Social Media Marketing
October 2, 2024
Choosing a social media management tool can be overwhelming. There are so many different solutions that exist, and most seem more or less the same on the surface.
However, as you begin experimenting with different social media management tools, you’ll notice nuanced differences between each one that make them ideal for different use cases and goals.
For example, a social media marketing agency requires much more detailed reporting than a startup that just wants a simple tool to schedule posts in advance.
To help you choose the best social media management platform for your goals (without trying each one individually), we broke down the unique differentiators of each platform.
Let’s jump into it!
GaggleAMP is an employee advocacy platform that makes it easy to turn your employees into brand advocates.
To give you an example of how employee advocacy works, you might publish a LinkedIn post on the company page, and then an employee comments on it, or reshares it with their social network.
This strategy helps you exponentially amplify the reach of any social media post, as your employees’ networks will also see the post.
Brand awareness quality also increases because your employees have already built trust with their social networks.
Here’s how it works: an employee’s connection is actively looking for a solution that your brand offers, and the connection sees the post your employee shared promoting that solution. Now the connection is much more likely to select your brand because they have established trust with that employee.
In addition, social media algorithms tend to give more organic reach to posts with high engagement. So, your employees’ initial engagement with the post can help it achieve more organic reach.
If employee advocacy is so effective, why doesn’t everyone use it?
Unfortunately, managing an employee advocacy program can be a heavy lift.
Many employees quit engaging because they don’t know what content to share, what they’re allowed to say, or which social media platforms they should use.
It’s also easy for employees to simply forget to engage.
We built GaggleAMP to solve these issues and make managing an employee advocacy program easy.
Here’s how it works.
First, you can assign specific engagement activities to specific employees.
We provide a list of pre-set engagement activities (like, share, comment, etc.) for all major social media platforms.
Each engagement activity is customizable, and you can add specific instructions, like pre-written text, guidance on what to say, the ability to paraphrase content with AI-Powered Paraphrase, and more. Every post includes an expiration date and a link to a specific social media post you want your employees to engage with, be it by a reaction (e.g. like, curious, love), a share, or a comment.
These personalized instructions eliminate most team members' questions, like what post they should engage with or what they can say.
Once you've filled out the engagement activity, you can assign it to specific employees or groups of employees (e.g., marketing team, executives, etc.) to ensure each person receives relevant content.
After you assign an engagement activity, employees receive a notification (via Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email) that they have activities waiting. They can then log into their personal dashboard and complete the engagement activity and schedule it to publish at a future date leveraging our intuitive content calendar feature.
GaggleAMP tracks employee engagement in an internal leaderboard that encourages friendly employee competition. The reporting dashboard also provides more detailed analytics, like total reach, top-performing employees, and top-performing content.
If you want a tool that simplifies your employee advocacy program on social media, you can learn more about GaggleAMP by scheduling a demo.
Source: GaggleAMP
Keyhole makes it easy to perform basic social media management tasks, like scheduling content in advance, but its strong point is providing detailed social media performance analytics.
It provides the basic profile analytics you'd expect like comments, reach, impressions, and total published posts. You can also drill down to specific campaigns and posts to analyze which strategies are most successful.
However, it also offers other more advanced reports you won't find in most social media management software.
For example, its brand comparison reports allow you to monitor your competitors and compare follower count, engagement, share of voice, and sentiment.
It also offers social listening analytics with detailed sentiment analysis, so that you can stay on top of what others are saying about your brand.
If you're running influencer marketing campaigns, it also provides plenty of metrics to identify popular influencers in your space and accurately distinguish fake and authentic engagement. When you launch an influencer marketing campaign, Keyhole also lets you track overall engagement, reach, and impressions by influencers.
Finally, it also offers detailed hashtag tracking, so that you can find the best hashtags to add to your social media content.
Source: Keyhole
CoSchedule offers a variety of marketing tools, but it's best known for its easy-to-use content calendar.
It doesn't have all the bells and whistles you might find in an enterprise social media management tool, making it perfect for freelancers, startups, and small businesses.
If you want a simple content scheduling tool to plan and organize your social media strategy, CoSchedule is a great option.
In addition to scheduling social media campaigns, you can also schedule other content marketing initiatives like webinars, blog posts, and video content.
All of the above features are available on CoSchedule's free plan. But if you upgrade to the paid plan, you'll also have access to its team collaboration and project management features, like task assignment and team chat.
It also offers other helpful content marketing features like ReQueue, which allows you to automatically repost top-performing content and pre-build social media templates.
Source: CoSchedule
Repurpose is a great tool for content creators that want to repurpose video content across multiple social media channels.
You can upload a long-form video and then chop it up into short-form videos, resize it, add captions, and then schedule it to post on different social media networks. Repurpose currently supports content scheduling on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
It also offers pre-made social media templates, so you don't have to start from scratch each time.
While most Repurpose users leverage the tool to repurpose video content, you can also repurpose podcast episodes into social media content.
