What Is Social Media Management?

Social media management is the process of creating, scheduling, analyzing, listening, and engaging with content posted on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It involves developing a strategy for your social media presence, creating content that resonates with your target audience, and tracking your progress over time.

If you use a social media management service, a professional social media manager will take everything off your hands. They’ll come up with your strategy, post content, and essentially take care of every aspect of your social media process. As with any specialist service, it can be a pricey option, which is why we’d encourage you to before committing to a service.

On the other hand, social media management tools like Zoho Social will allow you to streamline your strategy in-house by helping you automate posting, engage with users, and analyze trends, as does HubSpot’s all-in-one social media and marketing tool. They can be employed by pretty much anyone on your team.

If you don’t have time to read our deep-dive into these guides, have a look at the table below, where we’ve summarized the essential information about each provider:

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		Core Benefit	Starting Price	Free Plan Does this platform offer a free plan?	Unlimited Posting Does this platform allow you to post as much as you like without imposing monthly limits?	Browser Extension Is there an extension that allows you to use the software through a browser?	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn Does this platform support management on all four social media networks?	Other Platforms What other platforms are supported by this platform?
SPONSORED	BEST OVERALL
Hootsuite	Zoho Social	HubSpot	Sprout Social	Sendible	Loomly	CoSchedule	Constant Contact	Buffer
Best for publishing social media posts	Best value for money	Best for large businesses	Best for providing customer service	Best for affordable listening tools	Best for managing multiple social profiles	Best for collaboration	Best for small business marketing	Best for flexible pricing
$99/month	$10/month	$800/month	$249/user/month	$29/month	$26/month	$19/user/month	$9.99/month	$5/month
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Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, TikTok	Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube	YouTube	Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok	Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube	Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube	Pinterest, Tumblr	None	Pinterest

Social media plays an integral part in the business landscape. According to Hootsuite, 3.2 billion people use social media around the world, with 11 new every second. The software discussed in this article can help you reach this huge audience and make running a social media campaign decidedly simpler.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explain how you can take advantage of tools for managing social media accounts and traverse the media landscape in style.

Getting Started with Social Media Management

Engaging with your audience through social media is more important than ever. Customers interact with brands via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and more, and they expect fast responses and professional outputs.

That’s where social media management comes in.

Social Media Management Services

This is the full-fat solution to supercharging your social media strategy.

While social media management tools can help your company increase the quantity of your content, improving the quality of your content is just as important when it comes to engaging your target audience.

Fortunately, social media management services are equipped with the knowledge and resources to manage your social media presence right. Through targeted posting, sponsored ads, and a wide range of social media tactics that are far beyond common knowledge, these services can bring your social media game to the next level.

Social Media Management Tools

If you’re just dipping your toe in the social media marketing waters, do-it-yourself tools are a great way to get started. These platforms can help you manage your own campaigns with simple, comprehensive interfaces designed for the most novice of social account managers.

Plus, social media management tools are often very affordable, and many offer free versions to test out before you buy. However, if you want to really make a difference on social media, you’re going to need a bigger boat (in the shape of a professional social media management service! See above). 

The Key Elements of Social Media Management

Whether you hire a social media marketing service or take advantage of a wide range of tools, you’ll be able to transform your strategy from drab to fab without spending too much or wasting too much time. Take a look at some of the key elements of social media management below.

Manage multiple accounts

Given the state of social media today, one of the hardest aspects to keep up with is all the different accounts. Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and now TikTok, the sheer number of accounts you have to manage can be enough to overwhelm even the most experienced of marketing managers.

With social media management, all those accounts get narrowed down to a single platform. You’ll be able to post on every single one in an instant, saving you hours of time on a daily basis. Plus, with the ability to post the same content on multiple accounts at once, you can be ensured that your strategy is as consistent as it is on-brand.

Schedule posts in advance

Perhaps one of the unfortunate facts about social media is that the best times to post rarely line up with when you’re actually online. This means that you have to disrupt your day and post content during random times without a lot of cohesion.

Social media management software like Hootsuite or Sprout Social will fix of that. It allows you to schedule posts in advance to go live at whatever time you see fit, regardless of what time it is at the moment. You’ll even be able to schedule multiple posts days, week, and even months in advance, so you can knock out your whole social media strategy for the year in just a few hours if you have the time.

Listen to comments and respond efficiently

With 40-60% of consumers seeking out customer service over social media rather than phone or email, the ability to respond quick and efficiently is key. With standard social media platform functionality, this is a serious chore that likely involved a 24/7 rep that can keep track of all of it for you.

