In times when automation has become a norm small business owners can benefit tremendously by using social media tools.
Some of the best tools for social media management help small businesses with some of the toughest marketing work. These tools enable:
- Online businesses who want to spread a word about their products to gain visibility in a short time span.
- Small and medium businesses that aren’t a brand per se to build a good recall using social media marketing.
- eCommerce businesses to reach the right target audience, engage with them, and deliver the right message at the right time.
If you haven’t been using a social media tool yet winning in the social media space work for you might seem overwhelming.
You have to do a lot of digging into numbers and analytics, create engaging content that converts, measure performance of social channels, track audience engagement, and think about as well as implement optimization measures. There’s simply too much to be done. Why not try out some budget-friendly or even free social media tools available in the market?
The only thing you need to be careful about is picking just the right tool for your business requirement.
This blog post lists down 8 such social media tools that small business owners can use to get started with social media.
What are the best social media tools you can consider?
- SocialPilot - a social media tool that allows you to effortlessly schedule, plan, publish, and analyze your social media posts.
- HootSuite - a social media tool that gives a birds eye view of your social media performance mainly for enterprises
- MavSocial - a social media tool that helps make better use of visual content in your posts
- Buzzsumo - a social media tool that allows you to identify and analyze content that engages your target audience
- SproutSocial - a social media tool that is best suited for enterprises and large agencies
- Leadfuze - a social media tool great for lead prospecting
- Taboola - a social media tool that helps promote your best content on social media
- Audiense - a social media tool that enables digging out actionable user insights from social media platforms
Price : $30 for 3 Users
If you are a small business owner who hasn’t ever dealt with social media marketing before, it is best to go for a tool that is uncomplicated to use. It should have a feature set that helps you easily and in no time get started with social media. That’s exactly what SocialPilot aims to do for you.
If you are an agency, one of your main requirements for your social media marketing clients is going to be getting the multiple posts creation and scheduling on track. SocialPilot has got you covered for this as you can post content or schedule it on over hundred accounts in a single click, using this social media tool.
It makes sense to stay on top of your audience’s mind and social media feed if a special occasion is approaching.
- Schedule and Publish social media content for about 9 social media platforms.
- Curate content that trends and is popular with your target audience
- Use bulk scheduling to schedule and publish up to 500 posts at once, for better time management
- Converse with social media audience real-time using Social Inbox
- Win the attention that your brand deserves with White-label feature
- Make team collaboration on social media marketing seamless
- Manage multiple social media accounts for your clients effortlessly and efficiently
- Ease ad spending experience and boost Facebook presence
- Get a complete picture on content performance, audience engagement, optimum posting time, etc. with social media analytics
- Automate sharing links to your favorite blog posts using SocialPilot browser extension
Here it out from what people on Twitter and other credible sources have to say about SocialPilot
The built in reports from @socialpilot_co are wonderful! I love them 😁 https://t.co/IQhMOxOne0
— Chloe Christine (CC Digital) (@CCDigitalUK) February 11, 2020
Luis Ignacio C.
SocialPilot as the main tool for the content management of the accounts for which I work. SocialPilot, is truly amazing. Apart from all that, they also offer you a complete section of analytics, which allows you to show the orderly evolution of your work.
Brian W.
I had been using another company to facilitate all of my social media posts, however, the number of accounts I needed took me out of the search for the free products and jumped up pretty quickly to some prohibitive pricing. SocialPilot fit a perfect price point and got me connected to all of my social media accounts very quickly. I can make my posts and schedule them as I like. Thank you!
Why should you use SocialPilot as a social media tool for your business?
- The tool has an extremely intuitive and easy to work with, designed keeping in mind the needs of small businesses who have little idea about social media marketing.
- The tool not only makes work easy but also ensures smooth team collaboration and management. You can give Admin access to team members working on social media marketing. You can also provide them selective access to Social Inbox and Analytics Reporting if you want them to work on brand engagement.
- The tool is budget friendly, and is cheaper than most other established as well as new social media tools.
Price : $129 for 3 Users
This social media tool has managed to make it to most lists that show up on the internet when you search for social media tools for business. One of the oldest of social media management tools, Hootsuite is famous and has a huge customer base - over 15 million users worldwide.
Enterprises and large agencies, particularly, like using the range of features that this social media tool provides. There’s a range of apps it integrates and runs smoothly with. That’s why if you are a fast growing company, Hootsuite has got custom, scalable solutions to manage your increasing needs from social media. While it has been in the market for a long time, it is comparatively a complex tool to use. Thereby we recommend other user-friendly hootsuite alternatives.
