitely a good thing!), Hootsuite gives you everything you need for better data-driven decision-making.
The major plus I personally see in Hootsuite is its freemium model scalability – you can use the free version before you commit, or opt for the pro version for only $8.99 a month, or even scale up to enterprise-level options.
Push Your Reach with Edgar
At OMI, we use Edgar, a social app that is similar in many ways to Hootsuite. The advantage to using Edgar is that it’s specifically designed to help you reach more eyeballs with your content posts, by repeating them at specific times for different purposes.
When using Edgar, you input your content (it currently supports Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and file it under a category, like “Blog Post Promotion” or “Sales Offer.” Once you’ve set up a weekly schedule for when you want tweets or posts from these categories to go up, Edgar will randomize the content you’ve input for a great variety of tweets or updates – following your guidelines for when sales offers should go up, when blog posts are better, etc. So in terms of social media management, you’re completely in control without having to be literally hands-on with every post.
Since we all know that less than 10% of our fans/followers are seeing most pieces of content, you can get more bang for your buck out of every tweet or update by giving it more opportunities to be seen. This is especially helpful if you don’t have the budget for promoting posts or tweets to amp up your reach. Of course there’s nothing stopping you from scheduling repeat tweets or posts through Hootsuite or even manually, but Edgar saves all your content so you won’t have to write the update all over again.
Related Class: Finding Influencers to Amplify Social Reach
This is clearly not a guide to choosing your social media management tool; there are many that can get you started if you’re in the market. I’d suggest Search Engine Journal’s Top 10 Tools for Managing Your Social Media Accounts as a good jumping off point, but most established apps and tools will have their own comparisons, so you can see which works best for your needs in terms of functionality, frequency, extras (like photos, videos, etc.), analytics, paid promotion, and everything else.
Even if you’re managing just fine without social media management tools, you could be doing more, and doing it better, with a little help from these guys. Why not take a free tool or trial for a spin?
Want to learn more about spreading your content across many platforms for the biggest reach? Check out this class, led by marketing strategist Tom King: Personal Branding Through Content Distribution.