Social Media Management Tools

By Julia Salem

Updated: April 19, 2012

Original Post: November 20, 2011

We have been in search of the best social media management services for a few weeks now. Here’s a comparison of a few of the services we’ve come across.

• Analytics SEO This tool helps to improve your overall SEO Score and commentary and does this through numerous features. Some include competitive site audits, home page speed comparison, Google page rank comparison over time, and more.

• Eviv.io Focused on helping you to create a strategy, Eviv.io helps you plan, monitor and evaluate campaigns. An interesting feature is the ability visualize your campaign posts on a calendar, so you no longer have to open up the calendar on your computer or phone. Eviv.io is a helpful tool for strategizing social media for small or mid-size businesses.

• Hootsuite A great resource for those who manage accounts actively because it focuses on streams. You can organize tabs by account, network or content, so that it will be easy to closely monitor the feeds that are most important to your company. Hootsuite currently supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, PingFm, Digg, Trendspottr, InboxQ, WordPress and soon Google+ (currently testing). A great feature is the integration of each follower’s Klout score, which allows you to know which of your followers have the most influence. Another useful feature is the ability to create lists for followers you interact with the most for easy access. For unlimited social insights, pay $5.99/month. The free version only gives click stats. This is a great tool for small to medium-sized businesses.

• Klout Great tool for businesses that want to test the effectiveness of social media strategy. This service allows users to compare their social accounts to others. This is useful for business teams and influential individuals.

• SocialFlow Helps Facebook and Twitter publishers optimize content based on what your audience is doing using SocialFlow AttentionScore™. This tool posts the most relevant message, to the right audience, at the right time. SocialFlow a great tool for any company trying to optimize their social media posts.

• Kred Focuses on tools for analytics and marketing for brands. Kred uses an influence score, but it also grades by how much you share the love, a metric it calls “outreach level.” This is a really useful tool for finding influencers by communities of interest.

• PROskore This is a professional version of Klout. It adds professional history into the influence score. This is a great resource for small business owners looking for a place to gain more leads.

• Tweetdeck One of the best free management sites available, allows you to manage almost all of your social media profiles. These include Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Some interesting features include the integration of Google Maps into Foursquare feeds and the ability to view photos and videos. TweetDeck is best for companies who have less than five accounts to update and monitor.

• SproutSocial Some useful features include comparison with competitors, conversation history with each customer, customizable inbox (to customize the type of interaction you want to see), shows influential users, location manager and many of the other usual features. This is a great tool for small business owners who are just getting started in social media management.

• CoTweet Allows users to assign specific social media managers messages for follow-up. This allows for more relevant responses from team members who know a lot about a certain topic. One feature that isn’t available on some other systems is the OnDuty status, which notes who is responsible for social streams at a certain time. Also, the person on duty can monitor while doing other tasks because the system will e-mail them when something needs a response. Currently, CoTweet only supports Twitter and Facebook. This is great for companies with a few different employees in charge of social to corporations with numerous employees working on social.

• HearsaySocial Large companies with local agents, reps or store employees can use HearsaySocial to protect the brand’s name. This tool enables local offices to create authentic conversations with their clients and customers in real time on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, while still protecting the company from any messaging infractions.

• Spredfast This is a great tool for agencies or consultants with several companies that have high ROI demands. Spreadfast is the ultimate social media analytics and management tool with a hefty price ranging from $12,000 to $1 million per year.

• TweetBot Currently only on iOS, TweetBot is another choice for those looking for a Twitter Client. Some useful features include multiple timelines and smart gestures that allow you to easily communicate without the clutter of too many buttons. This is a great tool for personal accounts or business accounts on the go.

• Engage121 The best tool for large franchises, it allows you to maintain a consistent message while giving local branches a voice as well. If you are a franchise, this is the tool for you.

• TweetCaster This tool is strictly for users who want to update Twitter easily through mobile, with platforms for Android, BlackBerry, iPhone & iPad, bada and Windows Phone. TweetCaster handles multiple Twitter accounts and is easy to setup. Some interesting features include location services that use your location to show you nearby tweeters, trends and recommendations on who to follow, filtering to show all tweets, photos, videos or just links, and Zip It! feature, which temporarily mutes a person, trend or keyword. This is best used for personal accounts, but can also be used for business accounts on the go.

• Argyle Social Excellent for small businesses, Argyle aggregates all mentions, comments, retweets and other social interaction in one social inbox. It works with Twitter and Facebook (both applications and pages). Argyle permanently records all interactions, so nothing gets lost or missed. Cloning posts makes it easy to create a post and easily edit it for both Twitter and Facebook.

• Postling An all-in-one inbox for all social activity about your business, Postling allows users to read and respond to comments left on their blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. In addition, users can keep an eye out for the latest reviews from Yelp, TripAdvisor, CitySearch and more. This is a great site for small to medium sized businesses to keep track of customers and what customers are saying.

• Awareness This is an effective product for all types of businesses from small to enterprise-grade. Awareness allows companies to control social media efforts with permissioning, workflow, audit controls, and comment management.

• Involver Leader in the SML (Social Markup Language) industry, Involver’s platform acts as a marketer’s system of record, bringing everything from app management and wall response/moderation to publishing updates and analytics into one interface. This is mostly used by large brands and agencies to manage large social media campaigns.

• Vitrue Creates reports to help companies understand their brand’s social mentions measurement. Vitrue’s patent-pending technology creates index scores of various mentions from a company’s social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. This value helps large to medium sized companies make sense of an overwhelming amount of data.

• Tweepi This site has numerous features that make using Twitter easier. Some of these include the “Flush,” which allows you to see the users you follow who are not following you back, “Reciprocate,” which allows you to see the users following you who you’re not following back, and “Cleanup,” which allows you to see everyone who you’re following so you can unfollow as many users as you like. Users can also see who your friends are following, follow full lists and follow other users based on who they follow. Tweepi displays the users in helpful columns by showing their names, bios, locations, number of tweets, number of followers, number of users they follow, dates of their last tweets, their Klout scores and more.

• Friend or Follow See who you’re following and who’s following you in a grid format. This tool helps both business and personal accounts organize followers and users they are following.

• Tweet Eraser Search for and delete tweets in bulk from your Twitter timeline based certain dates, or tweets that contain a certain text string or hashtag. This is great for anyone trying to rebrand an account without having to create a new one.

• WeTweetApp A very useful resource for companies which use Twitter for announcements. Currently in beta, this service gives you the ability to prepare a Tweet and share it with colleagues. They can comment and change the Tweet in real time. So stop emailing your drafts to colleagues, start editing it in real time.

Let us know which social media management tools your company uses and why on twitter @OxfordTech.