Pros
- One of their strongest points is that they allow tracking trending topics by geocode, using the Geosearch feature. This allows you to engage with your audience based on their location.
- The tool integrates with more than 20 social media platforms, as well as with over 150 apps like Trello and Slack.
Kara D.
I am a digital marketer and I love using Hootsuite because it allows me to schedule my content, review my analytics, and engage with my audience all in one platform!
Cons
- Hootsuite does not offer the kind of ease of use that small scale businesses are looking for. It can get complicated use as the interface is also not very neat.
- Because the tool comes packed with a number of features it is also costly. Every additional service you top up your plan with comes with an additional charge. Even their custom URL shortener feature comes at a price and is expensive.
Zachariah K.
The platform does have errors, or sometimes can be buggy. I also dislike how you can't do more interactive content through Hootsuite. Finally, its analysis of negative and positive feedback in its analytics is not always accurate, which skews results for reports at times.
Here's a detailed comparison of SocialPilot being a great Hootsuite alternative
Price : $78 for 3 Users
For marketers who focus on creating and distributing visual content, MavSocial is one of the most sought-after tools out there. It simplifies the process of organizing and publishing visual content across multiple social networks by equipping businesses with a centralized database that can store huge sets of content in the form of images, videos, infographics, etc. and can be readily accessed.
Pros
- MavSocial lets you visually enrich your posts by providing an easy way to add effects and filters to images, as a result making them more shareable.
- To improve engagement, you can even join the conversations happening around your campaign and track comments and messages received across all networks from a single window.
Jennifer H.
I love the campaign planner and calendar. The ability to move post around by dragging on the calendar is very helpful.
Cons
- While reporting is an important feature, MavSocial’s reports lack depth. Also, the fact that you cannot customize the report as per the specific metrics that you want to check, you might find yourself missing out on critical details.
- MavSocial can sometimes throw unexpected errors. The root of this issue lies in the fact that the different social media networks are known to changing their APIs every now and then, so this is one area where MavSocial can be more proactive to find a workaround.
Sandra G.
The idea of a campaign was great, but I had to either let it run forever or set an end date. This was tough. Also, although it's great to have the cloud library attached to my account, it was horrific to organize. I regularly work with hundreds or thousands of images. Incredibly time-consuming to add metadata to each individual file. They also had to be moved to directories individually.
Price : $179
BuzzSumo is essentially a data analytics and content research tool that analyzes massive sets of data pertaining to social media posts and interactions so that you can identify the top-performing posts within a specific topic or industry. Touted as one of the top social media tools, it serves as a great enabler for you to figure out what kind of content suits you or your clients the most, thus letting you reach out to your audience in the most effective manner and gaining a significant competitive edge.
Pros
- This social media tool helps you identify the thought leaders and influencers in your respective field so that you can run the influencer marketing campaign that you may have been planning for years.
- You can stay on top of your industry news and updates by using BuzzSumo to create alerts for latest news or topics of interest to you.
Volodymyr B.
Developing good content means you need to do a lot of research and sometimes that can be a dubious process even if you have all the tools. Hopefully, BuzzSumo is one of those social media tools that makes the process of content research much easier and much more insightful in just a couple of clicks.
Cons
- The learning curve associated with BuzzSumo can be overwhelming as it has quite complicated workflows that take time getting used to.
- BuzzSumo’s affordability for small and medium-sized businesses is questionable since the packages have an intimidating price label.
Alina M.
The value is undisputed but the price of 99$ per month is very high. I think they are just focusing on big companies.
Price : $149for 1 User
The focus area of Sprout Social is making social management seem like an easy job. That’s why team collaboration is what they’ve paid utmost attention to while crafting this social media tool. If you are using SproutSocial or are considering using this social media tool for your small business it's great for managing customer relationships that uses a rich CRM system. It easily integrates with Zendesk, UserVoice, and Salesforce to enable sales, support and social media teams to work in collaboration.
Pros
- The tool makes customer communication for sales, social, and support team as easy as pie. With their bot builder, you can create a Facebook messenger bot that helps you connect and talk with customers round the clock.
- The way they present information and data on their dashboard is extremely neat and organized. People love their review tool.
