In a world where one’s social media presence is growing ever more important, finding the best social media management tool has never been more urgent than it is right now. The best social media management tools, however, are not just the ones that allow you to schedule and automate your content - that’s simply a good starting point.
An intuitive interface, a hands-on content calendar, and the ability to collaborate on your social media content are some of the most important features that will truly set you and your content team up for success.
In this blog post, we’ll cover some of the most important features that a reliable social media management tool should contain, namely:
- A Content Calendar
- Social Media Scheduling and Publishing
- Social Media Analytics and Reporting
- Easy Collaboration Features
- Employee Advocacy
- Multiple Workspaces
- Integrations
Why are social media management tools important?
Effective management of one’s online presence on a variety of social channels lies at the heart of any great social media management tool. With features that enable businesses to create, publish, and monitor content across multiple social channels, social media management tools are here to help you and your content marketing team soar.
By allowing you to publish your content to multiple channels at once, these tools save your content team valuable time and energy, leaving them to focus on creating great content that delights and engages your audience.
Social media management tools integrate a businesses’ social media channels into one platform, and thus squash endless password sharing between team members when collaborating on content.
They also provide valuable insights and metrics about customer behavior, and help businesses stay organized by enabling them to schedule posts, automate them and assign tasks to team members whilst collaborating.
Finally, the best social media management tools make repurposing great old content easy. This strategy maximizes the reach of your best content and, subsequently, the rewards for your efforts too.
Essential features of the best social media management tools in 2024
📆 Content Calendar
A customizable content calendar allows you and your team to visualize your carefully-constructed social media strategy easily.
The best social media management tools have content calendars that are intuitive, and can be shared with people outside your team in order to make communication between professionals and their clients simple and effective.
They also have calendars wherein multiple “views” and filters are possible - for example, a weekly overview or a monthly overview - making narrowing or broadening your focus on specific targets simple.
StoryChief’s content calendar, for example, is clean and intuitive, shareable and adaptable in terms of its “views”. It also allows your team members to create and schedule social posts right there and then - all they have to do is click their desired date, and get started!
📌 Social Media Scheduling and Publishing
Saving time is always of the essence, and the best social media management tools are here to support you with exactly that.
By enabling you and your content team to plan, collaborate on and schedule social posts to your desired channels automatically, the manual work that was once required is now ancient history.
StoryChief enables you to schedule a social post to publish to multiple social platforms, each with a custom time and date so that they are released at the most optimum time for each channel.
It also allows you to filter which audience you’d like to have viewing your content, allowing you to target different ICPs or audience members with different posts.
📊 Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics are important because they provide businesses with valuable insights into their customer’s behaviors, preferences, and opinions. By analyzing data from social media platforms, businesses can gain a better understanding of their customers’ wants and needs.
Some of the best social media management tools allow you to add UTM tags to your social posts in order to obtain deeper analytics and information about how your content is performing.
Naturally, a strong social media management tool will help them determine which strategies and campaigns are working and which ones need to be adjusted or replaced in order to maximize ROI.
🤝 Collaboration
If your social media management tool allows you to invite team members to collaborate on content together in one centralized workspace, you’re heading in a great direction!
Not only will a feature that allows seamless collaboration save you and your team enormous amounts of time that would’ve been wasted waiting for approval, and editing content back and fourth using different tools, but it will also help to prevent silly mistakes. Content is far less likely to get lost during a “copy and paste” mishap, and the most recent edition of your social post will always be displayed in your social media management tool. Here’s to staying up to date!
🙋🏻♀️ Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is a great feature for social media management tools, because it allows companies to leverage their employees’ social media networks to reach a larger audience. This helps when it comes to increasing brand awareness, reaching new audiences, and even driving more sales.
Employee advocacy can be used to increase employee engagement by providing employees with an opportunity to show off their knowledge and expertise in their field. By having employees actively sharing content related to their company, it can assist in building trust with potential customers - allowing them to hear the real voices behind the brand.
👨🏼💻 Multiple Workspaces
Having multiple workspaces in one platform is a surefire way to keep your content strategy for each client clear and organized, and in turn, keep your clients happy.
This way, the threat of accidentally mixing up content is removed. You can invite your clients to their dedicated workspace where they can monitor content performance, approve content and view the content calendar at all times.
⚙️ Integrations
The best social media management tools should be able to integrate with other software such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems or email marketing platforms.
This will help you get the most out of your existing tools whilst also making it easier to manage all your data in one place.
They should also integrate with DAM or Cloud Storage systems so that media such as high quality images can be included in your social posts easily.
Integrations help businesses automate certain tasks such as scheduling posts and responding to comments, freeing up time, and also allow companies to manage information from multiple tools in a centralized location.
Key social media management features of StoryChief
With its intuitive interface, shareable content calendar and ton of integrations, StoryChief is one of the best social media management tools currently available.
StoryChief allows you and your team to add multiple users to an account, assign them different roles, and lets you collaborate easily with people both in and outside of your team. The content calendar allows you to plan and create posts directly, and provides you and your team with a clean overview of your upcoming content strategy. StoryChief also allows you to create multiple workspaces, so your clients can have all their content separated from one another and each client gets their own content calendar.
Features such as the ability to create multiple workspaces, the reporting and analytics dashboards as well as the ability to schedule posts to be sent out at any time are certainly “wow” factors that make this platform great, however hidden gems such as StoryChief’s easy integration with DAM and Cloud Storage, and the ability for you to add UTM tags to any of your social posts will have you and your team publishing content without the pain of manual work creeping in.
StoryChief also makes employee advocacy simple with its Ambassadors feature, and allows you to connect both personal and business profiles to the platform should any of your team members ever wish to spread some brand awareness on one of their own social media accounts.