A raft of new social media management platforms have arrived on the scene that contain features rivaling popular tools like Buffer, HootSuite, and Sprout Social.
Here are five priced with small business budgets in mind.
1. Post Planner
Touting that it can increase engagement in just 10 minutes a day, Post Planner is a social media software solution designed strictly for use with Facebook.
While I don’t know why it would limit its technology to one social network — albeit the largest — Post Planner offers several features that make managing your Facebook account easier. These include:
- Trending content. Post Planner shows you trending content based on your business category, such a viral images, links, and other content sources.
- Post scheduling. You can set up a posting calendar to schedule content updates in advance. Automatically pull in content from RSS feeds to queue posts for sharing throughout the day.
- Fan targeting. You can target posts based on location and demographics.
- Post to lists. Merchants with multiple Facebook pages can organize them into lists and post to any or all at the same time.
- Real-time analytics. Post Planner provides real-time analytics, which can help you schedule posts so they will receive the most engagement.
Plans start at $29 per month and a free trial is available.
2. Rignite
Billing itself as an alternative to HootSuite, Rignite combines social media management with monitoring, analytics, and social campaign creation into a single platform.
Rignite’s strategic focus ties social media engagement to your company’s marketing goals. For example, to drive website traffic and increase sales, you can offer a discount coupon or promo code, feature products, or promote a sale.
Post scheduling across multiple networks is an option. In addition, you can monitor mentions of your company name, products, or keywords and respond directly from the dashboard to any of the social networks where you maintain a presence.
Through its analytics dashboard, Rignite enables you to measure the impact of social activity on accomplishing your business goals.
Pricing starts at $19 per month.
3. Oktopost
Designed for B2B companies, Oktopost allows you to manage content distribution across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, as well as set up social campaigns to create brand awareness, establish thought leadership, or generate leads.
In addition to social media monitoring, Oktopost includes a content recommendation engine that surfaces fresh content based on how well previous updates converted in terms of engagement.
Oktopost also supports post scheduling across multiple networks.
Pricing starts at $9 per month.
4. Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster emphasizes analytics. That is an important feature given that businesses want to see real results from their social media marketing efforts, not just metrics such as likes and retweets.
Though limited to Facebook and Twitter, it mines data from those networks better than others on this list and presents it in an easy to understand graphic interface.
For example, Crowdbooster lets you see every Facebook post and every tweet on a data table with the associated metrics. You can sort the table to see which messages achieved the greatest reach or highest number of replies and create others like them.
Just like the other platforms, Crowdbooster lets you schedule posts to publish over the course of a few days or weeks. Using predictive analytics, it can even optimize the timing of posts to maximize reach.
Prices start at $9 per month
5. Everypost
Everypost is unique in that it is a mobile-based social media management application.
Available in iOS and Android versions, Everypost enables posting of multimedia content across multiple social platforms.
Features include:
- Clean interface specially designed for the mobile experience;
- Posting of multimedia content;
- Social channel post customization;
- Post scheduling.
Everypost supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Tumblr, as well as Dropbox and email.
The basic plan starts at $9.99 per month after a free trial.