It requires a lot of time and energy to create and publish quality content, stay active and engaged, monitor and track campaigns on social media. Big Companies hire people to join their marketing team with the responsibility of managing their brands, products, and services on social media.

However, for start-ups and small businesses that do not have the financial strength to hire staff, there are marketing tools for you to make the work easier and cost-effective. To be successful in your marketing campaigns on social media, beat competitors as a small business owner, you’ll definitely need the help of social media management tools.

And I will show in this article, the importance of social media management tools and highlight the best 15 tools you can use to reach out and keep your audience engaged on social media, and as well manage your social media presence in one place. So, let’s dive in…

Importance of using social media management tools

Using social media to communicate and engage with customers has become one of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies. You can easily reach the majority of online users, increase visibility and brand awareness.

Many local businesses are also competing for the same audience you’re trying to target and to scale your social media campaigns and gain a competitive edge, you’ll need to equip yourself with the best social media management tools in the market.

Also, a good social media networking tool can help you run targeted campaigns more efficiently, manage your time effectively, easily discover more content to share, and help you schedule your posts to go live at the time your audience is most likely to engage with it.

Social media management tools allow you to measure your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and get better results from actionable insights that you can start implementing right away.

Learn how to use social media tools to grow your business fast. Or start here if you want to make money online as a social media manager.

Here’s a list of the top 15 most important social media management tools that will help you grow and engage your followers, manage your account more effectively, and scale higher above your competitors within a short time.

Are you ready to find out which tool is best for your social media marketing campaigns and to manage your accounts in one place? Let’s dive in.

1. Awario

Awario is a social media listening tool created for all business levels from individuals up to the enterprises and agencies level.

Awario tracks mentions of your brand and other keywords. It tracks mentions from all the major social media platforms, including blogs and news publishing websites.

Awario is a go-to tool for individuals or companies looking to monitor the performances of their social media account. It comes equipped with:

• A built-in flexible Boolean search for monitoring.
• Insightful analytics and reporting.
• Powerful sales prospecting and potential lead identification.

What the lead does is to help you identify potential leads on social media, especially when asking for recommendations.

With this tool, you can track your competitors’ activities on the internet, not just on social media.

The tool can also be used to analyze sentiment, that is, analyze the engagement and reactions coming from your audience, group them and respond to the ones coming in as negative.

To start using the lead tool, open and set up a Project, add your product or service’s descriptions, and start monitoring. You can also add your brand name.

Awario has a trial period that grants you free access to the Starter plan. You can create up to 3 alerts and find up to 30,000 mentions. But after the trial expires, you’ll have to subscribe to the paid plan ($24, $74, or $249 per month for enterprise.)

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a multi-level access tool that helps you to manage and better control your marketing efforts. It makes it easy for social media managers to assign, coordinate tasks with team members and allows you to monitor all of your accounts on social media networks.

Sprout Social, just like some other social media tools comes with full post scheduling capabilities, social listening, a detailed reporting dashboard that tracks engagement and interactions with the content you post on social media.

Sprout Social is relatively expensive for small businesses but they offer a free 30-day trial on any plan you choose ($99, $149, or $249 per month ).

3. Sniply 

Sniply is a very simple tool that every social media manager or business owner should have in their arsenal. Unlike many other tools discussed so far, it only act as a URL shortener. And it has a great built-in feature which allows you to overlay your own content on the destination site. Making it unique from other URL shorteners.

Sniply lets you send your followers to a third party content without disengaging them. This way, you can get your audience hooked with your content.

Sniply goes beyond just sending short links. It tracks how your audience is engaging with your content with the link you send.

It provides information about how many people clicked, re-shared the links, converted or bounced out, which you can then use to optimize your social media marketing campaigns.

You will find the dashboard to track the analytics for each custom URL you share, do some A/B testing and help you to make informed decisions as to reaching your goals, and measuring the overall effectiveness for a better ROI.

4. BuzzSumo

If you’re running out of content ideas for your social media accounts and blog posts optimization, BuzzSumo is one of the right tools for you if you are looking best social media management tools for business. This tool allows you to find new and popular content on the web. It generates ideas for your new blog posts and articles that you can share with your audience to boost engagements. 

