Best Social Media Suites

What You Should Know About Social Media Suites

As social media continues to grow, evolve, and influence people’s purchasing decisions, it has become more necessary than ever for companies to leverage social networks as a business tool. The usefulness of social media has expanded far beyond brand awareness—it is also a valuable asset for monitoring a company’s online reputation, responding to customer complaints or questions, generating leads, measuring engagement, tracking competitors, targeting advertisements, and more.

To harness a powerful and multifaceted tool like social media, businesses require an equally powerful software. That’s where social media suites come in. Social media suites provide an all-in-one product designed to meet all aspects of a company’s social media needs. These versatile solutions offer any combination of at least three of the following features: social media management, social media monitoring, social media analytics, social media advertising, and social customer service.

When evaluating new social media suite products, companies should consider their current social media strategies and compare the product’s features to their software needs. This will help an organization select the best and most cost-effective product for their business.

Key Benefits of Social Media Suites

• Respond instantaneously to customer inquiries and complaints
• Follow brand mentions with live updates
• Compile all of your company’s social media feeds into one centralized hub
• Use paid social media marketing to reach new audiences
• Monitor social analytics to reveal customer habits and interests
• Track performance of social marketing campaigns
• Identify and leverage key customers who are brand advocates
• Stay up to date on competitors by tracking their social media footprint

Why Use Social Media Suites?

Social media represents a low-cost, high-potential opportunity for marketing a business’ product or service. Effective social media marketing can be an efficient way to increase word-of-mouth among your target audience and drive traffic to your website or place of business. With the surge in popularity of social networks as an avenue for advertising, social media suites have gained popularity as a flexible combination of tools necessary for social media marketing.

Small businesses in particular have much to gain from the use of a social media suite. In small businesses, social media strategies are often executed by one person—perhaps by the business owner. They may not have the time or resources to dedicate to many different products. By offering a tool with multiple functions, social media suites have the potential to streamline an organization’s digital marketing efforts considerably, saving on software costs and training time.

While many of the features offered by a social media suite can be found separately within specialized categories of social media software, the design of the social media suite platform lends itself to a few unique benefits.

All-in-one platform — As previously mentioned, the main advantage in using a social media suite is the ability to execute a complete social media marketing strategy with a single product. From one centralized platform, a social media manager can view all of their company’s social network feeds, schedule and post content from multiple accounts, monitor social analytics, manage paid social ads, identify influencers and brand advocates, and communicate with customers.

Brand presence — By combining social media management, monitoring, and advertising capabilities, social media suites allow companies to optimize their brand presence across platforms. If a business has multiple social media accounts, they can manage those accounts from the suite’s hub, monitor brand competition, and place ads or promote content. With the use of one tool instead of two or three, a business can improve their social media presence and brand recognition.

Reputation management — Social media suites make it easy for companies to analyze and manage their online reputation. Staying on top of mentions and conversations about your company on social networks is key to maintaining a positive brand reputation. Marketers, customer service teams, and PR professionals can use social media monitoring and management tools to publicly respond to complaints, answer inquiries, and even thank customers for positive feedback.

Who Uses Social Media Suites?

Marketing and communications — The social media suite is an important tool for any digital marketer, social media manager, or community manager to have in their marketing toolbox. With the full set of features offered by a social media suite, marketers have everything they need to execute a complete social media marketing strategy right at their fingertips. These unique products help marketers manage their company’s social network accounts, schedule content, deploy ads, analyze the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, monitor their online presence, and more.

Customer service — Customer service teams can also use social media suites the same way they might use social media monitoring tools or social customer service software. Any suite that offers these features enables customer support specialists to monitor customer complaints, criticisms, and queries across social networks. They can respond to positive or negative mentions, thereby improving customer engagement or de-escalating customer frustrations.

Small businesses — As previously mentioned, small businesses have more to gain from social media suites than enterprise companies. In a small business, one person, or sometimes a very small team, will run all of the organization’s marketing efforts. By consolidating multiple social media marketing tools into one centralized platform, social media suites will have a positive impact on a small business’ bottom line.

Kinds of Social Media Suites

Free — Some social media suites offer a free option. While these products may have helpful features, they have downsides in comparison to their paid counterparts. These downsides often include a lack of in-depth analytics, a cap on users of the product, and a cap on the number of social media channels that can be synced to the product.

When choosing a social media suite software, companies should consider the needs and scale of their organization. The features and benefits of a free tool may be the best option for small companies, while larger organizations may need a more powerful, paid tool for their social media needs.

