Managing one social media presence amongst multiple platforms can be extremely time consuming. Managing multiple social media accounts, for different brands in very different industries, and among multiple platforms, would be virtually impossible without the help of social media management tools. Tools help entrepreneurs and social media managers publish content, monitor activities, monitor a brand’s social presence, analyze social media, and connect social profiles all in one organized space. (Shanks, 2021) Social media management tools are basically the end all be all for social media managers, and they make this tedious task much less time consuming and much more organized. This doesn’t mean that using management tools completely eliminates the brainstorming, pre-planning, creativity, and other timely processes from the equation, it simply means that nearly every task that needs to be completed to manage multiple social accounts once those steps are complete, can be done simultaneously on these helpful platforms. This allows social media managers to focus on strategizing for their brands, foster audience engagement, strategically determine the needs and wants of their audience to efficiently reach the brand’s desired business goals.

The Tools You Need to Help You Shine

Common tools that are used are graphic and written content creation tools, video editing tools and software systems. The software systems, or management platforms, allow for direct publishing of content, support brand specific social media platforms-simultaneously, come standard with analytic capabilities, and some offer customer relationship management (CRM) options.

It’s important to remember that a brand may not need to utilize all of these tools immediately, or on the flip side, may need additional tools that cover even more social bases, depending on their size, goals, and who they have on staff who can complete specific, time-consuming, tasks, like graphic design for example. This is where platforms that allow for team activities come in handy because different pieces of the overall social media management can be divided and completed by different team members all in one place to avoid confusion and also to avoid pieces of work falling through the cracks.

Social Listening and Community Engagement

Boosting community engagement and mastering social listening helps brands see how they appear from an outside consumer perspective. Growing engagement creates a sense of ownership among an audience who feel like they have an important voice that a brand is actually listening to. Increased engagement also fosters customer and brand loyalty because a trusted connection between the brand and it’s community can be formed through beneficial engagement. This can also lead to audiences becoming emotionally invested in as well as monetarily invested in, which is very good. Social listening tells a brand what their audience actually wants and needs and helps brands get ahead of issues to keep operations flowing smoothly.

Now that we understand why engagement and social listening are important parts of a successful social strategy, we can connect these two tactics to social media management tools. Social tools help brands, and social media managers, track specific keywords relevant to your brand or business to see what your audience, and everyone else, is saying related to things that may affect your bottom line. This crucial feature included in social media management tools assists brands with social listening and connects brands with their audience demographic, helps them locate influencers in their industry, tweak and adjust their content strategy with sentiment analysis, analyze free market research, easily find leads that are ready to convert to customers, and hear their audience on each and every social channel. A sentiment analysis helps brands control their reputation, get ahead of issues, and respond directly to interested customers as well as unsatisfied customers. (Osman, 2020)

Compare Two Social Tools: Hootsuite and HubSpot

Hootsuite and HubSpot are platforms designed specifically to manage multiple social media accounts to offer a smooth, cohesive, and expansive brand presence for audiences at length.

Hootsuite allows users to monitor, engage, and publish across all social channels, analyze trends, build a library of branded content, manage and report on search and social ads (measure ROI), connect employee teams, and offers industry-leading certifications. (Hootsuite, 2021)

Hootsuite has multiple plans available for users depending on their needs- Professional Plan (1 user), Team Plan (3 users), Business Plan (5–10 users), and Enterprise Plan (create custom plan) (Joyce, 2021). Each level up allows for more social profiles to be managed than the last, and goes up in price starting at $49.00 for professional to $599.00 for business. The Enterprise plan is a custom set price based on what the business needs in excess of what the Business Plan already offers.

HubSpot’s plans are based on the number of existing marketing contacts an individual or business have. The Starter Plan is $45.00 and allows for 1,000 marketing contacts, Professional Plan is $800.00 and allows for 2,000 marketing contacts, and Enterprise Plan starts at 3,200.00 per month and starts at 10,000 marketing contacts. Marketing contacts refer to contacts your brand chooses to market to, and HubSpot allows brands free storage space that allows for up to fifteen million additional non-marketing contacts as well. (HubSpot, 2021)

With the use of HubSpot, users are able to publish to social networks and build campaigns, monitor keywords and engage with audience, analyze data, and have access to fully functioning CRM and lead nurturing features.

There are apparent slight differences in each management tool, but which differences matter to your brand? Hootsuite outperforms HubSpot with their unique dashboards options that allow users to focus on individual social channels with their own individualized dashboard and has a more social media marketing driven focus. On the other hand, HubSpot helps brands clearly see how social media fits with the other pieces of their marketing strategy, not just social media in isolation, as well as helps brands gain a better understanding of their customer with features that allow them to add and filter by buyer personal and see every interaction a tracked lead has made. (Randall, 2018)

In the End, You Decide What Works Best