Top 5 Social Media Management Tools for Businesses Share: Audacity IT Solutions LTD. Date Published 9 July 2019 Categories Blog Reading Time 3-Minute Read A social media management tool is kind of like the “One Tool to Rule Them All” for social media Social media is a great way to spread the word about your business, connect with customers and network within your niche. Constantly posting to each of your social media accounts like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter can be daunting, however, and hiring a social media specialist may not be in the budget. Social Media Tools for Small Businesses Buffer Buffer is a favorite social media management tool for many small businesses and for good reason. It has a huge amount of feature, separated into three categories: Publish, Reply, and Analyze. The Publish feature allows you to schedule posts that will be posted to your social media accounts. The Reply feature helps you keep track and answer comments and replies on your social media posts. This is a great way to add customer service capabilities to each of your social media accounts effortlessly. Analyze gathers all of your engagement, growth, sales and reach data so it’s easy to look over to see where your social media campaigns are going right and where they need work. IFTTT IFTTT is an acronym for If This Then That and the whole idea of the site is that it allows you to create custom triggers to automate your social media workflows. With IFTTT you will be creating what they refer to as website. Essentially a set of instructions for what you want to happen. Now, recipe refer to as source what they refer to as channel followed by a trigger and trigger is what has to happen before the tool moves on. So you might create something as if I post to Facebook then post the same update to Twitter. Hootsuite Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media dashboard. It allows you to manage your content on multiple social media channels, listen to conversations and measure results all from one dashboard. Hootsuite is best if you are managing multiple social media channels. Hootsuite has lot of features: some are free but mostly are paid. Raven Raven is similar to function as of Hootsuite but it is for those people who manage a lot of accounts. With Raven you can do all the basics of social media dashboard such as plan and distribute content, review mentions and understand your data. They also look mentions for your brand around the web as well. Crowdfire Crowdfire is a lot like Buffer. You can use it to schedule social media posts, keep track of how each post is doing and interact with your followers. The site is a little more limited on features, though. Since Buffer’s packages are so confusing, that might be a good thing. The free package allows you to connect up to five social accounts to the system and schedule up to 10 posts per account at any one time. The advanced packages range from around $7 a month to $75 per month. These packages include advanced features like the ability to analyze your competitor’s data, reply to mentions, and bulk schedule posts.