Tiered — Many social media suites have pricing tiers specifically targeted to small-business owners. While most offer packages that include a wide range of features at various price points, some also offer free trials or basic subscriptions that are free and can be used to test the platform. These free offerings can be an effective way of learning the platform and determining whether it can work for your business, but they are often limited to a single user and a limited feature set.

After you successfully test the free subscription or use the trial period, you should upgrade to the package that provides the features you feel will help your business the most, depending on the price and your business’ social media marketing strategy.

Social Media Suites Features

Social media suite products provide at least three of the features listed below. Bundling products together into one social media suite provides a central hub for all of a company’s social media needs.

Social media management — Most companies have more than one social media account. Social media management tools enable marketers to effectively post content across social networks. Instead of visiting each network individually to post content, they can use these management tools to write the message one time and schedule it to be posted on multiple accounts at the same time.

Social media monitoring — Social media monitoring tools allow marketers to engage in social listening. With these features, they can look for trends, track brand competition, identify thought leaders or influencers, monitor their company’s social media reputation, and gain insight into customer sentiments and campaign effectiveness.

Social Analytics — Social media analytics programs help measure marketing success. These tools make it simple and easy for marketers or social media managers to monitor and analyze their company’s social media performance with data visualizations and easy-to-understand reports. Marketers can then share this data with high-level decision makers to justify social media as an effective marketing tool.

Social advertising — Paid social ads are an increasingly popular method for companies to promote their product or service. Social advertising makes it easy to ensure that your ad is reaching the right audience. In a social media suite, advertising features can include scheduling and placing ads, promoting or boosting posts, and analyzing the success of ad campaigns.

Social customer service — It is becoming more and more common for brands to engage with their customers on social media. A social media suite with social customer service features will alert customer service or support teams when the company is mentioned on a social network. The user can then respond to positive or negative mentions, which helps improve brand reputation and customer loyalty.

Potential Issues with Social Media Suites

Changing strategies — One of the biggest advantages of using a social media suite is the ability to coordinate all social media activities through one centralized platform. However, this can also be a challenge for a marketing team that hasn’t developed a thorough marketing plan or needs to pivot on a strategy. If a company purchases a suite without social advertising functionality, then later decides to make social media advertising a key aspect of their marketing strategy, they will need to seek out a new software. To avoid this, companies should consider their long-term social media marketing strategy and purchase the platform that will best suit their current and future needs.

Multiple users — Depending on the social media suite or the product’s subscription package, some software have limits on the number of team members who can access the software. Small teams and organizations do not need to pay as close attention to this feature; however, larger companies may need many users on their social media suite. Purchasing multiple seats for a product will likely increase the cost of the subscription. To prevent paying more than you need to, consider how many users in your company will need to monitor your social media suite product before making a buying decision.

Software and Services Related to Social Media Suites

Social media management software — Social media management tools help marketing and communications professionals with a wide variety of activities related to executing a social media strategy. These products provide functionality to administer social media accounts, schedule posts, suggest content, and boost posts. Social media management software makes it easy for digital marketers to increase brand awareness, manage workflows, and engage online communities.

Social media analytics software — Social media analytics tools provide functionality for gathering and reporting on data related to social media accounts. Marketing, communications, and social media professionals use social analytics tools to measure campaign success, target demographics, and analyze real-time consumer practices. By leveraging social analytics, businesses can gain a greater understanding of their audience’s desires and responsiveness.

Social media monitoring software — Social media monitoring software provides functionality for listening, tracking, and gathering relevant content across wide ranges of social media. Companies use social media monitoring to identify trends, track competitors, and understand customer sentiment. With the information gleaned from social media monitoring, marketers can personalize content to specific users or demographics, identify influencers, and respond to positive or negative feedback.

Social media advertising software — Social media advertising software helps companies advertise on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social media advertising products allow advertisers to buy, manage, and place social ads to reach the wide audiences using these sites.

Social customer service software — Social customer service software allows companies to reach out to customers and users via social media outlets. Social customer service solutions collect and organize mentions on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, among others, and create tickets for support agents to best respond to mentions and provide proper service.

Social media marketing (SMM) services — SMM services assist businesses with the promotion of their product or brand on social media platforms. These services are often used by businesses that want to keep customers engaged online but lack the expertise or personnel to produce effective content. SMM services can provide a wide variety of solutions, including account management, content creation, and consumer engagement.