Using buzzSumo is easy; just type in a topic or keywords, and you’ll see a breakdown of popular trending posts in the category that you’ve entered into the input infield.

You can use Buzzsumo to discover influencers who share keyword-related content with your niche on social media. BuzzSumo is a great tool to research content ideas for your marketing campaign and also to reach out to the top influencers in your industry.

There are four key features BuzzSumo offers straight out of the box that you can tap into to boost your online presence:

Content Insights: This lets you know what people are currently talking about on social media and helps you to gather information on the topics that are getting the most attention.

Influencer Information: BuzzSumo provides details of who people are listening to at a particular period of time, including who gets the most likes and shares. When you are trying to incorporate influencer marketing strategy into your marketing plans, this tool becomes handy. Having the details of influencers in your niche that have the public’s attention and trust will help you identify who to work with.

Alerts: The alert feature in BuzzSumo is an interesting feature that you get straight out of the box. BuzzSumo’s Alerts lets you set up keyword alerts so that you can be up to date when new content is posted or updated on the internet. It gives you information about who, where, and when of any post on social media, allowing you to determine the next step in your marketing effort.

Competitor Analysis: want to know and track your competitors? Use BuzzSumo! You can find out what strategy your competitors are employing, know what’s working for them and what’s not. And thus, helping you to stay clear of things that are not effective and gives you insights into what works best, and where you stand in comparison to them.

To start with buzzSumo you’ll have to subscribe to any of their plans. Their pricing plans are from $79, $179, $299, or $499 per month for enterprise and custom plans.

5. Buffer 

Buffer is one of the inexpensive but highly recognized social media scheduling tools in the industry. Buffer tool allows you to link all of your social media accounts in one place and schedule your post across them ahead of time. 

With Buffer, you can schedule, control and automate your posts as you like – you could set it to “every day” or “weekdays.” 

You can use it to evaluate previous posts impacts and identify which one is most effective.

One interesting feature in Buffer is the browser extension that lets you buffer images, website, or pages on the go. It gives you an analytics dashboard for tracking information on any of your posts; you can track comments and republish an old post that performed well.

Buffer has a 14-day free trial period. And their paid plan are: $15, $65, and $99 per month.

6. Hootsuite 

If you’re looking for a social media management tool to handle your business on social media, choose Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a simple but robust tool to promote your business on social media in Nigeria. Like Buffer, Hootsuite allows you to schedule your posts ahead of time on several different social platforms where you have an account. When it comes with engagement, you can measure the performance of your content and improve on it using the built-in analytics tool,

Hootsuite caters for all levels of businesses. Although it can be expensive compared to Buffer, BuzzSumo and some other tools, there are relatively inexpensive paid options for small businesses. There’s a free plan that allows you to manage up to 3 social media profiles.

You can integrate Hootsuite with your account on Salesforce, Marketo, and SocialFlow to manage your social media in one place.

Hootsuite is a bit expensive but they offer a 30-day free trial. Their paid plans start at $49 per month for a Professional plan, $129 for team and $599 per month for a Business plan. However, custom solutions are available for Enterprise with different pricing structures.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is similar to Awario. Brand watch watches for your brand and products mentioned across the internet. It offers:

• Deep audience insights.
• Powerful analytics.
• Beautiful data visualization.

Beyond tracking mentions, Brandwatch also allows you to create product innovation and staying ahead of the competition through its built-in consumer insights and audience analysis features that will let you:

1 search for articles, comment, reviews and other conversation.

2. use segmentation to select categories that are relevant to your business.

3. analyze data for discovery.

4. react in real-time with instant email alerts.

To get pricing ideas, you can book a meeting with the company on their website to negotiate a plan that best suits your business needs.

8. SocialOomph

SocialOomph is another social media scheduling with awesome features similar to that of post planner, Hootsuite and Sprout Social, but they offer something a little bit different.

One of the unique features of SocialOomph is the Content Center and great engagement insights; it uses its unique algorithm to score the Social Web and tell you what social content is engaging and which one is not. SocialOomph uses this algorithm to provide recommendations to you on what to post on your social media accounts by first analyzing your followers.

SocialOomph is another tool designed for all types of businesses and when you request a demo, the company will work with you to determine a pricing structure that works well within your marketing budget.

