Social Media Management Tools for Agencies
For many businesses, social media is one of the most important marketing channels they have. For this reason, many businesses hire specialized social media agencies to help create engaging content, increase brand awareness, and manage the social community. While these may seem to be relatively straightforward tasks, agencies have to deal with the expectations, problems, and complexity of a diverse clientele, all of which make their job complex.
This can be overwhelming since publishing, tracking, and reporting must be clear and transparent to customers who may not fully understand social media marketing. Any social media consultant will tell you that this can make their jobs a lot more difficult.
Managing multiple clients' social media presence is made much easily with the right tools. In this article, we will discuss what features a social media agency absolutely needs in their social media management platform. This includes essential features and functionalities and what you should look out for to get the most for your money.
The Challenges of Finding a Tool for your Social Media Agency
Navigating the intricacies of social media management can be a daunting challenge without the right tools at hand. As an agency, your social media management tool must be dynamic in a way that is not required for businesses who just have a few social media profiles. Those who work at social media agencies need to keep current on various trends, performance data, posting schedules, and conversations taking place on the channels they are monitoring.
Finding the right social media management tool for agencies is not just so simple as looking at whatever provides you with publishing, analytic, and reporting features. What is needed is a tool that can help your agencies to meet the demands and complexities of working on dozens or more social media profiles. However, the best social media management software for agencies needs not only have the enhanced features, but have those features that were made with agencies in mind.
Essential Features of Social Media Tools for Agencies
Nearly all tools offer similar core publishing, analytics, and monitoring features that may make you think that they are all one and the same. However, not all social media tools for agencies are created equal. Some tools excel in areas such as analysis and benchmarking for dozens and perhaps hundreds of profiles. While the sheer number of profiles may be daunting to some companies, this is business as usual for agencies.
The most effective social media management tool for agencies would offer all the following:
- Communicating and reporting to your clients
- Organizing different projects effectively
- Tracking and benchmarking dozens or more different profiles
- Coordinating content planning and feedback loops
Below, we examine what the essential features of the best social media management tools for agencies would look like and why you need them.
Report and Progress Sharing Features
When it comes to social media management, there needs to be a focus on effectively sharing progress that helps to ensure transparency. On a functional level, this means that report and progress sharing features have to be developed for agencies that are serving multiple clients with different reporting needs. The best social media management tools for agencies would not only allow for these reports to be quickly and easily, but also exported in common formats or shared directly with silence through a tool’s built-in secure sharing features. This means that reports should be easily shared even with those not using the tool. Additionally, publicly accessible dashboards for those who are not using the specific social media tool is also important in this regard.
Tracking Unlimited Profiles for Benchmarking
Social media agencies that manage dozens of accounts for must not only track and their client’s various profiles across channels, but also get benchmarking insights from competitors and industry leaders as well. This means that their social media tool must be able to track an unlimited number of profiles, create dozens of tracking dashboards, and analyze a host of metrics and other data points including increases in follower and engagement, interaction rates, audience demographics, and more.
Collaboration Features
Effective and successful teamwork on client accounts requires collaboration features where different colleagues can work on tasks together simultaneously. With the increasing complexity of managing many client accounts, collaboration features must include getting feedback on social media post copy, engaging with profile followers, and monitoring progress. Importantly, collaboration includes the ability to assign roles, ask for feedback, and set up approval processes for publishing are must-haves when for a social media management tool geared toward agencies.
Access for Non-users of your Social Media Management Tool
Different customers require different data and having a flexible social media tool is important. It is clear that agency social media management software needs to be accessible to many different stakeholders, whether it is management, clients, or simply someone who needs to provide feedback. Agencies need a tool that gives them the option of creating public dashboards, accessible to those even not using a social media management tool, as well as be able to share reporting metrics in different, custom formats, to highlight the data sets that important.
Important: Watch Out for Hidden Costs and Fees!
We hear from many social media agencies that some tools appear to have low starting prices, but when adding more features, the costs expand quickly. This is a common challenge that many social media agencies face since they need to work with several different clients at one time. Depending on the tool and plan you choose, simplifying tracking additional profiles can create unexpected costs. With this in mind, it is important to choose a tool that provides transparency on what you are getting.
What are the Best Social Media Management Tools for Agencies
Social media agency tools need to effectively track and analyze metrics to measure campaign success and optimize strategies accordingly. Agencies must navigate the fine line between delivering engaging content and creating that content efficiently, all while managing multiple client accounts simultaneously. Overcoming these challenges demands the utilization of an efficient and dynamic social media management tool.
Fanpage Karma
The Fanpage Karma social media management platform was created with social media agencies in mind and provides the features and capabilities that agencies need in managing their client’s account. It includes advanced features for publishing, analytics and benchmarking, monitoring, reporting, community management, and so much more. Fanpage Karma gives its users unlimited profile tracking and dashboard creation, which is perfect for agencies working on multiple client projects simultaneously.
Unique Features for Agencies:
- Unlimited number of profiles and dashboards - don't pay for more to monitor more profiles!
- Reporting made easy - Fanpage Karma provides you with freely customizable templates and a number of ways to share reporting in different formats.
- Advanced external feedback capabilities - receive feedback on post drafts even from those not using the tool.
- Engage your Audience - engage with your followers while benefiting from customer engagement tagging and assignment, AI helpers, and automation capabilities.
- Discovery features for finding influencers - Fanpage Karma makes finding perspective influencers easy with their influencer database that provides you useful analytical insights.
- Cross-network scheduling of posts - curate and schedule posts to be published across channels.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a widely used social media management software option for agencies since it provides such a wide-range of features and has developed a reputation as a tool that does essentially everything. However, there are two primary downsides, which are significant. First, Hootsuite can be expensive, especially for agencies that needs to have many different users. Second, Hootsuite puts limits on profile and competitor analysis, which can be a deal-breaker for agencies who need to track many different profiles.
Sprinklr
For an agency, social media management software with advanced social listening capabilities could be help them offer more to their customers. Sprinklr is relatively less-known than some of the other players in the market, but nonetheless offers a strong product for agencies that want helpful analytical insights. However, much like Hootsuite, it limits the overall number of profiles that can be analyzed and can be exceedingly expensive.
Buffer
Another social media management platform for agencies is Buffer, which may serve as a good option if your requirements for analytics are low and you simply want to manage your client’s publishing. In some cases, this can be cheaper than other options available, but the clear downside is that it lacks greatly on analytical power as well as sharing and publishing features.
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