Fortunately, with social media management software, you won’t be forced to be on call at all times. You’ll be able to easily reach out to customers commenting on content, as well as provide chatbot functionality (depending on the software) to respond immediately to give you a bit of time to formulate a response.

It’s worth noting though that listening features like these are not a given in most tools used to manage social media accounts. This valuable feature can really improve your standing with customers, and your insight into your industry, so make sure the provider you opt for offers listening tools.

Analyze social engagement

While social media platforms often offer some kind of monitoring tool on their own, the getting a complete picture of who is engaging with your content can be tough without a bit of help.

Fortunately, with social media management software, you can get all the information you need to see who is engaging with your content, how often, and where they’re coming from. This will allow you to strategize better in the long run, as you’ll know what works and what doesn’t.

Receive comprehensive analytics

Understanding who is commenting and how often is important, but the key to effective marketing is a robust set of analytics, and many social media platforms lag on that front.

But with social media management software, you can get the comprehensive reporting tools to truly inform your strategy from top to bottom. You’ll get access to demographic numbers, geographic stats, and a wide range of other analytics that will provide actionable data to improve your social media presence across the board.

Collaborate on content

The constantly shifting standards of social media make it hard to make an impact, particularly as a business. There’s so much noise combined with all that viral content, decreasing your ability to reach customers in a meaningful way. That’s where a team of people can come in handy, and with social media management software, they can work together.

While platforms don’t allow for much collaboration, social media management software is a cloud-based platform that can be accessed by all your employees at once. This allows them to collaborate on specific posts or full-on campaigns, so you can get the most out of every post.

How Can Social Media Benefit Your Business?

Social media management tools and services are designed to make marketing easier, which ultimately increases profits, especially for small businesses. After all, what’s the point of paying for new software or services if they aren’t going to improve your bottom line? Social media management tools and services come with a bevy of helpful benefits that will reinvigorate your marketing efforts and put your company in front of your target audience.

Social media management can help you:

• Save time – by scheduling posts in advance, rather than burdening yourself with remembering to post at peak hours during the day.
• Increase authority – by posting multiple times a day on a wide range of platforms.
• Understand your audience – by providing in-depth analytics that explain who is following you, where they’re coming from, and what they want from your business.
• Improve customer support – by creating a simple pathway for customers to inquire about your company through social media and making it simple for you to respond.
• Take control of your brand’s reputation – by allowing you to monitor comments and feedback more closely and respond as quickly as possible.
• Foster innovation- by encouraging creative collaboration across new platforms, for each social media campaign.

If you’re fully informed on how to use them, social media management tools have benefits. But, understanding how it works is only the first step in deciding whether or not you should purchase one of these tools or services for your own business. So, what’s the next step? Cost.

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How Much Does Social Media Management Cost?

Social media management pricing can vary a lot depending on your business and its rquirements. This is why it’s so important to know what you need and shop around before committing. Above all, you’ll want an accurate estimate of how much tools and services for managing social media accounts will cost for the particular scale and needs of your business.

Cost of Social Media Management Services

If you’re looking to truly break open the potential of a social media campaign, social media management services are the best way to go.

The price is understandably a bit higher, typically between $4,000 to $7,000 per month, but the results you’ll see from such social media marketing specialists will be more than worth it.

Unlike social media management tools, these services offer everything from marketing strategy to paid advertising to improve your overall strategy on social media. Because of this, social media management services vary greatly in cost depending on a wide range of factors, including:

• The size of your company
• How often you plan on posting
• The type of services you require
• Which platforms you’d like to share content on
• The level of analytics you need
• Whether or not you’ll provide customer service through social media

Cost of Social Media Management Tools

The cost of social media management tools can vary, but you should expect to pay somewhere between $10 and $600 per month. Yes, that range is large, but a lot of factors need to be considered before narrowing it down for your particular business.

Most social media management tools charge by five important factors: accounts, posts, users, features, and platforms.

Accounts

The beauty of social media management tools is your ability to schedule posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn from a single platform. However, depending on how many accounts you’re looking to manage, the price could go up.

Whether you’re popular on a wide range of platforms, or just have six different Twitter accounts that you want to manage, make sure you know exactly how much it costs to add extra accounts to your service, as it could cost you a pretty penny.

Posts

The primary purpose of social media management tools is to schedule posts in advance, so you don’t need to perfectly time out your day to hit those peak hours. However, if you’re trying to take the “quantity over quality” approach, you might need to pay a little extra.

