Comparing Social Media Management Platforms

Even the casual social media user finds it challenging staying on top of more than one platform, but it’s a challenge that businesses must overcome to find social success. Fortunately, several social media management tools help companies share effectively while monitoring engagement and reach. When choosing the right social media management system for a company, many variables come into play. How many team members need access? What access control features might be required? Are reports critical? If so, what kind, how detailed, and how frequently do they need to happen? How many platforms are in use? What level of draft-writing and scheduling is necessary? Depending on goals, audiences, and team size, mileage does vary with all the common tools available for social media management. Here are some services we’re quite familiar with, and a few reasons their users enjoy their systems.

Sprinklr

For large enterprise teams accustomed to deep-diving into complex workflows where collaboration is key, Sprinklr is a great social media management tool. Its dashboard screens are both many and comprehensive. It shines in planning, where it allows teams to create high-level campaigns featuring monthly, quarterly, and annual views. It offers the opportunity to define tasks and assign them to specific team members, while having shareable comments and ways to establish quality guidelines within campaigns. The analytics are great for both internal and external data. If you’re after tracking your competitor’s best-performing posts, this will do that for you. It also helps to monitor media types, content topics, and engagements that drive traffic to you. Monitoring allows you to track audiences, sentiment, moods, and even market trends. Platform integration is thorough too, as it works with everything from Twitter to Survey Monkey. Sprinklr is one of the more expensive solutions, but it offers a good variety of customer service that seems to keep most of its users happy.

Khoros

Khoros is popular with teams of 10 and under but is still a useful tool for larger teams too, thanks to how quickly it generates reports useful for strategizing and planning. Multiple dashboard pages also add oomph to those reports, thanks to how they break down insights into categories like platform analytics, influencer identification, consumer insights, competitor monitoring, and other helpful information. Khoros also boasts an easy-to-use search engine that isn’t too finicky, along with content albums that allow at-a-glance viewing of all shared content. The influencer identification page, for instance, allows users to enter keywords they’re after in an influencer’s biography, plus whether they’re verified and how many users the influencers have, along with common hashtags and other search terms routinely employed. Then, Khoros scours platforms and provides influencers matching these criteria. These leads can be helpful, but the game is changing and these metrics are not as valuable as they once were, given we’re learning how rampant bought followers are amongst influences. Plus, there are other aspects that should be considered when choosing a personality to suit a brand – like the reach their followers may also have. Still, it’s a good starting point for teams to consider. For those who’ve used Khoros over the long haul, they say they love how the app continuously brings in new features and refined performance. For example, in May 2018, Khoros launched a feature called “Vault,” a browser plug-in allowing team management to grant credentials access to multiple members without handing over the kingdom’s keys through account passwords. This means some actions that need direct access, like ad management and deleting posts, can now be completed securely through Vault, while member access can be controlled through time limits. Also handy is that team managers can use the “audit trail” feature to monitor who’s used access and when.

Hootsuite

One of the most popular social media management systems around, Hootsuite entered the social management game early. Today, it’s useful across all sizes of teams, including enterprise teams where delegation is critical. Its pricing is considered competitive and flexible, from teams of two to ten under Hootsuite Pro, or larger groups, which are priced as Hootsuite Enterprise. Its workflow is designed for groups, such as how specific engagements can be assigned to a one member to deal with, and other engagements assigned elsewhere, ensuring the person with the right know-how handles the right questions, as well as avoiding multiple replies on the same matter. This makes Hootsuite especially suited for customer service and oversight. Where Hootsuite gets big points is in allowing multiple social platforms to be managed from one page. In fact, multiple streams from a single platform can be included on that page with others, too, so teams handling multiple accounts can stay plugged into several at once. Hootsuite’s social scheduling tool has been popular with users for years and has only improved with time. This is integral when looking for best reach, since data shows that specific content types and messages with perform better when broadcasted at select times, making Hootsuite’s scheduler perfect for selecting the best times for tweets, posts and updates to go live. You’ll never miss that high-performance window. It’s an especially handy feature when company holidays and vacations are coming up.

Adobe Experience Cloud

Those familiar with the Adobe brand know it’s built powerful products like their Creative Suite with Photoshop and their omnipresent PDF Reader. This is their social solution, which can work hand-in-hand with Adobe Analytics, but reporting isn’t as strong without subscribing to Analytics as well. But for those not seeking an enterprise-level product, this can be a great social management system. It’s got at-a-glance visualization and monitoring of several social feeds on a single dashboard. Its reliability is good for small teams, as is Social’s customizable templates for use with posting, which cuts down the workload in getting polished posts prepared quickly.

Sprout Social

Sprout is very popular with its users, getting high marks for its ease of use and straightforward, user-friendly design. For teams who work with others, Sprout is geared toward collaboration. This is especially noticeable with its “smart inbox” that allows for forwarding and routing of private messages across all your social platforms, ensuring you stay abreast of all communications with a minimum of fuss. Sprout is big on clean, appealing and intuitive design, and this ticks the boxes for its users. They also love its scheduler for its simplicity, and especially its ViralPost option for “optimal send time,” which uses an algorithm to take guesswork out of when best to post a tweet or update. Sprout’s clients also like the custom reports options and the analytics it involves. The product lacks a little in the listening department, but Sprout is reportedly working on this and makes up for it with attentive, quick, and thorough customer service.

A Tech Agnostic Partner

At ICUC, we are tech agnostic when it comes to social media management tools. We are passionate about helping brands who have operationalized a tool or those looking to do so. We have our favorites but we are always here to be good partners to share our perspectives.