Social media marketing is one of the most important – not to mention, least understood – marketing considerations that today’s companies face. Implementing and executing a successful social media strategy is of critical importance to many companies, which is why they end up investing so much in making this a reality.
One of the most effective ways to get a handle on your company’s social medial campaigns is by making the most of a social media management tool. There are many available on the market today, but some are clearly pulling ahead of the pack. We’ll be taking an up-close look at a few of the most effective tools in the remainder of this post.
But before we actually get into which tools offer which advantages, it’s worth taking a moment to consider what, exactly, we mean by ‘social media management’. For our purposes, we’ll define a social media management tool as a platform that can be used to accomplish the following tasks:
- Scheduling posts across multiple social media accounts – for synchronised or staggered release
- Analysing current trends across various social media platforms to inform your company’s social media strategy
- Tracking mentions of your brand (or of any other hashtag, for that matter) amongst followers and the general public
- Managing all of your company’s core social media campaigns through a single, easy-to-use interface
Rating the Top Social Media Management Tools
G2Crowd is one of the most thorough software review platforms on the market, and they’ve commissioned a survey of the top social media management tools for 2015. Using the data that they’ve compiled – which take the opinions of more than 40,000 genuine users into account – some clear trends in social media management tools emerge.
There are four social media management tools that stood out amongst the competition G2Crowd’s survey. We’ll look each of these tools and see where each scored the highest ratings:
Hootsuite
Perhaps the best known of all the management platforms, Hootsuite scores highest in terms of market presence. While it trails the pack in several other categories, its size, social presence and market share secure is position as one of the leading tools available.
Sendible
Sendible was founded in 2009 (one year after Hootsuite), and it has had plenty of time to develop a large and loyal user base. Sendible never pulls ahead of the competition in G2Crowd’s rankings, but it earns high overall marks across several categories.
SproutSocial
SproutSocial launched a year after Sendible and scores at the top of the pack in terms of usability and ease of learning. But it also joins Sendible as one of the more expensive tools available.
AgoraPulse
The youngest of the major social media management software is AgoraPulse – but that should not be taken as an indication of inferiority. On the contrary, this platform earns top marks for ‘product direction’, ‘user satisfaction’, ‘meeting requirements’ and ‘customer support’. AgoraPulse has clearly learned from its predecessors, and it’s quickly pulling out ahead of other social media management tools in several respects.
Conclusion: Weigh the Pros and Cons
At the end of the day, it’s most important to consider which tools are best-suited to your company’s situation, as well as to the skill set of the person or team who will spend the most time using them. At minimum, surveys like the one conducted by G2Crowd make it easier to compile and compare the relevant statistics.
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[kopa_block_quote class=”e.g. kopa-blockquote-1, kopa-blockquote-2″]<p style=”text-align: center; font-size: 11px;”><a title=”The Top 4 Rated Social Media Management Tools of 2015″ href=”http://iag.me/socialmedia/top-4-rated-social-media-management-tools-of-2015/”><img src=”http://cdn.iag.me/assets/infographic-g2crowd-iag.png” alt=”The Top 4 Rated Social Media Management Tools of 2015″ width=”650″ height=”3400″ /></a> Infographic brought to you by <a title=”Seriously” href=”http://iag.me/”>Seriously Social</a> and <a title=”G2 Crowd” href=”https://www.g2crowd.com/”>G2 Crowd</a></p> [/kopa_block_quote]
