The 5 Most Effective Social Media Management and Marketing Tools in 2020
Companies invest small fortunes on branding and creating dynamic content for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the various other social media and content platforms users can post to. No matter what business you’re in, social media can expand your reach and if you’re creative with it, there’s perhaps no better bang for your buck in advertising.
Whether you’re managing someone else’s social media or boosting your own brand awareness, new tools and platforms are popping up every week to help you get the best results. That’s a good and bad thing. With so many tools available — some of which are even free — it’s hard to figure out where to start.
Fortunately, we’ve tested out all of the tools on this list and many that didn’t quite make the cut. Here’s a breakdown of the 5 most effective social media management and marketing tools in 2020:
1) Hootsuite
Hootsuite is excellent for performance analytics, multiple integrations, and managing posting schedules. The primary goal and function of Hootsuite is to provide an all-in-one social media management platform for cross-promoting on multiple sites. As a digital nomad, you’re probably familiar with the term social listening, but if not it basically means to monitor social media for mentions of your brand, which is another functionality Hootsuite is excellent for. There’s a search option that enables you to scour the various social media sites to find mentions, tags, and anything else that might raise your brand profile. This is particularly useful when it comes to engaging with your audience in an authentic manner.
Perhaps Hootsuite’s most popular feature is the ability to schedule posts on multiple social media platforms and with multiple profiles for each one. By doing this, you ensure that all of your campaigns are well-timed and executed. Lastly, Hootsuite’s built-in integrations, such as Mailchimp, Slack, Trello, Zendesk, and Asana allow you to operate as a team, so your entire tribe of digital nomads can work together efficiently. They offer three plans, the largest of which allows you to manage up to 35 social media profiles simultaneously.
2) Unsplash
The stock photography website offers more than 2 million photographs and counting. If you’re a SquareSpace user you’ll notice that Unsplash is actually the stock photo platform that’s built into the visual editing website builder. The photos are curated by a team of photo editors as well, so quality is never an issue.
3) Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another amazing one-stop shop for social media management and scheduling your posts. If you’re a digital nomad trying to balance Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more, this robust platform is the right tool for the job. In addition to scheduling posts and other basic management functions, Sprout Social is also great at analyzing data such as being able to quantify geographic and demographic info of your followers and what content they respond strongest to. Just like Hootsuite, Sprout Social is also an effective tool for social listening. You can start off with a free 30-day trial and then if you enjoy using it, you can go with a $99 per user each month for up to five different social media profiles. They have other plans, which offer more profiles, features, and a larger scope.
4) SEMrush
SEMrush is known for being the premier search engine optimization (SEO) software platform. If you know about SEO, then you know that a lot of the principles of website visibility apply to social media visibility. So perhaps it should be no surprise that SEMrush incorporates other useful tools for social media management across Google My Business, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.
SEMrush includes a post-scheduler, a visual editor, a link shortener, a post customizer, and the functionality to publish content immediately. As a bonus, you can manage ads across Instagram, Facebook, the Audience Network, and Facebook Messenger. The analytics and reports for all of your accounts and campaigns are put into a single dashboard as well. You can also monitor competitors, including how, what, and when they’re posting and to what effect. For Instance this blog makes use of SEMrush because we need to utilize the best practices of both SEO and social media. Click HERE to give SEMrush a try.
5) Hubspot
Hubspot offers users a suite of social media management tools and email marketing software. As a CRM first and foremost, Hubspot helps you prioritize connections and followers that are already most likely to engage with your brand. It spans Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. Hubspot has the essentials that Sprout Social and Hootsuite have with an email-centric twist.