Alternatives

SocialReport

Social Report launched back in 2011, but I've only recently come across it. It's cost effective and cheaper for teams when compared to Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer. All their plans come with multi-user access. Their entry-level standard plan comes with 5 users, 5 projects and social media channel management, 15 automations, business reviews, reports (export in Powerpoint & Excel) and contact management - all for an incredibly reasonable $49/mth. That's more expensive than the basic plans from Buffer and Hootsuite but amazing for what you get. It integrates with Facebook (profiles, pages & groups), Twitter, Instagram (including direct publishing), Google+ (pages & events), Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Vimeo, YouTube, Yelp, Reddit and more! That's a huge number of social networks to manage from one dashboard. It's also important to mention they are a Facebook and Instagram Marketing Partner.

Visit Social Report »

eClincher

A relative newcomer to the social media management scene, eClincher offers an incredibly powerful array of features and integrations. They were founded in 2012, but moved over to being a social media management tool in 2014.

eClincher integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube as well as Feedly, Canva and Pocket. It has the ability to publish, schedule, auto post and cycle content, an image library, monitoring and analytics. eclincher has a powerful bulk upload feature and is one of the only tools I've discovered that extracts images from the posts you upload (either as a CSV file or RSS feed). Prices start from $49/mth.

Visit eClincher »

MavSocial

MavSocial was founded in 2012 by Matthew Holden. MavSocial has a very generous free plan and an enterprise plan which works very well for agencies and larger teams. MavSocial integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr and YouTube with the Enterprise plan adding Japanese and Chinese networks. It has a digital assets library where you can store your images and videos and you can even licence stock images through various stock libraries including free ones (there are over 50 million to choose from).

Visit MavSocial »

Jollor

Jollor was founded in 2014 by Jakub Hrabovský. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube as well as the Russian networks VK and Odnoklassniki.

They have some enterprise features such as team and role management and delegation. They have a transparent pricing scheme starting from $5 per network, and you can add extra team members for $5 per month as well as other features.

Visit Jollor »

Commun.it

Commun.it is a social media relationship tool as well as a social media management tool that integrates with Twitter and Facebook. As well as being able to manage multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can find out who is relevant in your social networks' communities. Examples include your influencers or people who support you. You can also find out who is talking about you or your business or who is linking to your website and interact with them straight away. Prices start from $19.99 per month.

Visit Commun.it »

Rignite

Rignite was founded back in 2011 by Glen Kosaka. Rignite puts managing social media campaigns at the heart and integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. Rignite is campaign-focussed where you can create multiple social media management campaigns across your networks. Prices start from $28/user/mth.

Visit Rignite »

TweetDeck

TweetDeck hasn't changed much in recent years, but it still remains a powerful Twitter social media management tools. It now allows teams to manage multiple accounts and has some powerful features including advanced filtering of streams, Twitter list management and more. TweetDeck is free.

Visit TweetDeck »

Do You Struggle with Social Media Management?

If so, you’re not alone! Many of us struggle to keep on top of all the tasks required to be effective in marketing our businesses on social media. When it comes to social media marketing, there are many jobs including...

Publishing and schedule quality content

Engagement - responding to all the mentions and comments

Monitoring - keeping on top of all the mentions of certain hashtags and keywords for you and/or your competitors

Analytics and Reporting- to check how effective you’re doing with your social media efforts, digging deep into the data and making decisions on improving your strategy and systems.

The ability to delegate engagement and tasks to team members.

Tools to the Rescue?

So, maybe social media tools can come to the rescue here? Well, kind of… They’re certainly not going to solve all your problems. They’re not a replacement for planning and implementing a social media strategy. However, the right tool or series of tools can help you become much more effective and productive. It can also help you make smarter decisions and be quicker at reacting to opportunities, events and situations. Make sure you have a plan and a strategy first, but having the right tool or series of tools at the heart of your work is going to be vital - particularly as you scale things upwards.

What is a Social Media Management Tool?

There are so many social media tools out there. Many of us feel overwhelmed and confused by the choice. Many tools promise to solve all your problems without really explaining how they actually work. The “Social Media Management Tool” is a particular type of tool that tries to do it all. It aims to be “The One Tool that Rules them all”.

Such social media management tools will allow you to publish and schedule content and help you engage with your mentions and comments across all your social networks. They aim to help you monitor important keywords and hashtags, whether that be your business, brand or product name or perhaps a certain hashtag or even words to do with your competitors. Social Media Management Tools also aim to help you analyse how you are doing by providing analytics and reports for you to study. This can also communicate the effectiveness of your social media use to your team.

In Search of the “One Tool”

I’ve mentioned quite a few jobs and features there! Does this “One Tool” actually exist? A tool that will integrate with all your social networks and fulfil all the jobs you want it to. Well, no… there is no perfect tool out there. I think you expected me to say that, but there are many tools that try, and there are some that do a pretty good job. The problem is, that it’s a tricky job to find the best tool for your business. It’s a topic I spoke about at the New Media Europe Conference last year on “How to Find the Best Social Media Management Tool for Your Business”. I hope that the infographic will help you in your journey to find your One Tool.

What is G2Crowd?

On their about page, G2 Crowd, describes themselves as “the world’s leading business software review platform, leveraging its 70,000+ user reviews read by nearly 600,000 software buyers each month to help them make better purchasing decisions”. All the various B2B software technologies are listed by industry (email marketing, CRM, Social Media, etc.) and reviewed by their own users.

Is It Reliable?

G2Crowd have a strict authentication system for their reviewing system. This makes sure each review actually comes from a real user of the respective software. It definitely takes quite a bit of effort to leave a review on G2Crowd. However, this means that the review can be trusted as from a real user. Business buyers now have transparency when evaluating their next B2B software subscription.

How did we choose the tools to create this infographic?

We used information from this quadrant published by G2Crowd. I might be a little pedantic, but not all the tools listed in the quadrant are true Social Media Management Tools. As I mentioned above, Social Media Management Tools have to offer the following features:

Publishing

Monitoring / Responding to Social Media fans & followers

Measuring / Reporting

Team Management and Workflow

Available for several Social Networks

As a consequence, in producing the infographic, we eliminated the tools that only helped managed one Social Network (Tweetdeck or Facebook Pages Manager, for example). There is an exception to this, however. When I produced a similar infographic last year, I excluded tools that only focussed on publishing such as Buffer. Although, as I mentioned above, Buffer isn't technically a social media management tool, it is one of the most popular social media tools and its exclusion was felt. Therefore, I have decided to include in the top 5 this year, with the caveat that it only focuses on publishing with some analytics. In addition, we have only included tools that offered self-service access and transparent pricing. Enterprise tools such as ViralHeat, that require a demo and do not provide public pricing (enterprise tools usually above $1,000 per month) have not been included.