What Is Social Media Management?

The social media landscape continues to evolve and mature. While there hasn't been a considerable increase in the number of social media platforms, we are seeing the consolidation of popular services under Facebook's control. Social media platforms are pivoting to better serve as captive advertising and sales channels.

For example, Instagram, which was focused on photo and video sharing, has grown into a serious marketplace because photos of products and services fit easily within users' news feeds, putting possible purchase decisions just a few clicks away in the seemingly endless scroll that can be social media surfing. The addition of Instagram for Business and Instagram TV (IGTV), which enables creators and brands to create video channels within the application, has also added more avenues for interaction and engagement. Social media management tools are similarly adjusting to being able to publish posts and measure data from these new offshoot features.

Social media use continues to grow globally, which means that businesses and companies now have global reach for their brands and products. Any sudden global expansion brings unlimited potential while also posing some considerable challenges. These include being able to handle foreign languages and understanding localized social media trends. Social media has also transcended beyond publishing content and interacting with customers; it is a valuable source of real-time information and analytics. Some social media listening tools can quickly break down this information into quantifiable and actionable data points. Social media management tools can take analytics and funnel it into customer relationship management (CRM) tools to give you more informed and nuanced customer interactions.

There are a wide range of social media management and analytics tools in the market today. They run the gamut from creative publishing and scheduling tools (such as Loomly, Planable, and Sendible) that aim to keep social media managers on top of posts to powerful analytics tools (such as Buffer Publish and our Editors' Choice pick Talkwalker) that can present real-time performance and competitive information in a number of ways. Integrated solutions, such as Editors' Choice Sprout Social and pioneering social media app Hootsuite, continue to be popular for small to midsize businesses (SMBs) because of their versatility and convenience.

Finding the Right Long-Term Solution

The challenge for SMBs and enterprise organizations is finding the right solution for their present needs while paying attention to their possible future needs. Smaller brands and startups have the benefit of being able to focus on tools that will help their growth and build their name. Established brands are focused on their reputation as well as tracking competitors in a market where every hashtag, mention, or "like" can quickly go viral, impact a brand's reputation, and even affect their bottom line.

The urgency to keep posting and interacting with audiences and customers is still high, but the number of accounts and brands is increasing exponentially. Social media tools that can help you organize, schedule, and automate posting tasks are highly valued, especially those that integrate collaboration features and post-approval functionalities. Vendors are now challenged to provide social media management solutions that can navigate the limitations of social media platforms while catering to the needs of SMBs and agencies alike.

Facebook remains the dominant power in social media and messaging. According to market data firm Statista, 2.7 billion people use Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp each month. What's changing, and what's not that easy to track, is the audience segmentation in social media, which varies globally and is in constant flux.

Social media management solutions operate on many levels to centralize publishing efforts in a single dashboard or console. The more sophisticated solutions can help shape a message or post for use across various social media platforms while minding word count as well as offering quick access to a media library, emoji, and relevant hashtags.

We're increasingly seeing the use of the calendar layout and drag-and-drop functionality to schedule large blocks of posts. The calendar layout is quickly becoming the default view for social media management and publishing solutions, and works best for laying out bulk posts for the month ahead.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology help a tool determine when the best time to post to specific target audiences is. For example, Loomly has a "post ideas" feature that generates hashtags and themes depending on the day, time, concurrent sporting events, and upcoming holidays so that content writers can create fresh content and well-timed posts to reel users in.

Analytics: More Than Numbers

There's a divergence between social media management and analysis tools. At one end of the spectrum, you have solutions that focus solely on organizing and scheduling posts. And at the other end, you have analytics tools that have no publishing capabilities whatsoever but which are heavy on data gathering and analysis. There's also a middle ground with more comprehensive solutions such as Editors' Choice pick Sprout Social and Hootsuite, which can offer posting as well as basic analytics functionalities. These two solutions, along with Zoho Social (which can plug into other products for social listening and even deeper analytics) can cover most needs of SMBs. But these might all seem lacking once companies and their social media needs grow.

Larger companies or brand-heavy agencies will gravitate towards analytics powerhouses such as Talkwalker, which has a broad scope of tools to track a brand's reputation and determine user sentiment even beyond social media channels. The advantage of wider data analysis is more accurate competitive analysis; the ability to pick up on mentions, conversations, hashtags; and even emoji used in relation to a brand that can determine sentiment. Talkwalker uses its AI engine to determine sentiment and even nuanced expressions of irony or sarcasm. When properly used, these tools can give a brand a heads up on brewing discontent from users.

This is where analytics dovetails into brand protection, where sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, and now even image and logo searches can give businesses an overview of their brand's health across a global scale. With Talkwalker, these include over 10 social networks, 150 million websites, and the ability to track 30,000 brand logos appearing in videos and images online. It is as close as we've ever been to total social monitoring and analytics.

Where to Begin

A good place to begin discovering what kind of data you need is by checking out your competition online. The various social networks (with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter being the core four) will give you a good picture of what data your rivals are getting and how they're getting it. Now look at deltas in their data that you can see because you're in their industry. What's missing?

