9 Things to Consider When Buying A Social Media Management Tool

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If you are planning to invest in purchasing a social media management tool for your business, it is always best to research, analyse and review multiple tools rather than sticking to just one option. There are some aspects that help a social media management tool stand apart from the rest and are indicators of an ideal management tool. You must ensure that these aspects stand right on your business goals and needs with a social media management tool. In this article, we have elaborated upon what you need to consider when buying a social media management tool.

What Is A Social Media Management Tool?

A social media management tool is software that usually lets you use a single interface to publish, manage, and monitor multiple social media platforms. With a single interface at work, you can easily manage and schedule all the content on your social media platforms from one place and also share data from one social network to the other easily. A social media management tool also lets you reply to your customers who have engaged with your posts and respond to the ones who have messaged you.

However, there are still some social media management tools that allow you to only manage just one platform at once. And these are designed to suit a particular platform as well, such as tools like TweetDeck only lets you manage Twitter, Facebook Page Manager only lets you manage your Facebook business account and more. When purchasing a social media management tool it is always recommended that you buy one that lets you take care of multiple platforms even if you are currently just marketing through one platform. As you start expanding your social media marketing efforts, you can always add more platforms to the interface.

Benefits Of Using Social Media Management Tools

You can manually manage each of your social media platforms and profiles but let’s accept it; it is an exhausting and tedious task. Social media management tools help you overcome the long process and besides saving time and energy, there are many other ways in which they can make your social media endeavours convenient. Here are some benefits of using social media management tools:-

  1. One of the major benefits of a social media management tool is that it can help you increase your brand’s awareness and visibility in the digital world.
  2. It helps build your brand’s personality and effectively improve your online brand reputation.
  3. By automating several tasks on your social media accounts, it lets you focus on more important tasks such as sales and production and can thus help scale your business.
  4. It can supplement you with useful insights and data about your business’s social media performance by giving you detailed analytical reports on how your posts are performing on the basis of various metrics.
  5. It lets you understand your target audience and intimate you with their needs to help you plan your next set of strategies accordingly.

Here’s What To Look For In A Social Media Management Tool

There are several great social media management tools that you can choose from but what you definitely do before coming to a decision is research! While going on the basis of word-of-mouth and popular basis is good, it isn’t the most ideal thing to do. Here are some things you need to make sure the social media management tool you select stands correct on:-

1.    Business Goals

This is another important thing to consider before finalising a social media management tool. Social media tools can cost you a considerable amount depending on the features they have to offer and the subscription. Therefore, before investing you need to ask yourself if the selected tool would help you fulfil your business goals. Also, the business’s aim is to constantly grow and with it, you need to increase your promotions and grow your marketing strategies as well. An ideal tool should not just fit in your current business and marketing dynamics but should be able to accommodate your future plans smoothly as well.

2.    Financial Investment And Resources

Yet another essential thing to consider before purchasing a social media management tool is to ensure if you can bear the costs of having one. Choose a social media management tool that does not hamper your financial resources and is affordable and fits your investment bracket. This is especially important for small business owners working with a limited budget.

3.    Solution To Your Business’s Pain Points

Before choosing a social media management tool, ask yourself why you want to do it? Then enlist your needs from such a tool and check if the one you are planning to buy can be a solution and fulfil all those needs or not. Furthermore, if you already have a management tool and are planning to change it, you need to again question as to why you want to change it. Note down the pain points with your previous management tool and make sure the next one you choose offers a resolve to these pain points.

4.    Social Listening

This is a feature that not majority of businesses pay attention to but it is one of the must-have features. Social listening enables social media specialists to review the way consumers and users on a particular platform interact with your brand and what is the social talk around your brand, your competitors and the industry. A tool with this feature can catch up with trends and the entire social buzz that you can use to better plan your marketing efforts and promote your business.

5.    Reporting And Analytics

The social media management tool that you choose needs to have the reporting and analytics feature. Marketers often tend to think that any tool they pick would have the analytics in them because of how essentially common it is. And that is where the problem lies. There are still some tools that offer you great usability when it comes to managing the social media platforms and the content on it but they do not compile analytical and performance reports or present you with data to help you understand how your posts are doing.

6.    Engagement Opportunities

Social media engagement is what helps your business grow and can get you more customers and potential leads. The social media tool that you have chosen should be able to open you to opportunities to increase your engagement and help you identify them as well. These may be something like collaborating for social media webinars, influencers, guest posts, etc. You need to know that these engagement opportunities are really slim so it is also important to ensure that you are able to respond to them quickly as well.

7.    Alerts

There may be times when your social media platforms might not perform well due to technical glitches or in other situations there may be a security threat to your social media accounts. These are emergency situations that can have a serious impact on your social media reputation and in turn negatively impact your sales. Your selected social media management tool should be able to inform you about such situations and send constant alerts about any unwanted activity on your platforms. Besides, alerts work in almost all aspects of your social presence such as being mentioned, updates about new followers, users trying to connect, open business opportunities, etc.

8.    Scheduling Content On Social Media

This is another must-have feature that marketers expect to be in all management tools and because of how basically necessary it is, they may overlook it. Choose a social media tool that allows you to schedule content on your social media platforms, at least a fortnight in advance. Furthermore, it should be able to integrate all your social media as well. Scheduling content will ensure that you are present and active to your customers even when you might actually physically be unavailable. Furthermore, it would save your time and you can focus more on creative content creation.

9.    Multi-lingual Support

This is a feature that although not necessary, is still important for you to have in your social media platform. A social media tool that offers multi-lingual support can help your employees from different lingual backgrounds work more effectively on these platforms. More importantly, such a support system can help you widen your customer base and give you a more customer-centric reputation as it would allow you to effectively interact with customers from different linguistic backgrounds.

We hope this article was helpful for you in understanding what a good social media management tool is like. While all social media tools have their own unique features and can help businesses differently, the above mentioned are basic needs of a social media management tool that you must consider when purchasing a social media tool. Is there anything else that you can think of that makes a great tool? Let us know!

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