If you want to use social media in a strategic and goal-oriented way, social media tools can help you, especially if you are managing more than one or two social media platforms.
Many of the tools combine different functions such as planning, creating and scheduling posts. Some include analytics so you can monitor your marketing campaigns. There are some tools that enable you to identify trends and better understand your target group in order to better adapt your content to them.
With so many social media management platforms out there, which do you choose? We’ve previously discussed the benefits of Hootsuite, In this post, we take a look at Sprout Social.
Sprout Social is a social media management tool with an all-in-one approach. It has a huge list of features that help with engagement, publishing, scheduling, analytics and listening.
From community management to customer care, the engagement tool helps you increase your visibility, responsiveness and efficiency on social media.
Publishing
The publishing tool is a great feature giving you the option to post the same piece of content to all your social channels or to adapt the content to suit each channel. This is a good idea if you have segmented your audiences and need to market to them separately.
Another useful feature of the publishing tool is the best times option. Every time you schedule a post, Sprout Social gives you the option to schedule for the best times based on when your followers are likely to see your posts. Each social media platform has different times when its user base is fully engaged. Having put a lot of effort into creating your content, it’s good to know that your posts will be seen by a large percentage of your audience.
The publishing calendar gives you an overview of your scheduled posts. It’s easy to change the date and time of your scheduled posts. If you have a team working on social media engagement they can see at a glance what’s going out and can schedule their posts accordingly to avoid clashes.
Metrics
A successful marketing campaign depends a lot on your strategy and the decisions you make. You can make better decisions if you have the right measurement tools to hand. Sprout Social has you covered. The reporting dashboard provides you with analytics on the number of clicks, engagements, and impressions that a page gets. This function works with the top platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. There is even an option that allows identifying which content was the most successful. And it is also possible to compare statistics among pages.
Pricing
Sprout Social also offers social listening and influencer identification features and even has some social media-oriented customer relationship management (CRM) functionality, too.
It is jam packed with features but all that comes with a large price tag.
At $99 per month per user for a standard package, Sprout Social may be out of reach for solo entrepreneurs or small businesses. For big brands and large organisations and who have big budgets, this is an ideal social media management platform.
Sprout Social offers a free trial so you can try before you buy.
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