Social media management platforms MSPs should consider

Social media can serve as a cost-efficient and highly valuable marketing tool. For MSPs to drive leads and other opportunities, their social media channels must have strong visibility and encourage engagement. However, with many businesses having accounts on multiple social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube — managing and monitoring each channel can be time consuming.

Social media management platforms can help alleviate this problem by consolidating the monitoring and posting responsibilities that come with maintaining a strong social presence. Most of these tools allow businesses to post the same message to multiple accounts at the same time, whether it is meant to be posted immediately or scheduled for a later point in the future. Each management platform features its own unique capabilities that work together to save time. To help you find the right tool for your business, we identified a few popular platforms to consider and discussed what makes each solution unique.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite uses “Streams” to monitor your followers’ engagement with your brand. They can also be used to track posts that mention specific topics, hashtags, or keywords on a specific platform — which can help you engage with the trends that matter most to your target audience. Hootsuite’s scheduling feature allows a user to craft a message, attach links, images, and other media, and schedule them across many networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Sendible

Sendible offers a “Priority Inbox” that tracks engagement from other users and filters out the messages and notifications once you have addressed them. It also provides the ability to schedule in bulk, similar to Hootsuite. What sets this scheduling tool apart is that it has a repeating schedule option, that allows a post to be recycled with a regular cadence. Sendible’s built-in content recommendation engine analyzes previous content that has been shared on the account and suggests future posts that will be likely to have high engagement.

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse shares several similarities with Sendible, including a “Social Inbox” that shows notifications across each social channel and a repeating schedule feature to maintain a regular cadence. Where AgoraPulse differentiates itself is through its use of scheduling queues and performance reports. The queue scheduling allows for users to click and drag posts to be sent out in a specific order and for users to keep track of the order in a simple and easy way. The performance reports offer detailed measurements on several advanced metrics in social media performance and can be viewed online, downloaded to PowerPoint, or shared with partners by using custom branding.

eClincher

This platform combines some of the features of the previously mentioned tools, as eClincher utilizes a “Unified Social Inbox” for monitoring engagement, “Live Social Feeds” to observe what those you follow are posting about across all social channels, and an auto-posting scheduling system that uses queues. However, eClincher is not just a copycat of other management tools. It offers integration capabilities with Canva, making it easier to include original images in your posts, and monitors how your social media activity impacts the traffic being directed to your website.

Social Flow

Social Flow comes with perhaps the most unique set of features out of any of the social media management platforms on this list. First, it can analyze your engagement on social media to identify the best times to post content in order to earn high amounts of engagement. Social Flow also tracks topics that are mentioned frequently by those that follow you to find out what is likely to interest them and fuels their interactions on social media.

At the end of the day, determining the best social media management tool depends on what you are looking to accomplish. The individuals who manage your social media presence will probably be the best judge of which platform offers the most value. Fortunately, nearly every social media management tool allows users to experience their product on a free trial business, generally lasting from between two weeks to a full 30 days, before requiring you to make a purchasing decision — giving you the opportunity to find the tool best suited for your MSP.

Photo: Vasin Lee / Shutterstock