Who are social media managers?

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 15 years, you’ll have noticed a little thing called social media. According to Statista, there are currently 3.6 billion people currently using social media globally. This is estimated to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025. 

As social media began to take off, it became apparent that it had an almost unrivalled reach, allowing organizations to reach and engage with their target audiences. 

Marketing and communications teams began to experiment with promoting their content across the main social channels, it was evident that social media marketing was becoming a hugely important channel, one that couldn’t be left as a simple side task of a marketing department. 

The skills needed to create content, engage with audiences and grow followers became a skill set in itself. The consequences of getting social media wrong are far too serious to leave it to chance. 

And so the social media manager was born! 

What do social media managers do?

A social media manager is tasked with coordinating an organization’s presence across all social media channels. Their remit is broad, often having to combine several different skill sets to successfully manage a social media presence. 

These include: 

Strategy

Social media is an important part of a wider marketing and communications plan. Social media managers take the overall strategy and direction of an organization and plan how to accomplish this via social media activity. Social media managers underpin your brand identity on your social channels and are a vital part of your conversion strategy to grow a business. 

Planning

A healthy social media presence is built around a well-planned social media calendar. Knowing what to post and when to post it is vital to getting the best levels of engagement. It also frees up day to day resources to deal with ad-hoc posting. 

Content creation

Creating content for social media is part art, part science. Not only do social media managers need to be comfortable with images, infographics, animations, and videos, they also need to be able to master the nuances of each platform. They’ll dream of hashtags when they sleep. 

Community building 

Social media is a two-way street. You need to listen and engage with your followers regularly. Failing to do so will destroy trust in your brand and leave you with poor results. 

As you can see, the role of social media manager is wide-ranging and very important. Depending on the sector and size of a company, social media managers can be part of an in-house team or an agency. It is also a popular route for those looking to freelance or work remotely. 

Analysis

There’s a saying in digital marketing, ‘if you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen’. Social media managers also have to be comfortable with reporting and analysis. They take the reach and engagement figures and use them to refine and redevelop their strategies to get better results. 

Productivity tools for social media managers

Social media managers are always looking for tools that make their jobs easier. There are so many to choose from, it might seem overwhelming. From scheduling software to content creation and analytics, it’s difficult to find one platform that meets all of your needs. 

We’ve taken a look at what’s currently out there and here are our top 14 productivity tools for social media managers. 

SproutSocial 

This social media management platform is a firm favourite amongst social media managers worldwide. SproutSocial provides a range of features including scheduling, viral posting, and a single, unified social inbox. The user interface is one of the most intuitive out there and lets you seamlessly switch between social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

Depending on your subscription level, there is also a great range of reporting tools available to track the progress of your campaigns. 

Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a great, no-frills platform that is extremely popular with bloggers and those social media managers looking for a solid scheduling system. No frills isn’t a bad thing in this case. The platform is very user friendly and boats many scheduling and collaboration features that makes team working a breeze. 

It has curated content that makes it simple to find content to keep your timelines full, not just that, you can connect your blog, youtube channel, rss etc to schedule content directly from the app.

Outfunnel

Freelance social media managers who run their marketing campaigns will find Outfunnel a lifesaver. Not only does it make email marketing and drip campaigns much easier, but it also integrates with Mailchimp the most popular CRMs such as Hubspot, Pipedrive, and Copper. 

Later

Created with Instagram users in mind, Later is a favourite for those concentrating on this particular channel. The interface is clean and easy to use and incorporates as drag and drop editor, preview, and a visual content calendar. 

One key productivity feature is being able to sync your photos and videos from anywhere. You can then tag them to keep them organized and easy to find later. 

It also has a strong search function to help you find and repost user-generated content, which you can save directly to your content library. 

Agora Pulse

AgoraPulse is a social media management tool with some very nifty features. Not only does it let you schedule, queue, and upload posts in bulk, you can also set your posts to recur at set intervals, great for time-sensitive or evergreen content. 

It’s also popular with teams who like it’s strong collaboration features. One of the best functions of AgoraPulse is its own built-in social media CRM system which segments your audience into different groups. 

NoteLedge

When it comes to keeping all of your notes and inspiration organized, most people are terrible and end up with posts saved on various social media platforms, images, and screenshots on their phone and hastily written notes. NoteLedge is a fantastic multimedia note-taking app that keeps all of your information organized. 

It’s extremely versatile and works from your smartphone. It works with notes, images, videos, webpages, regularly. It’s as close to automating your social media scheduling as you’re likely to find. 

Bulk.ly

Bulkly is a must for anyone who uses Buffer. With Bulkly, you connect it to Buffer and Bulkly will automatically drip content into your Buffer account for you. It’s great for those who have evergreen social media content to share as well as those who are looking to save time by automating content into their social media accounts.

You can import previous Buffer content, upload a CSV file of content or even use RSS feeds to create hundreds of posts in just seconds.

It’s packed with some great features like the ability to organize updates in groups, automatically attach images natively to your updates, avoid sending the same post too often, schedule groups to start and/or end on certain dates and more.

Best of all you can set your Bulkly content to automatically recycle – meaning that you never have to worry about having adding content to your social media accounts. Simply set and forget.

While Bulkly was initially built for Buffer users (which allows Instagram scheduling), their roadmap includes integration with Hootsuite as well as some of the other major social media platforms.

Sendible

One of the heavier featured platforms, Sendible is popular with agencies and freelance social media managers because of the breadth of cool, time-saving functionalities it offers. 

It integrates with nearly 30 other popular productivity tools, blogs, and Slack. There’s also a content suggestions feature, RSS feed, and easily navigable content library. Curate and share content automatically. Its collaboration features are also strong and it integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, and Canva. It is one of the richest featured platforms on the market. 

Audiense

There aren’t many social media apps directed solely on Twitter. Of those that do, they tend not to be as feature-rich as Audiense. This platform is one of the best for Twitter-based marketing at scale. It allows you to create chatbots and options to engage with your audience as well as providing top-class management, listening, and analysis features. 

Use Audiense to find, communicate, and analyze your target audience on Twitter. 

EveryPost

A simple, yet robust publishing solution for multiple platforms. Customize, schedule, and curate content all from within the EveryPost dashboard. It also has an easy to use analytics function to track and measure the success of your campaigns. 

Kicksta

Organic Instagram growth is difficult to achieve, which is why, for a time, bots were popular. However, using bots and non-organic growth methods is not the way to grow your Instagram, as all good social media managers know. Kicksta is an organic growth platform that uses AI to find similar accounts and recommend interactions with their followers. 

Nuvi

Social interactions with your customers are more important than ever. Their expectations are high. Nuvi is a customer experience management tool that encompasses powerful customer analytics and management features. 

Feedly

Best known as an RSS feed aggregator, Feedly can cut through information overload on the internet. Social media managers need to constantly follow relevant blogs, writers, to get inspiration for their content. Feedly lets you collect this all in one place. You can sync your feed across multiple devices.

SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a simple & cost-effective social media management tool for small businesses and agencies that helps them to strengthen their brand presence across all major social media platforms. It assists you in executing a well planned social media posting schedule with advanced features.

With SocialPilot, you can publish content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, Google My Business, Vk, and Tumblr. And not only this, but it also provides valuable analytics for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. It is popular among small businesses because of its cost-effectiveness, intuitive UI, and exceptional customer support (24×5)

So there you have it. Being a social media manager means wearing many hats and you’re going to need the right tools to do the job properly. 

What are your favourite productivity tools? 

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With Crowdfire, you can find curated content, schedule your posts, engage with your audience, deep-dive into analytics and create custom reports. Now introducing Social listening. Try it for free.