Best Tools for Planning Social Media Marketing
Online Marketing is one hot topic right now, because if you aren’t on social media, you virtually don’t exist. And it doesn’t matter if you are a personal brand, a small business, or an enterprise. Having a substantial presence in social media is crucial even to gain the client’s trust.
In the beginning, social media started as a tool to connect people and have broad conversations about everything. But in no time, companies noticed that social media is a sales channel and a way to reduce the barrier between them and the customer. Having a voice as a brand meant real-time conversation with customers, entertaining, or educating your audience by having relevant content, managing multiple accounts on different platforms. Suddenly this wonderful world of social media grew more complicated and in no time a single person couldn’t handle all the aspects involved in managing “the brand voice.”
Nowadays while it’s getting more and more complicated, and having a presence in social media is not as hot and new as like it used to be, it is still indisputable that you have to be online but it’s also clear that this isn’t the work of a single intern or for people without some knowledge about social media management tools.
An app will not provide you with a marketing strategy for your business. At its core, Marketing is pretty much the same, but these social media management tools will help you keep it up with all the complicated and live aspects of dealing with social media marketing. From planning, organizing your content, having a content calendar, managing multiple accounts on different social platforms to even make blog posting easier. Today it’s crucial to visualize ahead what you are going to post and even make changes on the go.
In this post, we are going to review the most important planning tools for social media management, social media scheduling, and in general, keep the sight ahead while you are putting your marketing strategy online.
Crowdfire will help you seek and find content, photos, and even suggest pre-tailored posts for all your social media in one place. This app is great for the company that is still finding a voice and is unsure of what should talk with its customer. Another of the significant features of Crowdfire is the possibility to curate photos and seek more relevant images for you. While this can sound off if you are planning to publish photos of your product, in reality, photo curation can give you angles, color palettes and provide style guidelines for your images.
Crowdfire starts with a plan of $8 billed annually and a maximum of five social accounts.
Pros:
- Is one of the few social media tools that have the possibility of image curation.
- It works with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
- Comes with a splendid set of reports and stats.
Cons:
- Besides schedule posts, there are no more planning tools.
- Focusing on their content suggestions can dilute your brand voice.
Post Planner helps make it easy to plan before the plan. What this tool helps you do best is find relevant content on the internet to talk about. This will facilitate curation within the framework of your content pillars and basically, you will solve in less time your content marketing plan. Another interesting tool is the capacity to predict how your content will perform online before you publish it. Post Planner starts with a plan of $3 billed annually and a maximum of three social accounts.
If you are unsure how to curate the content within the guidelines of your brand-related themes, Post Planner will help to do that in one place for different social networks. You can also plan and have 300 posts in the queue and see engagement in advance.
Pros:
- Ideal if you still don’t want to hire a team of copywriters or still looking and building your content pillars.
- Collaborating with your team creating content for Facebook, Instagram or Twitter will be easier
- Stats of performance before publication is interesting as an ultimate check for your content.
Cons:
- Besides scheduling posts, there are no other design tools.
- There is an important lack of analytics compared to other tools in the market
- It can make your content lifeless if your team focuses more on the content suggestion rather than your voice.
ContentCal is the perfect service for the small and growing agency, why? Because it works like a collaborative suite that allows you to create, share, see previews within the members of a team, and even set rules of approval to publish. You can also integrate into the suite other collaborative apps like Trello. Similar to other planning services, ContentCal comes with the feature of content curation, which is a great deal for digital marketing planning.
ContentCal starts with a plan of $17 billed annually and a maximum of four social accounts.
Pros:
- A great social media management tool for marketing agencies
- Helpful if you have to deal with several clients with a presence on several social platforms
- It will improve communication between team members regardless of your current situation.
Cons:
- The greatest features and planning services come with expensive plans.
- The analytics have limited views for simple plan alternatives.
- It’s more expensive than similar alternatives listed here.
The significant thing about MavSocial is that it works with almost any social platform. Another significant thing is that creating a media calendar is super easy and one of the greatest features. MavSocial will help to find and promote created content within the app and without the need to use Facebook manager or other services. It also offers strong analytics and content curation with the help of RSS and with powerful query searches for words and topics. This makes their services great for organizing content and developing a media strategy.
MavSocial starts with a plan of $17 billed monthly and a maximum of 10 social accounts.
Pros:
- It comes with plenty of features ahead and not only for organizing your calendar
- Works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the most popular social platforms
- Offers one of the best stats out of many services.
Cons:
- The entry plan only offers 1 user
- You will need perhaps a copywriter or have experience in the field to deal with multiple content suggestions
- It offers less than other services in its entry arrangement.
Agorapulse promises to be a social media management tool that will help you publish and deliver your content on time, and perhaps it’s true. Rather than only let you see a preview and set a date, Agora offers a dynamic calendar in which schedule, reschedule, bulk, postpone and more are easy to do. As we stated before your social media strategy will benefit from an organized agenda and monitor of performance in all of your social media accounts. Agora works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Agora starts with a program of $79 billed annually and a maximum of 10 social accounts and two users.
Pros:
- Agora’s calendar is the best out of several apps
- You can share between members with easy and without leaving the app
- It comes with outstanding features to raise your engagement.
Cons:
- It lacks support for Pinterest and other free platforms that can be important for you or your client’s niche.
- The free trial is very limited and the entry program is expensive for small businesses or personal brands.
- Their reports offer less than other similar services.
Oktopost is an interesting alternative because it offers services for B2B businesses. This means that its greatest strength is social media campaigns and its editorial calendar. Their content curation is great to find industry insights and create content for this type of audience.
You have to book a demo to find Oktopost prices, but this means that their services are meant for medium or big businesses.
Pros:
- Offers services for B2B companies.
- It has powerful tools to manage campaigns
- It also has tools for email marketing easy to use
Cons:
- You will need to test carefully the level of involvement you need in social media prior to this purchase.
- It can be pricey.
- Has a significant learning curve
