Benefits of Using Social Media Management Tools to Increase Community Engagement

Erin Hill
5 min readJun 18, 2021

Depending on the size of the company you work for, you may be tasked with running multiple social media platforms. You may even be in charge of multiple accounts across each platform. Regardless of how skilled you are at multitasking and time management, it is impossible to remember all that needs to be done surrounding social media management. Luckily, there are tools in place to assist those in the social media world and make their lives easier.

What are social media management tools?

In simple terms, they are tools in place that make it easier for someone to manage posting, marketing and management.

Social Media departments spend loads of time, money, and effort researching and creating the best content to help drive their goals. The content is moot unless you know how to read and analyze what is occurring on the backend — follower counts only say so much. Management tools allow you to not only organize and schedule out content posts, but they also allow for a deeper dive into trends and engagement patterns.

Today, more and more marketers use social media sites to improve their brand’s visibility. However, to remain visible, they need to utilise the most powerful social media management tools because these tools simplify the task. — Cartoozo

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools; they’re best in class for tracking data. A few of their high points:

  • Manage posting schedules
  • Analytics for performance
  • Multiple integrations

With Hootsuite, you have the ability to filter through social media accounts in order to find insights, demographic information, and even brand mentions. They have an extensive scheduling system that allows users to actively keep track of campaign timing and targeting. Your posts will always be where you need them!

Their analytics features are great for keeping track of performance and measuring them against KPI’s. You can create custom reports that allow you to stay focused on the necessary data and analysis needed to target your goals.

Lastly, Hootsuite has the ability to integrate with other systems such as, Asana, Slack, and Mailchimp, making using the tool even more seamless.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another tool that allows social media managers to organize and analyze their campaigns. Although very similar to Hootsuite, they have their own high points:

  • A user-friendly, feature-packed interface
  • Wide range of insightful reporting options
  • Effective collaboration and automation tools

The tool is pricier than competitors, making it more suitable for medium to large companies with robust Social Media departments. They have a detailed content calendar that is perfect for advanced scheduling and monitoring. It comes as a surprise that this feature has a less cluttered and more user friendly UI than Hootsuite. Overall, their calendar and scheduling features are where they outshine other social media management tools.

Sprout Social has also found success with social listening. Not only can you monitor your own analytics, but you can also pull reports on everything your audience is talking about. This enables you to see what is going on beyond your page and tailor new messaging around those trends.

Using Tools to Enhance Community Engagement

Social media community engagement is the association between a group of people who enthusiastically share interest in a topic, and the way they interact via social media. With social media, consumers are able to view content, comment, ask questions, and get answers from the companies and content they most enjoy. Brands can use this concept to leverage their content and build a loyal following. Social media management tools use data from your accounts to create reports than can help enhance your community engagement strategies.

Knowing your audience is the number one step to creating an effect community online. Using tools, you can pull demographic and geographic date to narrow down your target audience and tailor your content to their wants and needs. From there, you can post effect content and start engaging online.

After you think you know the type of content your audience wants to see, use tools to dive deeper into the engagement of each post. What creates the most likes, comments, and shares? Is your content copy effective in gaining the attention of your audience? You might think that ironic, “funny” memes are the way to go, when in reality your audience interacts most with video content.

Social Listening

Social listening is a way to hear what your audience has to say, and reacting based on their feedback. It’s the process of waiting for an issue to arise, responding to it, and then moving on. Social listening involves keeping an eye for trending hashtags, keywords, and competitor accounts, and often involves an individual reading through dashboards any learning. Although tedious, social listening is an effective way to find new trends that your audience is interested in, while also putting out an fires that have started surrounding your brand.

There are tools in place to assist with social listening. A common tool for Twitter is Tweetdeck. The platform allows you to monitor multiple handles and hashtags associated with your company. You can interact with users directly and even post tweets through the platform. There are more well-rounded tools out there that combine platforms and even have their own analytics tools.

Community engagement and social listening can be time consuming and tedious tasks, but they are necessary for brands to have success on social media platforms. By utilizing tools, brands can efficiently discover the content that works for them and their audience.

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