7 reasons why social media management tools are indispensable for online businesses

Social media is probably the most essential extension of your business. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram — the list is endless. While these platforms can help you connect with your customers, boost brand awareness, and increase leads and sales, there’s another important aspect that you should consider.

Every other brand is claiming a spot on social media. If you’re not there, then you’re not a participant of this fast-paced web community. Moreover, customers gauge a business based on their social media profiles and how involved they are with their customers. If you don’t show people what your brand stands for and how much value you are giving to your customers, they don’t have a clue what your business represents.

Yeah, social media marketing is crucial for success.

But there are few challenges that businesses need to overcome.

• There are more than three billion people on social media. While this highlights the great deal of potential just waiting to be discovered, there’s a huge audience out there that you’ve got to connect with.
• Consumers usually interact, on average, with 8 different social media accounts. So you’ll have to monitor and manage multiple social media networks. Moreover, you’ll have to identify which platform aligns better with your target audience.

At times, this can become quite challenging. But you don’t need to break out into a sweat just yet. Technology can help you run several campaigns from one interface.

What you really need is a social media management tool.

You’re probably thinking, great, one more investment to run my business. But is it worth it?

We’ll let you decide that for yourself. Have a look at the following reasons on how a social media management tool can help your online business.

1. Automate responsibilities

Cloohawk.com stated that time management is one of the challenges social media managers are currently facing. Tasks range from managing numerous social networks, consistently creating content, engaging with the target audience, posting regularly, supervising social media campaigns, and much more.

Your job as a social media manager can be significantly simplified. The single, most significant benefit of any tool is the automation of complex and repetitive tasks. It helps reduce time spent on daily routine duties and streamlines processes so that you can focus on other more essential aspects.

2. Manage multiple profiles from one place

With the aid of a dashboard, you have access to various accounts from one location at the same time. Moreover, all the data is easily comparable at a glance. And since social media management tools offer features such as analytical capabilities and segmentation, you can effortlessly work on improving and growing your online presence.

3. Schedule posts

Your main concern is to get content posted to gain the maximum visibility for your brand. But you know that in social media marketing, timing is everything. And this is where social media management tools and editorial calendars can ensure that you are able to publish content on time. More importantly, you can also effortlessly manage posting content across multiple time zones. Notice how this tool helps schedule LinkedIn posts depending on the time and day of the week you want to publish content.

4. Plan an effective marketing strategy

Content Marketing Institute reports that only 32% of marketers have a documented strategy. But you know that planning and aligning every angle of your marketing approach simultaneously is crucial for developing a cohesive brand image. Therefore enlist the help of a social media management tool to create a well-documented strategy detailing information such as the content that’s going to be posted, on which platform, timing, etc.

But in order to promote a uniformed growth for your business, you will need to manage all your social media channels at the same time. Moreover, as a professional marketer, you should have an organized lineup of content that you want to post.

Moreover, your post can be loaded into a social queue so that it is automatically published at a later time. Often these queuing tools help upload content in bulk, making the task quick and simple.

5. Improves relationships with customers

According to emarketer.com, 67% of customers use live chat, social media, or texting to contact customer service. Moreover, Gen Z displays the highest preference for using social media channels to connect with customer service, quotes Zendesk.

Customers are using social media platforms to reach and interact with brands. Whether it’s a complaint, question, or review, consumers prefer using this channel for giving feedback. But customer expectations are rising. For instance, 85% of Facebook users expect an answer to their questions within six hours, but 64% of people on Twitter want one within the hour. Unfortunately, 7 in 8 messages sent to brands on social media go unanswered within the first 72 hours.

Even though you receive thousands of messages, not responding to your customers is hurting your business. Social media management tools can aggregate the messages sent to all of your profiles into a reliable stream. This promotes engagement and bolsters customer relationships, which, in turn, builds loyalty. Moreover, these tools help save a considerable amount of time and effort.

6. Make the most out of conversations

There are a lot of customers on social media. So needless to say, there are plenty of conversations. Now multiply this by the number of social media profiles you have. Keeping track of conversations can be challenging.

A social media management tool can help by holding all of the data in one place, whether it’s consumer opinions, feedback, competitor news, etc. So you can search conversations by keywords. One word is enough to bring back all the related information to it. More importantly, you can find, monitor, and follow all conversations happening about your brand or topic.

7. Analyze your social media campaign

The whole point of your marketing campaign is to optimize the overall performance of your business. Your goal is to implement strategies that will help you grow. And there are various ways you can improve the outcome. But it all stems from collecting, monitoring, and analyzing the right social media KPIs. Important ones include clicks, likes, shares, comments, brand mentions, visits, active followers, etc.

Social media management tools provide a vast amount of information. They can even generate reports for you, based on activity between specific time periods. However, it’s your job to make sense of all the data and adjust your tactics accordingly.

As you continue to test, tweak, and optimize, you can determine what works and what doesn’t. But more importantly, you can identify which platforms are generating the best results, segment the target audience to create more engaging content, schedule posts to prompt higher responses, determine which keywords are trending, and much more.

But while you make sense of it all, as a leader, you can initiate a drastic change for your company. You have the power to devise a more robust campaign, bring the entire social media marketing team on board, and take the brand to greater heights.

Final thoughts

There are countless social media tools available on the market. Choosing the right one can be overwhelming, especially if you are working within a tight budget. Many tools are freemium, meaning that you’ll only get the basic features unless you pay extra.

Moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. You will need research for tools that align with your brand’s goals and objectives. Sometimes, you may even have to implement several tools to acquire optimum results.

Wrapping up

There are dozens of other reasons why your business needs a social media management tool. But it’s hard to negate the fact that they help track and streamline various aspects of your social media marketing campaign. And as you reel in these efficiencies and organize your strategies, your brand will benefit immensely.

Most important of all, this is your opportunity to stay ahead of the competition. And you don’t want to waste it.