Barbara Potrč, 10. 5. 2022
Having the right social media management tools will save you a ton of time, effort, and money on social media.
With more than half the world’s population now active on social media, social channels are a critical way to build brand awareness, contact customers, drive traffic, and even sell products and services. That’s a lot of functions for one communications channel. Social media management tools increase efficiency and allow social teams to get more done.
So what is social media management? It involves a long list of tasks spread over multiple social media platforms. These can include scheduling social media posts, replying to comments, tracking the success of social strategies, and much more.
Social media management tools can reduce the amount of time and effort required for those tasks. At the same time, they increase performance, security, and data tracking capabilities. The best social media management tools meet a variety of needs. They simplify everything from marketing to customer service to social selling.
8 benefits of using social media management tools
1. Save time
For smaller brands and solo social media managers, this is likely the biggest benefit of a social media management platform. Stop opening apps or tabs and logging in and out of accounts. Instead, you can manage all your social accounts in one place.
You can also save time by preparing social media posts in advance and scheduling them to post later. You won’t need to interrupt your other work to post throughout the day. This allows you to better plan content and improve your posting consistency. It also frees up time to work on other aspects of your social media presence.
2. Plan a cross-platform content calendar
It’s important to plan your posts (both created and curated) in a social media content calendar. Many social media professionals use spreadsheets to plan and organize their social posts. But it’s more effective to use the planner built into a social media management platform.
Social media management tools with planners allow you to:
· Balance different types of social messaging
· Publish posts when they are likely to receive the highest engagement
· Curate compelling content to share with your followers
· Plan for seasonal and release-specific messaging
A built-in content planner allows you to schedule posts at the right times. In most cases, you can adjust your schedule with a simple drag and drop.
3. Automate social listening
You need to know what’s said about your brand, your competitors, and your industry. In fact, 48% of marketers strongly agree social listening increased in value for them in the last year.
Social listening allows you to monitor conversations across channels from one central dashboard. You never need to switch between browsers, and you never miss relevant conversations.
Social listening is also a powerful content curation tool. Use appropriate industry keywords and hashtags to source great third-party content. Share that content to complement work created in-house.
4. Centralize creative assets
Keeping content consistent across channels and teams can be a challenge. A content library makes it easy for teams working in various locations to share appropriate, pre-approved content. This ensures all your social channels remain on-brand and on point.
5. Streamline permissions
It is a truly terrible idea to share passwords among members of your team. A social management dashboard creates unique passwords for each person who needs access to your social accounts.
You can control permissions for each team member based on their role. It’s easy to revoke that permission when someone leaves your team. And the appropriate stakeholders can sign off on social content right within the posting workflow.
6. Unify analytics
It’s important to use real data to test your social media strategy.
Social media metrics tell you when your content strategy is performing well, and where it might need reworking. A good analytics tool helps crunch the numbers that matter to measure performance.
A social media management platform shows you cross-platform analytics. You can see which content works best on which social network, then create custom reports based on your business needs, not network-specific stats.
7. Improve customer service
Customers who reach out on social media expect a customer service response. But often, the person monitoring the social channels is not a customer care rep.
Social media management tools can help ensure the right messages get to the right teams. They also create a unified view of the customer. They merge messages across channels, and even connect to your CRM.
As artificial intelligence improves, chatbots have also become invaluable for social customer care. They provide answers 24/7 to basic customer requests like package tracking and order status.
8. Simplify social commerce
The global social commerce industry is worth more than half a trillion dollars. And it’s expected to keep growing.
Social media management tools can help your brand sell more through social, automatically. AI-powered chatbots help guide shoppers to the products best suited to them.
In conclusion social media management tools are great freelance social media managers, small but growing brands, medium-sized companies and one-person marketing teams. They make your life easier and help you save time, effort and money.
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