Week 14: Social Media Management Tools

    I think some of these tools would help me with my business because they make managing my social media accounts much easier. In most cases, more expensive tools or plans for tools are not meant for a person like me with just one business and one social media account per social media site/app. I still would use tools because I am just one person and will hopefully have a small team at some point, so getting help from social media management tools would really help me save time and would allow me to save money because the tools would be way cheaper than hiring people full time.

    I think that Hootsuite is a good tool I could use. It seems really handy, especially because I only have to manage one social media account and I don't need anything too complex, so the free plan works well for me. It allows you to see analytics, send targeted messages, manage two profiles, directly post to your social profiles, you can have organization assignments, and they also have social content profiles for social medias outside of their main offerings. These are all free things you can do with it and you get (in order of what you unlock depending on pricing with the plan they come in parenthesis) unlimited posts, post scheduling, access to messages in one inbox (professional), roles & permissions, assign posts to team members (team), approval workflows, inbound/outbound tagging, content & asset library, Hootsuite customer support (business), social ads management, social ads analytics & reporting, employee advocacy, and team productivity reporting (enterprise). Their pricing is $49 (team), $249 (team), $739 (business), and custom pricing (enterprise) for plans that cost money. Overall, I think this would be an amazing tool because of what it has to offer. They also have a 30-day free trial, so it really gives you a lot of time to think about if it would help you and your social media profile(s). It also has a lot of useful tools, but I feel that paying for Hootsuite would be more for larger businesses or for people who want to run multiple social media accounts on multiple social media sites or apps.

    Another tool I really liked and I feel that could be good for my business is MeetEdgar. Their plans aren't very expensive and are about the same as other popular tools. They have two plans which are named: Eddie ($24.91 monthly) and Edgar ($41.58 monthly). For the Eddie plan, you can manage 5 social media accounts, you get unlimited scheduled posts, 10 weekly automations, 4 content categories, 4 content categories, and can add 20 team members. While for the paid plan you can manage 25 social media accounts, you get unlimited scheduled posts, 1,000 weekly automations, unlimited customizable content categories, and can add 20 team members. I believe this tool would be a really great tool for me because I can post more and more easily. I can easily schedule posts far into the future which can be really helpful for when I already know what I'm going to do and I already know what my plan is with my social media accounts or when I want to plan far ahead. The more expensive plan is also very worth in my opinion because the price is less than double of the cheaper one, but gives more than double the feature/value, so if I ever what to have a really large social media presence I can easily use MeetEdgar to automate my tasks very easily. Overall, I would love to use this tool to make things way easier for me and the small team I plan on having. It would really allow me to focus on other things like interacting with customers, responding to feedback, other forms of marketing and even focusing on my products.

    Another tool I think could be useful is Status Brew. Status Brew lets you have an inbox to respond to your customers, it lets you easily schedule posts, helps you boost audience engagement on Instagram with custom Instagram hashtag feeds, they help you measure your performance, and makes it easy to work with a team. Status Brew has many plans and many different features per plan. It would take me ages to list them all and would probably take up half of this blog. Anything more expensive than the standard plan is meant more for larger businesses with more social media presence and more money to spend on tools. The main two plans that would help me are the lite and standard plans. The lite plan is $69.00 a month and the standard plan is $129.00 a month. The lite plan lets you use the tool for 5 social media accounts, allows 2 users to use the tool, gives unlimited posts, provides the best timing queue, allows you to bulk schedule, gives you an all-in-one social inbox, hides comments on Facebook and Instagram, and gives email support. The standard plan allows you to use the tool with 10 social profiles, allows 5 users to use it, has Facebook and Instagram ad comment moderation, social media publishing, social media reporting, google my business integration, automated comment management, and email and chat support. I believe it would benefit my business because it would allow me to manage my comments and my posts much more easily than without it. Since it measures post performance, it would really allow me to see what works and what doesn't very easily and would allow me to learn what I should add to my posts and what I shouldn't very easily. This would give me a huge advantage because people would be more drawn in by my posts compared to other accounts' posts. This tool would also allow me to help customers and would also help me connect with them. In short, I think this tool would really help me with making posts people would want to see and would help me respond to customers.

These are the people whose posts I commented on and what they found out:

Sarah Mitulski: Sarah learned that social media management tools can be helpful for small businesses that only have one person who manages the business. Sarah also talked about how these tools can help take the stress off of people. She also mentioned how Buffer is a good tool but isn't supported by TikTok, but that Buffer includes Google Analytics.

Maximiliano Hidalgo: Maximiliano learned that social media management tools can help business administrators manage a business's social media. Max also talked about Sprout Social and Buffer. He also talked about how Sprout Social's price range is from $14.99 to $499.00 and that they had plans for businesses of any size while Buffer is better for businesses on a budget although their tools aren't the best.

Kristy Yam: Kristy learned about Meet Edgar and Zoho. Kristy learned about how Meet Edgar helps you schedule posts that will automatically run on multiple social media platforms but said it's limited to a few social media platforms. She also talked about how Zoho helps you manage your social media, emails, projects, and finances which can be really helpful.