9. SocialFlow 

SocialFlow provides data that you can access quickly, and helps you engage with your audience in real-time. It uses the real-time data to know when your audience is active and is most likely to engage with your content and automate the post scheduling process.

What socialFlow needs from you is to upload your content to the queue, and let it do its job by using AI to determine when to publish the posts. This tool removes all of the guesswork out of social media marketing for you.

As a social media manager or business owner this tool allows you to focus on the content creation and strategy, while SocialFlow makes the big data-driven decisions, optimizing the post and growing your social media profile.

SocialFlow gives you suggestions for who to engage and how you can improve on your posts.

To get started, request a demo on the company website. You’ll get a personalized pricing structure that will fit well for your business and still within budget.

10. Oktopost 

Oktopost is a social media content tool with a very simple interface but designed for B2B. You can search by topics, keywords, and hashtags to see the type of content being shared around a specific person or subject. You can schedule your content and monitor its effectiveness, curate content to keep your account updated.

When you search, Oktopost lets you set recommendations based on the industry and interests and uses the data to generate new content ideas.

There’s also a custom algorithm in Oktopost which helps determine whether a post is worth sharing. It uses engagement scores to rank the content by collecting data from past reviews and predicting future engagement.

11. SocialBakers

Want to know everything that’s happening on your profiles across social media? If you want more out of social media beyond post scheduling, SocialBakers is the right tool for you. It allows you to log daily engagement and interaction. it has a pricing plan that fits well into every business whether you’re a small business or large enterprise.

Socialbakers gives you the power of analytics with which you can make informed decisions; you can monitor your profiles on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, track engagement, check your social advertisement results, and share reports to a single platform.

You can track and compare the performance of up to 10 competitors from different industries at a time.

When you request for pricing model SocialBakers will allow you to choose any of their plans and whichever one you pick comes with a free trial period to try out their product

12. Bitly

Bitly is a URL shortener. Its a great tool for sharing content across multiple social media platforms because it allows you to track the performances of the posts in all the platforms. It takes lengthy URLs and shrinks them into much shorter ones for quick and easy sharing. Bitly becomes handy when sharing content on social media, especially on Twitter, where there is a character limit.

Apart from links shortening, Bitly helps you track your campaigns’ performance, record traffic to the site, the number of leads captured, geo-location of users, type of device used and conversion metrics on the built-in dashboard.

The Campaign URL Builder in Google tool is Bitly. This powerful feature is what makes Google to integrate Bitly to their tools to help users shorten links and track campaign performances.

13. Powtoon

Creating and designing visual content is an important part of improving online presence on social media and with Powtoon’s Visual content gets 3x more engagement on Twitter than ordinary text. Creating videos can be very expensive, but thanks to Powtoon, creating video becomes an easy, fun, and inexpensive thing.

You get 100s of templates, characters, animation, footage, music & more when you subscribe.

Powtoon makes it easy to create studio-quality videos without buying expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment. It comes with a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes.

With Powtoon, you can engage and entertain your audience with informative, short videos you share on social media.

Powtoon offers you endless possibilities of spicing up your social media profiles with content that attracts users the most. Short videos are super-shareable. They increase engagement.

14. Everypost 

With Everypost, curating content all from one place becomes easier. Everypost uses some algorithms to pull together relevant multimedia sources: YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, RSS feeds, and more. And then schedule and customize your post for your audience. You can track the performance of each of the posts and maximize its effectiveness.

15. Audiense

Audiense is an artificially intelligent tool that automatically finds new target audiences and creates segmentation for each one you find.

The tool uses real-time social behavioral patterns and then categorizes individuals based on that data. From here, you can divide followers into multiple segments and tailor your content based on relevance.

Learn how to use social media tool to grow your business

Bonus: Social Media Platform-Specific Tools

If most of your audience is on twitter, consider using FollowerWonk. FollowerWonk is one of the Moz toolkits that gives you an in-depth look into your followers using analytics and allows you to know more about who your followers are, where they are located, who they follow..

For pinterest, I’ll recommend Tailwind, a cool tool that allows you to schedule your posts on Pinterest. And for Facebook audiences, the Facebook IQ Audience Insights tool can help you to understand your audience and community better, and then you can create a social media marketing campaign to target them.