In 2021, digital marketers like you need a reliable tool for social media management. And with so many tasks ahead of you – whether it's social media analytics, content creation, community management, or social listening – you don’t always have time to research all the best tools for your business.
That’s why we’ve put together this helpful social media management tools comparison to make sure you have all the info you need to make the right choice for you.
The best social media management tools for business
Social media usage continues to surge significantly. Statista reports that an estimated 3.6 billion people worldwide used social media in 2020. That’s almost half of the global population, and this number is only projected to keep growing in the coming years, reaching 4.4 billion in 2025. Not to mention, people spent 145 minutes every day on social media in 2020.
The list of social media platforms where people are spending this time only continues to grow. The emergence of Clubhouse and the massive spike in popularity that TikTok saw in 2020 being recent examples.
As people turn more and more to social media, platforms will continue to evolve and become more complex. In 2021, it’s critical to have the right tools at your disposal.
But which social media management tool is the best for your specific needs? Which one will help you handle your social media presence and stay on top of what people are talking about?
Fortunately, no matter how you use social media for your business, these top social media management tools will continue to evolve to make the work of digital marketers easier and more effective.
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud (formerly Socialbakers)
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud (formerly Socialbakers)
When it comes to social media management, Emplifi is your answer. It’s an end-to-end platform that helps you through the entire process, all the way from analysis and content planning to streamlined publishing and hassle-free community management.
It’s been the trusted platform for marketers from SMBs and large enterprise companies for years. It’s easy and quick to set up, so your teams can start using it immediately.
Of course, it offers all you’d expect from an end-to-end marketing platform, plus a lot more that truly allows you to take your marketing to the next level.
Key Benefits
Streamlined Social Media Management: You can scale all your social media strategies with AI publishing recommendations, as well as boost publishing efficiency with team approval workflows. You can effortlessly manage all your channels in one place.
Powerful AI Analytics and Measurement: With Emplifi, it’s really easy to understand your own performance. But more critically, it helps you benchmark your performance against your competitors with unparalleled precision. Marketing teams have developed successful campaigns to combat competitors using this solution alone. What's more, it helps you predict future performance! (No, we're not kidding)
Everything for Your Content Strategy: With content insights powered by AI image recognition technology and deep content intelligence, Emplifi gives social media managers what they need to truly create the most engaging content.
Easy Community Management: Emplifi provides one place to manage all your social media care, from community management to crisis management. And it's made extremely effective through templates and task automation.
End-to-End Influencer Marketing: Today, successful social media management is entangled with influencer marketing. Emplifi helps you connect these two seamlessly. From super easy AI influencer discovery to campaign tracking (and actually engaging with influencers), the platform makes it all a smooth process.
Facebook Business Manager
Every business needs a Facebook business page, and Facebook Business Manager has always been a few steps ahead by providing the necessary social media tools for publishing content. Facebook empowers businesses to grow with free tools, insights, and a global community of almost three billion people.
Even though it’s solely a social media management tool for Instagram and Facebook, it’s a great package to help small businesses, startups, and ambitious entrepreneurs to get started in growing their social media presence.
Key Benefits
Facebook Ads: According to Facebook, 1.6 billion people were connected to a small business on the social media network in 2017. Marketers can create ads and personalize them with precise audience insights that not only cover age and location, but demographics, interests and behaviors.
Audience Network: This social media management tool enables marketers to expand and scale Facebook campaigns with powerful features. Marketers can also create Custom Audiences that include core and lookalike audiences.
Iconosquare
Started as a social media tool for fashion brands, Iconosquare has a multitude of features such as page analytics, community management, and post publishing. It can monitor your results, engage with your followers, and publish content systematically.
Key Benefits
Quick Scheduler: Iconosquare’s publishing has built-in features such as geolocation and user tagging. The platform even gives you information on the best time to post.
Auto-Posting: Iconosquare offers auto-posting for Instagram. Marketers can schedule Instagram carousels and stories with ease. Marketers can also see how their content is making an impact.
Buffer
Buffer offers a range of solutions for marketers. The social media tool can streamline engagement and results on social media with all the basic attributes from team approvals and collaborations to a dynamic calendar.
Marketers can also engage with customers directly from the platform and analyze campaigns.
Key Benefits
Publishing: Buffer’s unique Instagram publishing features include a shop grid to drive traffic and sales from an Instagram bio. Marketers can also include a first comment when scheduling a post.
Analytics: Work with reports and statistics for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Buffer’s analytics provides recommendations to grow reach, engagement, and sales.
Later
Later is an innovative app and cloud-based platform that helps marketers plan, manage, and schedule posts on a visual dashboard.
Solely a social media management tool for Instagram, Later helps influencers organize social media content and marketing campaigns with a smooth mobile app interface. If Instagram is your main channel, Later is the perfect platform for you.
Key Benefits
Plan Instantly: Marketers can plan and schedule their content in a matter of minutes. With a visual content calendar, marketers can easily drag and drop photos to create a personalized feed. With auto-publishing, influencers can find their experience smooth and easy.
Analyze Content Performance: Later give marketers the ability to track likes, clicks, and followers. It’s essential to have the right analytics and gain a clear view of organic performance. And with the right insights, users will be able to create a successful Instagram social media strategy.
Falcon
Falcon is known for monitoring and social listening. They have helped social media marketers with brand reputation challenges. With a collaborative UI, they can deliver personalized brand experiences across most digital touchpoints.
Falcon provides valuable features for marketers from monitoring to publishing to engagement. Falcon can help you keep track of online communities with ease.
Key Benefits
Monitor Reputation and Brand Reach: Social listening is one of this tool’s best features. It allows marketers to discover audience conversations and develop new business opportunities.