Competitive analysis will play a big role in your program so make sure the tools you choose can perform here. It's also important that your tool has ample social listening ability, too. In other words, make sure it can pick up and deliver any mentions, conversations, hashtags, tweets, and other chatter about your company. In this review roundup, Buffer Publish, Hootsuite, Sendible, and Talkwalker do a good job helping managers compare competitors and set alerts on specific keywords, hashtags, and mentions. Sendible ups the ante by periodically emailing managers with the latest competitive mentions, which is a natural step towards automation for these solutions.

Of course, you need to know who is talking about you as well. These are the influencers who you will want to identify for customer engagement; they're the ones who will be key in propagating and spreading the good word about your business. We like Talkwalker when it comes to flushing out influencers and their data—as long as your business is prepared to pay the Enterprise premium plan for it. On the SMB end of the scale, Sprout Social and Zoho Social hold their own at a much more affordable price, joining Buffer Publish, Hootsuite, and Sendible as great combined social publishing, management, listening, and analytics platforms.

Team Tracking and Collaboration

Team tracking, collaboration, and oversight are increasingly crucial elements in running a well-oiled social marketing team as a business grows. Many businesses and brands manage multiple social media accounts. The ability to add users, assign tasks, and set up layered approval processes (to avoid erroneous posting mistakes) are well established in agency-focused tools such as Hootsuite, Sendible, Sprout Social, and Buffer Publish, and are now also viable for SMBs.

A tool's analytics capability is the overarching factor that will determine its usefulness because it takes all of the types of information mentioned already, turns them into data, and then displays them visually in compelling formats. A tool can gather all sorts of data but how the analytics piece of the tool disseminates the intelligence and delivers the insights is key to whether or not it can be used to accomplish planned business objectives. These objectives can include driving marketing campaigns, forecasting possible brand crises, and revealing new markets.

We tested the core tasks critical to each platform's social media management and analytics features, with SMB and enterprise business value in mind. Such core tasks include content creation and publishing tasks, bulk upload capabilities, and scheduling and automation functionality. For the analysis-focused solutions, we focused on how each tool gathers listening and mention data from the main social networks and other sources, and how creatively and effectively each tool transforms and presents the data with reports and visualizations.

Many non-enterprise products use Facebook Analytics to some degree to gather their Facebook data. Facebook Analytics requires that a Facebook page have at least 30 "likes" before it begins to pay attention to it and gather statistics. Google Analytics (GA) is also a valuable free tool and generates numerous types of reports and tools. GA reports can be segmented and filtered to suit business needs. Being able to pull from this app greatly benefits other social tool apps. Of the SMB-focused offerings, Buffer Publish, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social can all integrate GA.

Sprout Social's user interface (UI), with its single-stream mention monitoring, is the easiest to set up and navigate. It also offers the widest variety of relevant social networks and produces numerous reports that can be downloaded in more than one format. You can build basic Queries and Script Rules, and run a competitive analysis. Of the products reviewed, Sprout Social, which begins at $99 per month, is the best value. It meets all of the qualifications for an entry-level social media tool suite, with the ability to scale. It is this review roundup's Editors' Choice pick for SMBs.

Hootsuite and Zoho Social are close behind in offering a do-it-all social publishing and analytics hub for SMBs, and Buffer Publish is closing the gap with a packed feature release cadence to bolster its listening and influencer management chops. These are all tools that any social media manager or business user can operate with ease. They don't take a social data whiz and won't break your SMB's bank. But global brands with far more expansive listening requirements will want to consider enterprise offerings, especially those that can parse data from various countries. Each company's needs will differ, so even a combination of pure publishing solutions (such as Loomly and Planable together with an analytics powerhouse like Talkwalker) might be a better combination than an integrated suite of solutions.

CRM Integration

If your business is at the point where you are considering a social media management platform, then you probably already have a CRM tool in place. CRM tools are an important part of your company's tech arsenal, helping you to effectively keep tabs on your interactions with customers. If used properly, they can be extremely effective in improving customer satisfaction and driving up sales.

A number of the top social media management tools will offer integration with popular CRM systems. Zoho Social, unsurprisingly, integrates with Zoho CRM, the company's CRM offering. In that particular scenario, Zoho Social will record every person who has engaged with your company on a connected social media channel. From there, you can add them to Zoho CRM as a lead from within the software.

Other platforms work in a similar fashion. Synthesio lets you connect social data to a CRM services such as Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Salesforce, and Sysomos; they all have Salesforce functionality as well. Occasionally, you'll find integration with other popular CRM platforms. Hootsuite, for example, offers integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM but, unsurprisingly, most social platforms integrate with one of the CRM industry's biggest names.

Depending on how invested your company is in CRM, integration might be a make-or-break feature for you. Being able to convert social engagements into leads is a powerful feature that, if used correctly, can add a lot of benefit to your business. If you find CRM integration important, then research which social media management tools are compatible with your relationship management service of choice.