It is now essential for enterprise-level organisations to have a robust social media presence. Social media can help you build relationships with customers, engage with your target market, and expand your business.
Featured Image photo credit: Sara Kurfe
Fortunately, there are many excellent social media management tools ready to help. These tools can boost your processes, save precious time, and ensure that your content is seen by the right people at the right time.
But how do you select the right social media management software product?
There are many excellent social media management software tools available. The enterprise-level products we find larger organisations using include Hootsuite, Buffer, Later and Brandwatch and so have provided a comparison of the key features and pricing below:
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a software for managing social media that includes features for scheduling, syndicating, and organising social media posts. Hootsuite provides prominent features such as, Automated scheduling, social media tracking, performance reporting, simple task management and more.
Hootsuite Publishing Features:
- Easily plan your posts: Get a quick overview of the content that has been posted and scheduled across all your platforms in a calendar view. Campaign planning, content enhancement, and real-time collaboration.
- Generate effective content: Composer makes it simple to create and preview interesting, brand-consistent posts. Get access to asset libraries, photo editing, as well as frictionless video publishing, which automatically adjusts the bitrate and size to fit each network’s requirements.
- Keep up an active social presence: By scheduling your content in ahead of time along all your networks, you can save time and remain engaged. Bulk Composer allows you to schedule numerous posts at once. Use the best publishing times for each of your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn profiles to gain maximum engagement.
- Collaborate and operate smoothly: Before drafts are published, feedback and edits are provided from team members to ensure brand-consistent content.
- Find outstanding content everywhere: Create dashboard streams that browse by hashtag, location, or keyword to make it simple to collect and share excellent content from across your networks.
- Make compliance automatic: Gain additional security with Proofpoint, a program that works with Hootsuite Enterprise accounts to offer automated screening and analysis both before and after each post is released.
Hootsuite Engaging Features:
- Stay on top of topics: By creating personalised streams that fit your workflow, you can track trends and the effectiveness of your posts across all your profiles in one spot. With only one click, you may respond to questions, encourage favorable responses, and provide products to teammates.
- Easily and effectively handle all incoming messages: Avoid getting overwhelmed by customer inquiries. You may monitor communications from several platforms in a single view with the aid of Hootsuite’s Inbox. Sort out the messages that need to be responded to, mass-delete the ones that do not, and then either react yourself or delegate the work to another team member.
- Make sure that each comment and question receives accurate, prompt responses: Utilize simple team assignments to contact the appropriate team member to respond to client enquiries. If necessary, enlist the help of subject-matter specialists to react, or simply distribute the workload to get through any message in a decent amount of time. Use pre-written responses to frequently asked questions from customers. yet, our machine learning system will suggest appropriate saved replies on its own.
- Enjoy the efficiency of chatbots without losing customer intimacy: Use chatbots to instantly reply to simple audience enquiries and obtain a seamless conversation transfer via messages to your Inbox when clients require personal assistance from a human.
- Boost your brand and monitor consumer feedback: ReviewTrackers, a software program that connects with Hootsuite to collect reviews from over eighty-five websites, will help you preserve and enhance the reputation of your company. Create review groups alongside your dashboard streams to simply track trends, exchange favorable reviews with your audience, and observe real-time audience feedback.
Hootsuite Advertising Features:
- Multi-channel functionality from start to finish: Spend less time by monitoring and optimising your activities, promoting posts, and generating reports for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all from the Hootsuite dashboard.
- Greater reach at all stages: Place your brand in front of the right audience at every phase of their customer journey using targeted paid efforts like advertisements and boosted posts, enhanced by deeper organic engagement.
- Best-in-class analytics supercharged: Through multi-channel analytics and reporting for both organic and promoted posts, you can get a complete view of your performance so you can strengthen your weak points, play to your strengths, and adjust your plan to get the most of your resources.
Hootsuite Tracking & Analysing Features:
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- Find your focus: Create custom streams to focus on important subjects, trends, and social profiles and get a quick overview of what is happening. Quickly react in-stream whenever an opportunity presents itself.
- Get real-time audience insights: Gain a quick overview of millions of online interactions taking place in real time by using Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch. You can perform a keyword or subject search and filter the results by area, date, demographics, and more. You will be able to recognize thought leaders, comprehend how your brand is viewed in the marketplace, and receive prompt alerts when your mentions increase.
- Analyse effectively: Get a comprehensive overview of your performance across all social networks from one location to set performance goals and track advancements over time. The information and figures that are most important to your organisation may be easily distilled, distributed, and digested thanks to the customisable reports.
- Optimize for improved outcomes: Get useful insights on when to post without doing extensive data analysis.
- Find your ROI: Utilise Hootsuite Impact to determine the real return on your social media investment and to support the business case for social in your company. Impact enables you to illustrate the lead, conversion, and revenue-generating effects of your social media channels and initiatives. With simple-to-read graphs, tables, and KPI summaries, customisable dashboards are ideal for stakeholders who care about performance.
