Social media is an invaluable tool for businesses, whether you’re building trust with your customers, doing market research, or scaling your audience reach. There is a major drawback, though — it’s a significant time investment to keep your company’s online presence updated and active.
If you’re managing a small-scale operation and you aren’t quite ready to hire a marketing team, there are social media management tools designed to streamline and semi-automate the process. Let’s compare 3 of the best SMM tools for business owners along 4 metrics: scheduling, price, analytics, and usability.
1. Brandwatch
Best for: People that like personalization
Brandwatch offers 2 plans for different organization sizes:
The Essential plan caters to small teams, providing a content scheduling calendar along with audience analytics and a comment management suite.
The Full Suite caters to large companies looking for a broader market. It includes everything from the Essentials plan plus social media advertising and competitor analysis tools.
Brandwatch provides users with a high degree of personalization on the platform. You can design your inbox using multiple feeds and filters and create customized response templates for bulk responding. This can be very useful for developing a workflow that suits your company’s KPIs exactly.
Consumers report two notable drawbacks with Brandwatch, however: the price starts at a hefty $108/month, meaning that smaller companies might want to look elsewhere for a budget-friendly price. There is also no multichannel posting, so you have to add posts to each channel one at a time.
Scheduling: Content calendar allows you to draft, edit, post, and schedule all in one place
Price: $108, notably higher than competing SMM tools
Analytics: Provides deep analytical insight into audience activity both in its entirety and on an individual level
Usability: Users report an overly-complex range of products from multiple companies, although the scheduler itself is relatively straightforward to use
2. Loomly
Best for: Users looking for an intuitive experience
Loomly offers a range of price points, starting at $26/month for 2 users and 10 social media accounts all the way up to $269/month for 30 users and 50 accounts.
This social media management platform provides an intuitive, straightforward user experience when creating and scheduling posts. The calendar supports drag-and-drop scheduling and provides topic ideas for each post, which makes the drafting and scheduling process a breeze. Loomly also offers audience insights for each post on each platform, and users can apply filters to compare posts or ranges to determine what posts performed the best. There is a community management suite where users can respond to comments and direct messages as well as track when their account is tagged. Loomly also supports multichannel posting, which can greatly simplify expanding your company’s presence across a variety of popular platforms.
Loomly offers a simplified user experience at the cost of personalization: you can’t modify your inbox or homepage to your preference, and the user interface in general is largely fixed. If you’re looking for an easy-to-learn platform for social media posting, you can’t go wrong with Loomly.
Scheduling: Drag-and-drop scheduling and a list of content ideas beside new posts make scheduling simple
Price: Starting at $26 and up to $269, Loomly has a plan for anyone from individuals to large teams of collaborators
Analytics: Insights for individual posts and date ranges make comparing post successes easy, although these analytics are somewhat limited compared to other platforms’ offerings
Usability: A clean, intuitive experience if you aren’t looking for UI customization
3. Sendible
Best for: Agencies that span many social media platforms
Sendible promotes its “Scale Plan” prominently, coming in at $199/month, although they also offer a Creator plan for a competitive $29/month.
Sendible supports posting on almost any social network. Beyond the most mainstream choices such as Facebook and LinkedIn, you can also directly post to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and more. You can easily post videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube as well.
Along with scheduling and drafting features, Sendible also supports Canva integration so you can more easily design visual content within the platform. You can also repeat-post successful posts to keep your profiles active when you’re too busy to draft new content.
Sendible’s most significant offering is its geo-targeting feature, which can be useful for a company that primarily does business in specific areas. This can be an effective tool for both small companies that only operate locally, or large companies that may only have licensing to operate in certain areas.
Ultimately, this platform is designed for companies trying to scale their social media advertising significantly. If you’re a smaller company, there are likely better options — while this platform offers a lot of reach in terms of supported platforms, the interface is clunky and not terribly intuitive.
Scheduling: Supports posting to almost any social media platform, plus Canva integration to make drafting visuals easier
Price: Sendible promotes its $199 “Scale” Plan for agencies most significantly, but there are lower-tier plans available as well
Analytics: Geo-targeting feature allows you to gather highly specific information about audience members in certain areas
Usability: Clunky and not terribly intuitive, users looking for a simple experience may want to look elsewhere.
