Social media automation tools and suites

In this post, I’m going to talk about some of the Social media automation tools and suites top platforms that you can use social media posting, and combine your social media accounts to one platform so you don’t have to go to Facebook, then Twitter, then Instagram, and so forth.

So I have four platforms that I’d really like to highlight, and I think, with these four platforms, we can find solutions for pretty much any-size organization.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the first one that I’d like to talk about. Hootsuite is the social automation platform that has really been around since the early days of social media automation, and they’ve really done a good job updating, and it’s still probably the top dog today.

So we can take a look at some of the solutions provided by Hootsuite.

We can schedule posts with Hootsuite. We can monitor all of our interactions that we’ve had with posts. We can get some pretty detailed analytics. You could have multiple team members working on the same social profiles. And towards the middle of this box, you can see that it integrates with a lot of networks. Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, those are probably your top three.

You can schedule as many posts as you want, but you can only have one user access Hootsuite. So this is a great way to get started with social media automation.

Hootsuite is a great place to start once you start to feel a little bit overwhelmed with all your social posting and everything like that.

Agorapulse

The next one that I want to talk about is Agorapulse. This one is very similar to Hootsuite.

With the publishing features, we can schedule our posts just like we can with all of these tools, with Hootsuite, as well, but this third bullet point right here, reviving evergreen content. I think this is a really valuable aspect of Agorapulse, and what this allows you to do is it allows you to specify what content on your blog or website is evergreen, and for those of you who don’t know, evergreen is content that really never becomes out-of-date.

It’s actually kind of the king of content. When we’re thinking about our content production and what we want to put out there, if we can put something out there that, in 10 years, will be just as relevant as it is today, that is really, really great content, and it’s known as evergreen. So what you can do with Agorapulse is you can specify what content on your blog is evergreen, and then you can let Agorapulse know how often you’d like to post that. So you might say, “Well, every month, “I want to tweet about this article I have. “It’s never going to become out-of-date.”

So that’s a really nice feature of Agorapulse that doesn’t come with all of these other social automation tools.

Buffer

The next tool we have is Buffer. Now, Buffer doesn’t have quite the features that Hootsuite and Agorapulse have.

We can schedule posts for the future, and we can review analytics. You can also create teams with Buffer. So you could have multiple members working with the same social profiles, but it just doesn’t offer quite the depth of features of Hootsuite and Agorapulse. But the pricing is very, very attractive.

So if you were just a one-person business, and you’re looking to do a little bit of social media automation, Buffer might be the perfect solution. You could do it for free, which is really great when we talk about that ROI with social media.

SproutSocial

The last tool I want to mention is SproutSocial. Now, this tool has a lot of popularity. If you were to do some research on the top tools, social automation tools, yourself, you might see Hootsuite and SproutSocial kind of come up as the top two.

It has a CRM, customer relationship management, system, built right into it. So the reason I want to mention this is because, for those medium-to-large-size companies that might be hiring an employee specifically for social media, and they’re really doing a lot of heavy lifting in their digital marketing, this might be a good solution.

If you want to integrate a large team, you want to get really in-depth analytics, and actually, you can even manage some of your display advertising here, with SproutSocial. So it’s an option, but it is expensive, so keep that in mind. If we look at kind of our tiers here, of these different platforms, I would say, for the really small organizations just getting into it, just starting out, try Buffer, see what you can get out of that. If you don’t quite get enough out of Buffer, then I would probably move over to Hootsuite or Agorapulse, and then if you’re a larger organization, and you’re not worried about the pricing as much, and you need everything, all in one place, integrations, you might want to try SproutSocial, as well.

There are a lot of options out there. There are a lot of new social automation platforms that have just come out within the last year or two. Time will tell how effective those platforms will be, but I mentioned earlier in the course that I really wanted to focus on the tools that have already been proven successful. These four tools have. Hootsuite, Agorapulse, Buffer, and SproutSocial are the go-to tools when you’re looking to automate your digital marketing with social media.