- Boost response times and customer service: Keep track of how long it takes your staff to address and respond to incoming client questions. To improve your team’s performance, identify your best performers and study and share their strategies.
Hootsuite Pricing:
The enterprise plan provided by Hootsuite starting with five users and fifty social accounts has a custom price. However, according to Ernoult, E. the enterprise plan starts at $18,000/year for five users with $1,800 for each additional user.
For further information on Hootsuite
https://www.hootsuite.com/platform/
2. Buffer
Buffer is an internationally distributed team of eighty-four members living and working in twenty-two countries. They are working hard to create the best products to assist their clients in developing their brands and growing their businesses on social media.
Buffer Publishing Features:
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- Create the ideal post for each social network in one place: Publishing content across all your channels should not be a time-consuming task. Plan and publish across all channels from a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
- Increase the effectiveness of your Instagram marketing: Create your own brand on Instagram. Plan, preview, and schedule your upcoming Instagram posts, carousels, and campaigns with your team.
- Plan and prepare your TikToks and Stories: Plan and schedule reminders for your Stories and TikTok videos. When it is time to share, you will get a mobile notification.
- Create the ideal posting schedule: Content can be queued up on an automated schedule or at a specific time for each post. You have complete control over what you post and when.
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Buffer Engaging Features
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- Respond to comments from your desktop: View all your missed comments in one convenient dashboard. Buffer will display the ones that are most important to you.
- Prioritise important conversations: If a post contains questions, unfavorable sentiment, or remarks about a purchase, smart alerts powered by machine learning will let you know right away.
- Speed is everything: You can easily interact with more consumers without having to take out your phone thanks to keyboard hotkeys and intelligent emojis.
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Buffer Tracking & Analysing Features:
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- You get only one dashboard to manage your social media analytics and reporting: Track results and generate reports for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn from a single, user-friendly analytics dashboard.
- Analyse and measure the effectiveness of your content: Get a detailed view of your performance across multiple accounts as well as detailed insights into specific social platforms.
- Find out the answers to your most challenging questions: “Analyse” examines your data and instructs you on when, what, and how frequently to post on your network to optimise your results. Your best time to post on Instagram is predicted based on your followers’ activity and previous posts.
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An extra feature is Start Page, it is a simple, beautiful, and adaptable link in bio page that gathers all your best content in one place. Include it on your Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or other social accounts’ bios. You may use Start Page to construct a completely free microsite to begin marketing your products and services. Add your WhatsApp or other messaging platform to stay in contact with your clients.
Buffer Pricing:
The pricing according to Buffer for marketing agencies with ten or more social channels is $120/month for a monthly subscription, while is $100/month for a yearly subscription, you can add additional channels $6/month if billed monthly, or $5/month if billed yearly.
For further information on Buffer
https://buffer.com/publish
3. Later
Later is a social media management platform that also serves as a link in bio tool for all social media platforms. Plan, evaluate, and publish content ahead of time to save time and promote your business.
Later Publishing Features:
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- Use a visual content calendar to plan your postings: You can start scheduling social media posts in minutes as it is intuitive and simple to use. Optimise your publishing times to achieve more interaction on your content!
- Personalise your captions for each channel: Save time by customising your captions for each platform.
- Schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter automatically: Set images and videos to auto-publish on all your accounts to spare time.
- Import content from anywhere: Images and videos from your smartphone, PC, Google Drive, or Dropbox can be synchronised.
- Quickly locate your content: Search through all your videos and photos in a flash and keep organised with tags.
- Switch accounts easily: Make a separate content library for each user.
- Reliable source for social media content creation: Boost your social plan with easy-to-find, easy-to-share content that is completely on-brand.
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Later Analysing Features:
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- Instagram analytics can help you grow your business: Later’s new Instagram Analytics can help you increase interaction, manage your stories, boost traffic, and more. Get the Instagram insights, plus additional data for assessing engagement rates, ideal times to post, and more.
- Boost your engagement rate: Determine your engagement rate easily and view your top-performing posts in a single glance.
- Later’s “Best Time to Post” tool determines your best seven posting periods based on engagement rate.
- Get detailed analytics for each story so you may adjust your posting times and experiment with alternative content types.
- Target the Right Viewers: Use demographic information such as age and gender to guide your content strategy. Discover the cities, countries, and languages spoken by your followers. Monitor your following growth, growth rate, and profile views over time. Use “Instagram Hashtag Analytics” to determine which hashtags function best.
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Linkin.bio Feature
An extra feature is Linkin.bio, it is a mini web page integrated within your Instagram and TikTok profiles that allows you to make your items clickable and shoppable. Build your page, include the link in your bio, and assist your audience in learning more about you, your products, and your brand. With Linkin.bio you may:
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- Drive traffic from Instagram and TikTok to whatever location you desire. Such as your website, e-commerce store, or most recent blog article.
