Social Media Planning Tools We Can’t Live Without
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All social media managers and those in similar positions will understand just how time-consuming posting to social channels can be, especially if you handle multiple accounts. Luckily, there are tools to help streamline processes and remove some of the most tedious steps about social media publishing. Just thinking about logging in and out of each account every time a post is ready to go live makes us sweat!
What this means is we’ve spent significant time road testing different platforms, and here are the top project management products with our take on what makes them worthy of consideration.
Buffer
If room for growth is what excites you, Buffer is a tool that offers more than just social media scheduling. While its initial product, Publish, comes with varying levels of pricing and allows you to schedule across multiple social accounts, Buffer upped the ante by offering additional options under its suite of tools. If you’re running one account and need to reply to and interact with the public quickly, check out their Reply offering. You can respond to DMs, react to mentions, and more. Last but not least, Buffer’s suite of tools includes Analyze, which gives marketers the opportunity to track metrics, engagement, and make better-informed pivots on their social media strategy. Each suite option also comes in levels so you can tailor your Buffer package to your exact needs.
Loomly
Our next social media scheduling tool to cover is Loomly. Our team has extensive experience with Loomly, and loves how it tackles the major issue of pushing content to Instagram. With Loomly, it will send you a notification reminding you to share your scheduled post, and allow you to copy and paste the content from the mobile app right into the ‘Gram. It helps our team stay on top of posts and collaborate more effectively. With different pricing levels and several extra options like analytics and hashtag suggestions, you’ll get a lot of mileage out of your engagement with Loomly.
SproutSocial
SproutSocial has been a powerhouse in the social management arena for years, and for good reason! This tool in particular reaches past social media managers and also tackles issues that customer care teams, digital analysts, and employee advocates require to be successful. While SproutSocial starts at a higher per-month cost of $99, they also allow you to try their platform for free for 30 full days, versus both Buffer’s 14 day free trial and Loomly’s 15 day free trial. For growth-minded organizations, SproutSocial also offers a partner program. This program gives agencies special pricing, additional marketing tools and support, and sales support. Additionally, the SproutSocial blog is a goldmine of knowledge, insights, and tips. They post very regularly, and we often look to them for learning.
Airtable
Calling all spreadsheet lovers—Airtable is for you. Its initial setup and UX feels similar to a spreadsheet, but it handles more like an extensive project management app. Pros include seamlessly syncing mobile and desktop apps, optional views of projects (calendar, grid, Kanban, etc.), and vast integration options with tools like Slack, Dropbox, and more. Here are a few of our favorite options from Airtable’s social planning offering:
Automatically double check the character counts for your posts by using the formula fields and alert your team if the headline or description text may be truncated.
Before publishing, you can visualize exactly how the post will look using the mockups built using the Page Designer block.
You are able to store all your social media graphics, stock photos, and other visual content in the Assets table for quick and easy reference across your entire team.
Have you tried any of these social management tools? Have a secret weapon that we should check out? Let us know! Send us an email at: info@kaleidoscopemg.com. We’ll be sharing a post that covers some of our favorite project management and tasking tools on the blog soon, so stay tuned!
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