Cons
- You can manage less social media platforms to work with on Sprout Social. This isn’t great because you cannot reap the benefits of social engagement and social commerce for all platforms at one place..
- The dashboard isn’t comprehensive. It doesn’t provide all the information about all your four social media channels in a bird-eye view. You have to toggle between different pages to retrieve data and insights about each.
Stephanie M.
I dislike the new layout completely, I don't like having the navigation bar on the left side; it's not as intuitive. I wish I could click and drag posts to different days on the month calendar view instead of having to click the post and go in and manually change the date.
SocialPilot proves out to be an efficient Sprout Social alternative. Check here for a detailed comparison.
Price : $149 for 1 User
Leadfuze is not purely a social media tool. But, it does enable you to manage your social media work. However, the core focus is on lead prospecting. So, if you are a small scale business and are currently looking only at getting social media content publishing, engagement, and promotion, on track, you need not consider this tool.
However, given that you are likely to need lead nurturing and prospecting some time in the future, we couldn’t leave this tool altogether out of the list also.
Pros
- Early-stage eCommerce companies or small SaaS startups can benefit from LeadFuze’s lead generation and prospecting capabilities.
- The interface is easy to use and simple to learn. Integrating with Hubspot is also possible and trouble-free.
Seth C.
I was actually really impressed with their marketing and I switched from another lead grabbing software to use LeadFuze. It has a great cold email builder and they provide helpful training to make sure you're using best practices. They give you plenty of leads on a daily basis, so it keeps us busy.
Cons
- Unfortunately, Leadfuze doesn't cull out phone numbers for the leads generated
- Onboarding for Leadfuze isn’t effective. There is a lot of scope for improvement on this front.
- You can’t add specific tags to records when added to CRM
Want to get your content noticed and win footfall for your business? Taboola will serve as the right social media tool for you. Using this social media tool helps you create creative native ads for different social media platforms. This way you can bring your best content right to the front and top for your audience on Facebook and other social media channels.
In a nutshell, Taboola is a content discovery tool that reaches and engages your target audience no matter where in the world they are.
Pros
- The platform’s interface is easy to understand and intuitive. Reports can also be generated quickly without having to follow too many steps.
- When running content promotion campaigns this social media tool gives you the freedom and flexibility to exclude those devices and segments that aren’t working too well for you.
- The pricing is easy on the pocket for small businesses
Verified Taboola User
I believe this tool offers good scale of distribution as it has some large publishing partners within its network (such as Huffington Post and BusinessInsider). It's been easy to get the content ads up and running and the reports that you get are easy to digest. The interface is well designed and doesn't require much training to use.
Cons
- The quality of customer support is declining day by day. It can at times take over three or four days to get a campaign approved.
- Their account managers are difficult to work with. They often don’t help understand how to make your landing pages or creatives can be improved for approval. They straightaway reject if guidelines aren’t followed to the T.
Price : $79
How users behave on different social media platforms, the kind of content they like or dislike, what they share, where they share content from and on, etc. are key insights that can help you create a solid social media strategy. Tools like Audiense are meant to help deep dive into such actionable insights. With Audiense Connect you can create and use a custom chatbot for Twitter that allows you to engage with subscribers and/or customers, using direct messages automatically.
Pros
- It’s tough to help clients understand how their campaigns are performing without the help of reports. Audiense makes this otherwise complex task easy.
- You get a picture on the personality of your target audience. Useful insights like these are very helpful, especially to eCommerce merchants, who want to know and make the best out of consumer likes and dislikes.
Eduardo B.
It provides deep psychographic data powered by IBM Watson's Artificial Intelligence. No configuration or training needed. If you are looking to have your entire team make data-driven decisions easily, this is the tool for you.
Cons
- Free analytical capabilities provided are limited. Customization capabilities in the free version are also few.
- The UX is a bit confusing and so is the in-app navigation. It could definitely be made better.
Verified Audiense User
There is much more in the application than comes out in the default reports, so we have to manually take application screenshots and copy them into Powerpoint. Also, it would be great if the default PPT reports were able to be exporting the 16:9 format.
Frequently Asked Questions
Over-to-you
For a small business what is most important is that they
- quickly gain a social media presence
- continuously improve their social media game.
- have budget constraints.
An all-in-one social media platform like SocialPilot can prove to be the best social media tool for your business.There’s a 14-day free trial to get hands-on and find out if you like how it works.
If you are already using a social media tool for business do let us know how it has been working for you so far.
