One of the very first things you learn dealing with Social Media is that if you want to do things properly – but especially, if you want to work in a professional way, optimizing the time! – you absolutely need help, a tool that makes your life easier, especially when you have different clients/accounts to manage or a large amount of data to be collected and analysed.

That’s mainly because, let’s face it, frequently the native tools – Creator Studio’s ears must be burning – are neither reliable nor particularly successful.

How do I manage publishing post? And (what about) analysing the performance in a quick and successful way?

How do I manage and monitor comments and messages when there are lots of them?

How do I monitor in real time the mentions of my brand to provide quick feedback and to have constantly under control “the pulse” of the sentiment in the Net?

And, in particular, how do I monitor the performance of my brand in Social Media with a periodical final balance?

These are some of the questions I frequently receive during my courses/classes. 

In this post I’ll explain you how to choose the Social Media Tool that fits your needs and I’ll also suggest you some Social Media Tool I use/used in my job. Just to be clear, especially in this sector, every day a new tool pops up…I don’t know them, and I haven’t tested them all. So, here I’m going to mention only those I know “personally”, but keep in mind that there are so many more out there. I encourage you, indeed, to test more than one of them to orient your choices.

How to choose the Social Media Tool suitable for me/my business/my brand?

Spoiler: the Social Media Tool that can actually make the difference in optimizing both your work and your time are never free.

Among the key aspects you must consider:

• The Budget: We’d all like to have the incredible Tool that analyses and catalogues all the conversations on the Net about us, the activities of the competitors, that allow us to program, to do customer-care, to get reports “turnkey”…but sadly these “all-embracing” Social Media Tool, that generally means Enterprise Level, cost around tens of thousands of Euro per year. So, in the first place, we need to figure out the kind of budget we arranged and, based on that, we need to examine the Tool – they will surely be more than one – we can afford.

500 Euro per year? 2.000 per year? 10.000 per year? Firstly, we need to figure out the disposable income and then we choose the Tool – Spoiler: Social Media Tool that can substantively make the difference in optimizing both your work and your time are never free, at most they offer you a Freemium Formula or a Free Trial.  

• Basic Needs: Performance monitoring? Moderation? Publishing? Listening? Social Adv? There are Social Media Tool of all kinds, but we need to choose our Tool – or Tools – based on our priorities.

If we need to manage Social Account for which we preview a large amount of interactions and requests, we probably need to focus on a Tool that allows us to manage, to tag, to promote a quick moderation of the conversations and to assign responsibilities for response to the various collaborators. If we have to publish more contents across multiple Instagram accounts, it is important to avail ourselves of a Tool that allows us to publish them quickly and properly, contemplating also to schedule the Stories, to save Hashtag and so on.

If we know that various conversations around our Brand and its products/services take place in the Net, it will be paramount to avail ourselves of a Tool which allows us to intercept rapidly those conversations, maybe by aggregating them per sentiment and finding out as much information as possible about the participants in that conversation in quick time. Similarly, if we manage multiple channels, maybe for different brands – e.g. Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – we should find a Tool which allows us to publish in more channels, analysing its performance and managing its interactions.

• The Type of Activity: A Social Media Manager freelance doesn’t have the same needs of a company just like, almost always, a company doesn’t have the same needs as a business that have to monitor and manage its presence on Social. So, when choosing, you have to take into account of the type of project you need to manage. In fact, many Tools, as you’ll see, have specific plans for companies or Social Media Marketing professionals that find themselves managing more than one account while others are more focused on the single or even on a single type of Social Media and so on.
• The Timing: It’s about a single campaign or of a continued management? Sometimes you only need tools for a certain period – just think about, for example, the monitoring of the spread of a single hashtag for a given event – while most of the time you need a Tool valid in the long run.

Once understood the importance of these aspects you can start getting an idea of where to look at or what to look for. Conversely, you will rely on the first or the most popular Tool you will run into, maybe finding out that in practice it doesn’t meet your needs of the moment at all – trust me, I know from experience: the perfect Tool for your colleagues maybe doesn’t meet you and your priorities.

Even once you will have your eye on the Social Media Tool you’re interested in, before investing time and money on it, remember that:

• Test It: Most of the time a free version or a free trial period are provided. Not all that glitters is gold and maybe you might realize that the Tool that promises you to make you schedule stories in a jiffy actually forces you to extricate yourself from a complex round of notifications and mobile approvals to fulfil this task. Or maybe you might find the Tool that promises you “unbelievable reports” that actually are four data easily detectable/taken out from the Insights.
• Checking its Reliability: As said, there are tons of Tools designed to help you managing your Social Media but they are not always reliable Tools. Just keep in mind that whenever you decide to use an external Tool you grant it access to data and options for managing your profiles/those of your customers, so watch who you give “the keys” in hand. If you are looking for a Tool for management and monitoring accounts, particularly on Facebook and Instagram, where possible, you should rely on Facebook and Instagram Partner – if they are so, they generally place the badge in plain sight in the Home and in the Footer -, which is a further guarantee of reliability.