- Sell things and keep track of sales. Linkin.bio integrates with Shopify and includes analytics so you can see what’s working.
- Create a coherent experience. Your TikTok and Instagram followers may locate exactly what they are searching for with just one link.
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Later Pricing:
Later has two special plans for enterprises:
- Scale 15: Contains 15 social sets [15 Social Sets = 90 social profiles (15 per platform)] and 10 users. This plan costs $200/month.
- Scale 30: Contains 30 social sets [30 Social Sets = 180 social profiles (30 per platform)] and 20 users. This plan costs $400/month.
Both plans cost an extra 15$/month for an additional social set and an extra $5/month for an additional user.
For further information on Later:
https://later.com/try/scale-plans/
4. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a social media analytic platform that tracks billions of online interactions every day, such as blogs, news, forums, videos, tweets, reviews, images, Facebook, and so on, to help brands and enterprises discover consumer insights, trends, influencers, and brand perception.
Brandwatch Publishing Features:
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- Post on various platforms: All social media campaigns and posts are easily scheduled, edited, previewed, and posted. Using approval processes will help your team work together on cross-channel campaigns and ensure that the content is of a high standard and consistent with your brand.
- Publish and distribute your greatest assets: A shared content library can save you time and keep your content consistent. Utilise it to store your previously approved assets and to ensure that the branding on all your social media posts is the same. An external storage tool can even be integrated.
- Seamless team collaboration: Get your team operating together without shutdowns, errors, or delays in posting. To ensure that your content is scheduled as intended, assign user roles and tasks to team members.
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Brandwatch Engaging Features:
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- One Inbox to manage all your social media interactions: “Engage” categorizes all your user interactions from social media into a single, customisable inbox. Encourage teamwork while increasing customer loyalty.
- Manage teams and communities: With all your social media notifications and comments arriving in your Engage inbox, you will never skip a message again. Your team will be able to moderate and reply to each one easily thanks to a wide range of time-saving features.
- Create a custom inbox: With a variety of feeds, labels, and filtering choices available, the customisable inbox allows you to establish the experience you want. Even better, you can create a Listen feed that allows you to keep an eye on discussions about your company. Automated messages and personalised response templates save you time while improving customer satisfaction.
- Make teamwork smoother: Transfer comments and messages to particular members or teams across the company. While managers have a clear audit trail outlining team actions, note sharing allows you to add additional context.
- Know the person you are speaking to well: Give people the one-on-one focus they desire. When an existing contact approaches you, their Audience profile card is displayed next to it.
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Brandwatch Advertising Features:
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- Easy ad management and reporting: Use “Advertise” to create and optimise ads quickly for all your audiences and distribution channels.
- Connect your social media strategy to your advertising: It is simple to keep track of both your paid and organic campaigns when you manage them from the same platform. Utilise your organic content to check which copy and creative are most effective to expand your reach.
- Save time with automated features: You can set up your campaigns twice as fast thanks to the user-friendly interface and clever automation features. With just a few clicks, you can automatically create ads using smart labels.
- Cooperate with different teams and markets: The adoption of a focused advertising strategy depends on effective teamwork and brand consistency. Team members can be given user roles to simplify the creation and optimisation of ads for various channels and countries.
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Brandwatch Tracking & Analysing Features:
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- Discover cross-channel insights: With aggregated, cross-network metrics and KPIs, you can get the most thorough picture possible. Examine where your efforts are paying off and modify your strategy accordingly. Dashboards can demonstrate data from hundreds of channels without decelerating the page load time.
- All metrics are updated in real time: Since social media never stops moving, real-time dashboards are the most accurate and user-friendly way to monitor your performance. In these customisable dashboards, you can track and display all your Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn metrics.
- Simple dashboard creation: With our simple templates, you can create impressive dashboards in seconds. Then, to satisfy your specific requirements, add, resize, and reorder each individual widget.
- Share your achievements: Sending or scheduling reports in just a few clicks allows you to easily share insights with your team and stakeholders.
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Brandwatch Pricing:
The price of the social media management plan is custom and decided by booking a meeting with Brandwatch.
For further information on Brandwatch:
https://www.brandwatch.com/products/publish/
Choosing the best social media software
The fact is that we live in an impulse-driven culture, with various forms of artificial intelligence at the forefront of technological advancement. This is true in social media management services as well. Your specific business objectives, budget, and preferences will determine which social media management platform is ideal for you.
We propose that you select a social media management software partner that will save you and your team considerable time automating social media marketing procedures, collaborative workflows, and actionable analytics.
Examine the characteristics listed above again to determine which platform is most suited for your company and supports all the social media platforms you require.