One Profile, All Data: Anyone who has interacted with your brand on social, whether via a message, comment or mentions, you will automatically get a profile card based on that data.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite started off as a tweet scheduler. But over the years, Hootsuite’s social media services diversified. They are known for their freemium service.
The tool provides features from scheduling and content creation to monitoring. Hootsuite support channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, YouTube, and even Google My Business through the Hootsuite app directory.
Key Benefits
Scheduling: The scheduling feature allows marketers to manage all content in one dashboard. Marketers can organize multiple posts and automate them quickly. They can even schedule content while surfing online.
Community Care: Hootsuite’s community management makes it easy for small teams to monitor social channels. It includes features from delivering more responsive social customer care to manageable team workflows.
Meltwater
Meltwater’s media intelligence focuses on PR and analyzes brands globally through PR and marketing. Their speciality combines a listening platform with publishing and engagement tools.
Meltwater can capture most mentions on social media sites. Plus, scheduling posts on Facebook and Twitter has never been so easy. It’s also a great tool for archiving and managing influencer marketing efforts.
Key Benefits
Global Map: A cool feature that allows marketers to access a global map that can identify different conversations within a city. Being able to understand your audience by their demographics and location is always an advantage.
Social Engagement: Meltwater users can respond to public conversations or private messages through the platform. They can speed up efficiency and respond to high volumes of inquiries.
Khoros
If you need to strengthen your social customer care, Khoros can do the job for marketers. Khoros is built on top of a customer care foundation, and their advocacy for quality customer service comes from collaborations.
After merging with Spredfast and Lithium Technologies, Khoros was able to help marketers with digital community care and branded communities.
Key Benefits
Customer Satisfaction: Khoros helps marketers uncover important social conversations from their audience. Marketers can connect with customers to resolve their needs quickly and in an organized fashion.
Advanced Listening and Monitoring: With a customizable widget dashboard, Khoros’ powerful monitoring tools can help marketers uncover distinct conversations that can be valuable for future campaigns.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps a wide range of businesses with complex social media business solutions. These include audience reach analysis, streamlining social media monitoring, and community engagement.
This social media management tool offers a practical customer care experience for marketers to quickly and efficiently plan social media strategies.
Key Benefits
Social Listening Strategy: In cooperation with Simply Measured, Sprout Social gives marketers deep social media monitoring and analytics features to expand and strengthen social campaigns.
Paid Performance Reporting: Marketers can evaluate and report on the success of paid social campaigns executed through Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is one of the leading social media solutions when it comes to social listening and analytics. Talkwalker’s social listening and monitoring tool goes beyond just social – it also connects with news sites, blogs, forums, offline databases, traditional print, and even television.
Talkwalker can provide real-time insights on current trends and conversations from all social channels and online media. And if a social crisis hits, Talkwalker has your back.
Key Benefits
Share of Voice: Marketers can see how much their audience is talking about your brand compared to competitors.
Logo and Image Recognition: With over 50,000 logos in its high-accuracy database, Talkwalker allows users to track brands using image and video recognition from social media platforms, blogs, and news sites.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse has helped marketers from mid-sized businesses and agencies throughout the years. This platform is known for solid publishing and a social CRM.
For businesses with a narrow focus and specific target audience, Agorapulse can monitor their brand and keywords on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. With clear reports and an easy-to-use dashboard, Agorapulse can boost social campaigns and increase engagement.
Key Benefits
One-Click Reports: Marketers can discover the ROI of their content strategy and engagement with downloadable and shareable reports.
Automated Inbox System: Agorapulse's inbox systems work similarly to other solutions. Marketers can tag, flag, hide, or assign content. However, what's unique is that you can eliminate spam and assign incoming content automatically.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr is more a unified front office management platform than a stand-alone social media management solution. Plus, they do it with a cloud-based customer experience management solution for social media, content marketing, and paid advertising.
Key Benefits
Advertising: Sprinklr allows omni-channel planning for other non-social campaigns across a comprehensive timeline. Marketers can plan campaigns and access real-time data on all campaigns.
Smart Response: Marketers can use an intuitive system to generate replies while conversing with audiences, saving them time.
Planable
Planable is a fun social media planning tool that caters to marketing teams, agencies, freelancers, and influencers. It offers features such as content previews, Giphy integrations, post scheduling, feedback reviewing, and many more.
This is a great tool if you have a small marketing team or you’re just getting started on expanding your social media presence.
Key Benefits
Gridview on Instagram: For content creators, this feature will be one of the most useful features. Having the right brand image and consistency on your Instagram grid is just as important as individual posts. Planable enables you to plan your content in an organized fashion.
Content Creation: Marketers can create content for multiple pages and take advantage of the drag and drop feature for all posts. Marketers can plan all their content in an organized calendar.
Dash Hudson
For brands, Dash Hudson is a software that focuses on visual marketing and content. Marketers can publish all their content through the platform to gain the right engagement.
This tool allows businesses to analyze their traffic and the overall success of their different social media accounts.
Key Benefits
Ecommerce Suite: Dash Hudson helps businesses sell products through platforms like Instagram and TikTok by providing ecommerce analytics. This makes it easy for audiences to shop directly on their social media profiles.
Vision: This is a creative insight feature that analyzes all owned content from organic to paid. Vision can identify the best images, trends, and recommendations.
Picking the best social media management tool for your business
Billions of conversations take place on social media daily. Not only must brands be able to grow and communicate with their follower base effectively, but they must also truly understand how people talk about them and identify new trends.
Being able to cut through the noise to do each of these things effectively is essential for any customer-centric brand to succeed in 2021. Adopting the right social media management software or tool can make this happen.
Thankfully, as we’ve seen in this post, there are several options available to social media managers today to help them do just that.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
