Top Social Media Tools For Startups
Getting on top of your social media marketing is a big deal, especially for a startup where budgets are tight but getting word out is vital for success.
The good news is, there are plenty of great tools out there that you can use to help plan, schedule, analyze and manage your entire social media marketing strategy.
Let’s take a look at a few that are used by everyone from the big corporations to the small startups – meaning they’ll grow right along with your new business.
Buffer
Buffer is one of the most-used scheduling tools in the world. It allows you to upload your own content and add it to the queue for posting, as well as having a handy feature that allows you to curate content from across the web. This is great for posting blog posts, news articles, videos and reposts from other accounts.
You have a low monthly cost per social media channel and an unlimited number of posts that you can schedule. This means it’ll scale really well as your startup grows. The dashboard also offers detailed analytics on your posts, but you need to pay more for that per month.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another of the major players when it comes to social media tools, however, it can be a lot more expensive than most. The basic plan is for one user and 10 social profiles with unlimited scheduling. Once you start adding other users, this is where the price starts to go up. This tool is definitely worth investigating and working out if it’ll be financially viable once your business starts to grow.
With Hootsuite, you don’t just get a great scheduling tool. You can also engage with your communities on all your platforms right from the dashboard. It basically brings all of your different profiles on different platforms together. The social listening and analyzing aspects of the tool are also top-notch. You can see a great overview of your engagement.
Sprout Social
This is another one that is on the pricey side but is incredibly powerful if you’re serious about growing your online presence. Sprout Social is an all-rounder for social media management. The aim of the tool is to be more than just a place for scheduling content and viewing the stats. The designers of the tool want you to take the information and make strategic marketing decisions based on it.
Sprout Social can be used to analyze and plan everything, from the beginning stages of a campaign through to the performance of each post. It also integrates with several powerful customer relationship management (CRM) systems, giving you even greater access to your customer activities. You’ll be surprised how much better you can make your social media campaigns when you know how your customers are behaving online.
HubSpot
Speaking of CRM tools, HubSpot is possibly the most powerful and well-known in the digital space. They have created their own social media management tool that fully integrates with all of their other tools. You can also opt to use just the social media management tool at first and grow your account with them as your needs change and your budget increases.
When you combine the CRM and social media, however, you get the ability to monitor and analyze the social media behavior of any customers in your database. When these customers mention certain keywords or hashtags that you designate in their social media content, an alert in the system gets triggered to let you know they’re interested in what you have to sell.