Even if you only have one account, some social media management tools will put a limit on the number of posts you can schedule in advance. The more posts you want to schedule, the higher the price, so make sure you take that into account when picking your tool.

Users

Are you planning on tackling your social media strategy all by yourself, or were you hoping it would be more of a team effort? This is an important question to ask when it comes to which social media management tool and plan you end up with.

Most social media management plans are priced on a “per user per month” basis, so each additional user will cost you. Additionally, some plans specifically cap your users at a certain number, and you’ll to upgrade to add more, so be sure you consider how many users before making your decision.

Features

Social media management comes in many forms. From scheduling posts to analyzing trends, you can do a lot with the right platform. As you can imagine, providers offer a wide range of different features, and that can seriously affect how much you end up paying.

In most cases, the average plan will offer scheduling capabilities, along with some posting help. However, if you’re looking for marketing, monitoring, listening, engagement, and analytical features, you’re typically going to have to shell out a few extra bucks a month.

Platforms

Almost every social media management tool offers functionality with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. However, if you’re looking to branch out with your social media strategy, you might want to investigate which providers offer additional platforms and, more importantly, how much they cost.

TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, and Tumblr, among others, are far from standard in the average social media tool, but you can absolutely find them. Loomly, for one, is a great option, although it could cost you a bit extra to get all the coverage you’re looking for.

Social Media Management Stats

Unlike other aspects of your business, measuring how important social media is to building a growing company is pretty difficult. With abstract metrics and unique approaches to success, having a few statistics to drive the message home certain never hurts.

• Over half of the world’s population uses social media (that’s 4.62 billion people)
• 55% of consumers learn about new brands on social.
• 77% of social media marketers say social media marketing has been somewhat to very effective for their company this year.
• $65.31 billion was spent by marketers on social media advertising in 2022.
• 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business, and 70% are open to seeing ads.
• With 2.92 billion users as of Q4 of 2022, Facebook is still the world’s biggest social media platform.
• TikTok experienced a 100% growth rate between 2020 and 2022, and is the fastest-growing social media app.

If these statistics don’t highlight the value and importance of setting up a social media management strategy for your company, we don’t know what will.

Best Social Media Management Tools and Services

Now you know what social media management involves, its benefits, and the cost factors that will determine what sort of price quote you can expect, here are some examples of the companies that can help you. We’ve put together a selection of the top social media management tools and services available in 2021.

Expert Tip

If you want to increase your business’s presence across a number of different social media platforms simultaneously, make sure you opt for a tool or service that supports multi-channel scheduling and posting in bulk.

Conor Cawley Tech.co's social media management expert

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Do It Yourself: Social Media Management Tools

If you’d prefer to be hands-on with your brand’s social media, then there are some brilliant tools you can choose, to manage how you go about this. Social media for business shouldn’t involve logging into a standard Facebook or Twitter account, just like you would with a personal page. Businesses need to be smarter.

The best social media management tools let you schedule updates, manage customer service comments efficiently and learn about trends in how your customers interact with your brand. 

For more information, check out our comparison table here, or keep scrolling for a basic breakdown of some of the best social media management tools:

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		Core Benefit	Starting Price	Free Plan Does this platform offer a free plan?	Unlimited Posting Does this platform allow you to post as much as you like without imposing monthly limits?	Browser Extension Is there an extension that allows you to use the software through a browser?	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn Does this platform support management on all four social media networks?	Other Platforms What other platforms are supported by this platform?
SPONSORED	BEST OVERALL
Hootsuite	Zoho Social	HubSpot	Sprout Social	Sendible	Loomly	CoSchedule	Constant Contact	Buffer
Best for publishing social media posts	Best value for money	Best for large businesses	Best for providing customer service	Best for affordable listening tools	Best for managing multiple social profiles	Best for collaboration	Best for small business marketing	Best for flexible pricing
$99/month	$10/month	$800/month	$249/user/month	$29/month	$26/month	$19/user/month	$9.99/month	$5/month
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Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube, TikTok	Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube	YouTube	Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok	Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube	Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube	Pinterest, Tumblr	None	Pinterest

Business Professional: Social Media Management Services

The question remains, is it smarter to attempt to tackle the social media feeds for your business yourself, or to trust this vital service to an expert? Managing your social media accounts properly can transform the way you interact with customers. This isn’t something you can easily fit in between all your other business tasks, so think carefully before attempting to do it yourself.