Source: Repurpose
One of the best ways to stay connected with your audience and monitor competitor activity is to use a social listening tool that sends you alerts when anyone mentions your brand or a competitor's brand on social media.
Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that makes this easy.
You can track branded keywords and hashtags, and it sends alerts and reports on everything you're tracking.
It also measures sentiment, so that you can uncover key pain points with both your brand and competitors' brands to improve your product, marketing messaging, and even resolve complaints before they escalate.
If you're running PR campaigns, Brand24 also makes it easy to create reports and measure the ROI of those campaigns.
Brand24 offers a Slack integration to receive alerts in real-time and more advanced features for agencies.
Source: Brand24
Agorapulse is one of the best social media management tools on the market and offers all of the functionalities you'd expect like content scheduling, team collaboration, and analytics tools.
However, it's perhaps best known for its social inbox, which makes it super easy to manage engagement and respond to comments from all of your social accounts in a single dashboard.
The biggest benefit of Agorapulse is that it allows you to have different inboxes for different social media platforms (e.g., one for Facebook, one for Instagram, etc.) and types of engagement (e.g., ads comments, organic comments, and direct messages).
You can also assign specific conversations to different team members, so each social media follower receives a knowledgeable response.
To further improve organization, you can label conversations and then use those labels to generate personalized reports.
These features make Agorapulse an excellent social media management tool for brands and influencers with a high volume of engagement across multiple social media profiles that need a better method to organize and respond to engagement.
It's also great for e-commerce brands that typically deal with many customer support issues over social media.
Another noteworthy feature is that Agorapulse also offers social listening features. Most social media tools only offer this as an add-on, but Agorapulse provides this on the second-tier pricing plan.
Source: Agorapulse
Finding influencers and managing an influencer marketing campaign can be a major headache; GRIN helps you streamline the entire process.
First, it offers both passive and active influencer identification methods. If you just want to passively collect influencers, you can build a landing page and interested influencers can reach out to you.
Alternatively, if you want to actively reach out to influencers, you can sort its Instagram influencer database or use its Google Chrome extension to look up engagement statistics for influencers on any platform.
Once you start working with an influencer, you can manage the entire content creation, approval, and scheduling processes inside GRIN.
It also offers analytics to track which posts and influencers drove the most engagement. When you complete the engagement, you can pay influencers directly inside GRIN.
While GRIN isn't the only influencer marketing platform, it's perhaps best known for its communication and workflow automation functionalities. First, you can communicate with influencers via Slack and SMS, which speeds up campaign management. If a post goes live and needs an immediate change, you can easily reach the influencer.
GRIN also offers a robust content library that makes it easy to reuse top-performing posts and manage the entire process from a single dashboard.
GRIN does not offer any public pricing information.
There are plenty of all-in-one social media management tools, but most offer more features than the average small business needs, making them complicated to use and expensive.
If you just want a simple social media management tool that has a user-friendly interface and basic social media management and collaboration tools, Buffer is a great choice.
You can import content, create social media posts, schedule them across multiple social media platforms, and respond to comments in a single dashboard.
The analytics dashboard shows you basic engagement metrics like comments, likes, and impressions so that you can identify top-performing content.
A new noteworthy feature that Buffer offers is its AI Assistant, which helps you generate ideas, rephrase text-based posts, and automate content repurposing.
Source: Buffer
Hootsuite is one of the most robust social media platforms on the market and is ideal for larger companies that need all the bells and whistles.
While plenty of social media management tools offer post scheduling, content organization, customer engagement, and analytics features, the key differentiator of Hootsuite is the level of detail in each of these features.
Here's an overview of all the capabilities offered on all Hootsuite plans:
Where Hootsuite is somewhat lacking is its paid social campaign management. This capability is only available at the enterprise level. It also restricts some basic team collaboration features, like assigning content to team members, for higher pricing tiers.
Finally, it offers social listening, social selling, review management, and employee advocacy features. But users must purchase them as additional add-ons (even on the enterprise plan).
Nevertheless, it offers everything that a robust social media marketing strategy requires and is one of the most established tools on the market.
Source: Hootsuite
HeyOrca is excellent for large teams and agencies as it lets users manage multiple social media accounts in one place and offers unlimited users, scheduled posts, and media storage at all pricing tiers.
The lowest pricing tier also allows users to connect up to 10 social media profiles and direct publishing for Facebook, Instagram, Reels, TikTok, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Most agencies like to loop clients into the content creation and scheduling process, and HeyOrca also offers plenty of collaboration and approval tools, so that clients can see the content and provide feedback before publishing. If clients are slow responding, you can create approval reminders that automatically nudge clients if a post needs approval.
Source: HeyOrca
If you're still unsure which social media marketing platform is right for you, look at the marketing campaigns you're currently running, the social media platforms you currently use, and the size of your team.
Then work backward and select the social media tool that best fits your use case.
If you're trying to increase engagement on social media and are interested in leveraging employee advocacy and social media publishing, consider trying GaggleAMP. Our team is happy to show you how to improve engagement organically and point out low-hanging fruit in your current social media strategy.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing
