How To Choose The Best Social Media Tool For Your Startup

How do you manage to prioritize all your Social Media Marketing tasks?

From Social Publishing to Community Management and Brand Monitoring, it can be overwhelming to think about all the tasks marketers need to complete each day. Thankfully, there are just so many time-saving Social Media Marketing or Social Media Management tools to help you exactly with the same.

But how do you figure out which one’s going to be the best fit for you?

Let's dive in.

Well, I will start with some general information that can get you an overview of few important things to keep in mind while opting for the best Social Media Management tool:

5 important things to keep in mind:

Identify the key challenges you face on Social
How could a social media management tool help overcome those challenges?
Other important things to consider while making a final choice
Where to look for great Social Media Marketing tools
What to use - A Single-Purpose tool or an All-In-One management tool?

Keeping these things in mind while choosing Social Media Management tool can help you choose an appropriate tool for you.

(Also, Discover how Social Media Marketing Tools could Help you Overcome them)

If you want to end up with the best tool for your team, identifying the core issues that caused you to start looking for a social media tool in the first place is a crucial step in the process.

The goal here is to help you find the most suitable product that will help you resolve those issues and allow you to do the things you weren’t previously able to do – no matter which tool that happens to be.

Following is the list of key challenges faced by social media users:

a) Manual publishing on different social media marketing platforms:

Imagine how much hard it would be to log in and out of each profile and network everytime you need to post something new for your amazing audience on different social media marketing platforms!

Without a social media management platform, it becomes labor-intensive and inconvenient to leverage your content across multiple social platforms efficiently.

'How can Social Media Management tools help to overcome this challenge?'

These tools help keep your social presence active 24/7 by uploading, editing, and scheduling hundreds of social media posts at once, using CSV format. Moreover, the additional features provided by these tools such as content suggestion and an inbuilt media library provide the user with an endless supply of curated & quality content and visuals respectively.

b) Engaging meaningfully with the audience:

People are more likely to recommend a business that engages with them on social media compared to a company that has no social media presence. But unfortunately, many companies overlook proper social media engagement and miss an exceptional business opportunity.

To take your engagement a step further, be proactive, listen and respond. It may sound easy, but it is undoubtedly one of the most challenging social media tasks.

'How can Social Media Management tools help to overcome this challenge?'

Social media management tools help you monitor conversations about your brand and product from all your social channels and also find out what people are saying about you.

c) Tracking results to back your intuition:

Tracking results on social media is an eternal challenge of social media managers in particular. How do you prove the value of what you do to the c-suite?

Previously, it was hard to access and understand the social media data. But these days, there are so many excellent tools out there that accessing data is a must-do for marketers looking to take their social to the next level.

'How can Social Media Management tools help to overcome this challenge?'

Social Media Management tools help you get an all-encompassing view of all your social efforts and how your engagement translates into business success. These tools can give you a comprehensive view of your social activities on your community, engagement and content composition.

d) Lacking human and financial resources:

According to a survey of 344 social media marketers, 26% of organizations say their greatest online networking challenge is - Lack of Resources.

Many companies, especially little ones, barely have the workforce and funds to keep up with day-to-day social media tasks.

'How can Social Media Management tools help to overcome this challenge?'

Even if you don't have enough workforce or funds, you don't have to worry. There exist many robust, free and affordable tools out there to help you manage multiple social profiles, schedule posts in advance, run contests, track analytics across platforms all by yourself. These tools are game changers for your social strategy!

2. Other Important Things to Consider while Making Your Choice

Now that you have discovered the ways how social media management tools could help you overcome the challenges you face on social, the next step is to know another set of important things that you need to consider.

a) Team collaboration:

If you will be inviting your team members to collaborate and increase productivity on social media, make sure you end up choosing the tool that supports team collaboration. The best social media management tools will give you the capabilities you need as a team lead by allowing you to easily:

Add team members
Decide which social media accounts each person has access to
Set permission levels
And review posts before publishing

b) Pricing:

There are few things you need to consider when it comes to pricing.
First, check the availability of free features, and at what price the more advanced features become “pay-only.”

'For example,' on our forever free plan here at Statusbrew you can have availability of following features - 1 profile per social network; up to 5, 10 scheduled posts.

But 25 Social Profiles, Team Workflows, Integrations – to help you gain better team collaboration and productivity are part of our business plan, starting at $125 per month. Do those pay-only features fall into your “must-have” list. And is it worth the cost?

Second, are you okay with signing an annual contract or would you prefer to pay month-to-month? Each company will have a slightly different offering here. Here at Statusbrew, you can get 20% off when paying annually.

Now that you're beginning to get more clarity on what your needs are, now's the ideal time to start your research. If you need to find the best social media management tools, here are a couple of resources I'd suggest utilizing to get the most important answers:

G2 Crowd: It is a peer-to-peer, business solutions review platform where you can compare the best business software and services based on user ratings and social data.
Capterra: Capterra is a free Web service that aims to help businesses find the right software solutions. With software reviews, ratings, infographics, and the most comprehensive list of the top business software products available, you're sure to find what you need at Capterra.

4. What to Use - A Single-Purpose Tool or an All-In-One Management Tool?

The primary question is whether it makes more sense to choose a single-purpose app or to choose one multi-purpose app.

Now, this depends on the complexity of your problems. If you are facing all of the challenges mentioned above, then no single purpose tool can make the things easy for you! But if in case you are facing any one of the above difficulties you can surely make use of the Single-Purpose tools

A multi-purpose app is one that has everything the user needs in one place. In contrast, single-purpose apps are more like boutiques; they are specifically designed to accomplish one thing.

I may be a bit biased here, but in case it might be useful, here is a list of my favorite social media management tools:

Buffer - It's an excellent tool for scheduling, publishing and analyzing your content with ease
Tweetdeck - It's a fantastic tool for management of Twitter accounts
Sprout Social - This tool rocks for monitoring all of your social media efforts, both content and engagement
Edgar - This tool excels at recycling your best content automatically

"One tool to rule them all"

Statusbrew - With Statusbrew you don’t have to manage or buy multiple tools. You get the power of 4 products in one. It is fantastic as an “all-in-one” social media solution. Statusbrew is a Unified Social Media Management solution for teams and agencies of all sizes which makes scheduling, listening, and reporting a lot easier than having to do it through each social platform individually.

Conclusion

Choosing an appropriate and most suitable social media management tool is a massive investment in your social media marketing strategy. A right tool can spare you a considerable amount of time and vitality – and enable you to gain significant ground towards your objectives.

That is the reason it's so vital to take the time to get clarity on what are the challenges that you confront before you begin doing the research. So you can make the best, the most educated choice for your group!

We hope you took away a couple of ideas to help find the right choice for you. We’d also love to know which social media management tool you make use of.

Also, if you are looking for an apt Social Media Management for your team, you can schedule a demo with Statusbrew here.

Ritika Sharma

Ritika is a digital marketing specialist and a writer who works on putting together creative and useful content for Statusbrew. Other than this she's an adventure seeker and a photography enthusiast.