If you’re confident in your ability to run a successful social media campaign, the above tools will be a great start. However, if you’re interested in significantly improving your company’s presence on social media, the professional services listed below will not disappoint. These services are designed to take complete responsibility for your social strategy, coming up with content ideas, posting on your behalf, and generally improving your reach without too much input on your end.

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		Best Fors	Pros	Cons	Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn Does this platform support management on all four social media networks?
Lyfe Marketing	Boostability	Hibu	SociallyIn	Bad Rhino
Best overall social media management service	Expert service for small businesses	All-around Meta (Facebook and Instagram) marketing	Modern, analytics rich service	UGC content and measurable results
All-in-one social media solution Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn Offers SEO marketing, web design, and advertising	Staffed by experts Covers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn Superb analytics tools	Speedy and accurate Easy to use Free consultations	Covers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn Up-to-date on trends like influencer marketing Robust analytics features	Covers Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn Friendly, easy to work with team “No BS” company culture
Not great for larger companies No free version available Higher price than average	Difficult to get a hold of at times Good for small businesses only	For small businesses but not large ones Meta (Facebook and Instagram) only	No add-on services like SEO Some growing pains with learning platform Struggles with website development at times	Primarily focused on Facebook, with secondary attention to others Slow learning curve on strategy development
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Best Social Media Platforms for Business

Social media is made up of dozens of platforms, and knowing which ones can help your business is the first step in truly tapping into your potential. Take a look at how each of the platforms below match up against each other so you know where to focus your energy.

Facebook

With approximately 3 billion users worldwide, it’s safe to say that Facebook is still an all-powerful social media giant. Not having a Facebook account, at least for businesses, is a profoundly bad idea, as many people will simply assume you don’t exist without one.

While many say that Facebook is “for old people,” the reality is that its biggest demographic remains those between the ages of 18 and 34, so don’t forego a Facebook account just to seem like you’re “hip with the kids these days.” Simply put, if you don’t have a business Facebook account, get one.

Twitter

As the proverbial second fiddle to Facebook’s mammoth social media presence, Twitter represents a different albeit valuable option for businesses. It’s not nearly as necessary for you to have a Twitter business account, but it does provide a unique opportunity to build a loyal following.

With its 280-character limit, Twitter is perfect for sharing company news, announcing sales, and engaging with your customers in a meaningful way. You can even use it as a form of customer service, as users will typically reach out — either in threads or direct messages — to get help with your product. Plus, with more than 300 million users worldwide, you can really reach the masses if you need to.

Instagram

Instagram isn’t just for pictures anymore. With 1.3 billion worldwide users, businesses have begun to see the value in this Facebook-owned social media platform. Between posts, stories, and now Reels — Instagram’s answer to TikTok — you can reach users in a wide range of other ways, and it works.

According to statistics, over 200 million Instagram users look at one business page per day, which provides a substantial market for your business ventures. Plus, with unique features like “See More” built right in for businesses, you can really make an impact if you take advantage. Plus, Instagram’s demographics lean decidedly younger, so if you want to jump into that market, here’s your chance.

LinkedIn

Obviously not the go-to option for social media, but LinkedIn does offer some benefits for businesses looking to keep their presence as professional as possible. In addition to being able to share content, you can also recruit and hire talent directly from the app.

Plus, while you might not think of LinkedIn when it comes to social media, the reality is that the platform boasts approximately 750 million users, which means you can reach a hearty number of potential customers, particularly if you’re a more business-minded operation.

Get Started with a Social Media Management Tool Today

Getting on top of your social media marketing strategy is imperative to succeeding in the world of business today. And, as we’ve shown here, social media management is the most effective way to get in the fight.

Picking the right solution, however, can be a bit daunting. But with an earnest understanding of your options, you’ll find it much easier to make the right decision.

If you’d rather someone else handle the nitty-gritty details of your strategy, and keep up the momentum while you focus on other areas of your business, you can go with social media management services.

Or, if you want to tackle it on your own, you can use social media management tools that put the power in your hands to schedule posts, create content, and generally streamline and automate your strategy.

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Written By

Conor Cawley

Conor is the Lead Writer for Tech.co. For the last eight years, he’s covered everything from tech news and product reviews to digital marketing trends and business tech innovations. He’s a feature, reviews, and news contributor for Android Police, and he has hosted tech-focused events for SXSW, Tech in Motion, and General Assembly, to name a few. He also cannot pronounce the word “colloquially” correctly.

You can email Conor at conor@tech.co.

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