Which Social Media Tool to choose?

Often, the best strategy to optimize both time and energy is to use a combination of different tools, based on the activities we have to manage at the time.

As said above, I haven’t tested all the existing Social Media Tool, but I’ve tried some of them before finding those that, for my specific needs, are the best and that I often use combined. It could happen that a single Tool isn’t enough to cover all your needs and so you need to activate more than one Tool, depending on the period.

Down here I selected for you a list of Tools for managing and monitoring Social and more, ranging from free subscription to the price of a few hundred Euros monthly:

Agorapulse: If you need to manage in a professional way more than one account with a fair amount of interactions and several publishing, this is the Tool that best suits you. With Agorapulse you can manage your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter accounts with its scheduling of posts, managing of accounts in team with allocation of tasks, the moderation of conversations through quite a Inbox system which allows you to always have everything under control – with its option to add Tags also to the users, so that to identify them, which is very useful  -, monitoring the Mentions in the specific Social, comparison with competitors and much more. Additionally, Agorapulse offers a great system of monitoring and customized reporting. Subscription is free for managing three Social profiles and one user.

Hootsuite: One of the best-known Tools in the Social Media Tool world, Hootsuite allows you to schedule and publish posts on various Social platforms – almost all the best known – in a quick and easy way, keeping under control the various Social Accounts through a Dashboard divided into streams, in addition to do Social Monitoring for the specific key words, working in team, monitoring the URLs with the shortener owner, integrating the system with a variety of free or paid Add-Ons and much more. It is also available an Enterprise Version, very complete and integrated with a variety of other Tools. The Pro Version starts from 39 Euro monthly.

FanPageKarma: This is definitely my favourite Tool for Testing and Account Reporting, also because it offers a truly unique level of detail. With FanPageKarma not only it is possible to analyse in detail Social Accounts of all kinds, both owners and Competitors – TikTok included – but also to manage conversations, the publishing, as well as monitoring trends and finding Influencers. The subscription works at modules and it starts from 49 Euro per month, with a “Lite” version for free. 

Mention: If you don’t want to spend a fortune but you want to be alerted as soon as you brand is mentioned in the Net, I suggest you this very useful service of Listening which allows you to find the use of certain keywords around between Blogs, Forums and Social, by analysing over one billion of sources. It also integrates a publishing system, available a free subscription, while the one for freelancers starts from 29 Euro per month.

Socialbakers: A truly complete Social Media Tool, enhanced by Artificial Intelligence, it offers a variety of solutions to analyse one’s Marketing Persona, to analyse and program contents, to analyse the Organic Strategy and paid, to analyse the Influencer Marketing Campaigns, naturally to publish contents and much more. It’s about a truly complete and flexible Tool, with a customized quote that can be calculated here.

Later: If one of the main platforms you work with is Instagram, then Later is definitely for you. You can program with a great Visual Planner – Stories included! -, you can get help in choosing hashtags, to gain access to extensive Insights and to publish on other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Free subscription is available, while the Starter costs 15 Dollars per month.

Social Insider: A Tool designed precisely for Social Media Manager and companies that want to analyse in an accurate and scrupulous way their performances on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok…complete with an analysis module for Facebook and Instagram Ads! With Social Insider is easy to monitor the performances of the hashtags, but also of one’s Influencer Marketing activities. It allows you to create automatic reports and White Label, as well as offering an integration with Google Data Studio. Prices start from 83$/month for the annual subscription.

Postpickr: A Social Media Management Tool made in Italy, allowing you to manage Social, particularly the process of selection and planning of contents, from a single space. With Postpickr you’ll be able to manage, publish and analysing the performances of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Twitter, YouTube accounts and more. The free version is available, as well as the free trail for a month.

Loomly: Integrated with so many Tools and Social Media – Instagram, Snapchat, Slack, Giphy and Zapier included – this Tool allows you to schedule and publish contents, to manage approval processes, to receive customized ideas for your content activity and to analyse the performances with many very useful features, like the opportunity to create Mock Up for your sponsored posts and to publish, the Hashtag Manager and the Hashtag generator. The subscription starts from 25$ monthly, with the option of a Free Trial.

This list will be updated over time, so go ahead and save this link. And if you have other Tools to recommend, just write them in the comments section.

On your journey looking for the Social Media Tool, remember to choose the one that can make your life easier, saving your time and providing you data that can lead to making immediate decisions, seeing beyond the price. There are Tools which are much more expensive than other, but of great value, precisely because they allow you to save plenty of time, and then, money.

Just keep in mind that we are talking about Tools that have neither intelligence nor common sense to understand what needs to be done and why…they aren’t magic wands! The difference is given by the training and expertise of those who use them!