How to Choose the Right Social Planning App for Your Business

You Are 2 Questions and 11 Features From Your Ideal App to Plan Social Media Posts

To compete in today’s digital world, your business needs to stay active on social media. More than half the world's population is on social media, More than half the world’s population is on social media, and 63% of potential customers begin their buying journey online. 

If you’re not actively present on social media, you’re going to lose out to competitors. You understand this. The problem is time. You have a business to run. This is why you’re looking for a social planning app ─ to help you keep on track with your social media.

This article will help you make the best choice between the best social planning apps for your business.

Two questions to answer when looking for apps to plan social media posts

When you are searching for the best social planning app for your business, the choice can be overwhelming. Whatever the marketing hype surrounding each app, though, you must focus on answering two questions:

1. Does the tool cover everything you need?

It’s time-consuming and tedious to produce a post for your social media: you need to write the content, find or create images, login, copy and paste everything together, then hit publish. And before all this, you need to decide what themes and topics you will cover. 

You need to do a lot of work in advance, plan it, and then pull your content from your files each time you want to publish. If you’re posting three or four times a day, to three or four platforms, that’s a huge commitment of time to make ─ and a huge amount of energy and effort.

So, take time to think about your marketing planning, what is easy for you to do, and what you want your app to do for you.

2. How much money are you willing to invest?

There are some free social media planning apps, but these are limited in functionality and often won’t scale with your business.

When considering how much you are willing to spend on a social planning app, think about which parts of the process you can do yourself easily and which are not economical. Consider, too, those things you love doing and those things you loathe.

Finally, remember that this investment won’t only help you to keep your social media planning and publishing on track, and therefore help you to achieve your business goals; it will also save you time ─ and your time is money. 

As an example, if you spend, say, three hours a day on social media work, that’s 15 hours each week. 750 hours a year. How much revenue could you generate if you spent those 750 hours pitching to leads?

11 Essential features to look for in a social planning app

To help you decide which features are the most important for a social media planning app for forward-thinking businesses, we’ve compiled this list of what our clients’ most common expectations are:

1. Simple content scheduling ─ easy to use, clear, and concise scheduling for at-a-glance management

2. Automated posting ─ to take the legwork out of post-publication

3. Team collaboration ─ so the whole team knows how social media campaigns are progressing, and to keep each member on top of individual tasks

4. Approval workflows ─ so that workflows are structured and in a logical order

5. Coverage of all your social media ─ maximizing the access you have to the world to its full capacity

6. Campaign organization and prioritization ─ to maximize ROI, you’ll need to organize and prioritize posts based on impact, importance, deadline, platform, etc.

7. Check for useful/necessary integrations ─ the better the integration with your business software and platforms, the more effective the app will be for your business

8. Built-in analytics to inform new strategies ─ to keep you informed of the results your campaigns are delivering, and to enable you to tweak each one

9. Campaign progress tracking ─ you’ll need to keep on top of the progress of each campaign and the elements attached to them

10. Visual media storage ─ if your business publishes videos and other visual media to its social media accounts, the app you use must be able to manage this

11. Tracking of branded keywords and hashtags ─ keywords and hashtags are crucial to your inbound marketing performance, so you’ll want to track and manage them

Five of the best social media planning apps available in the market today

You’ve answered the two key questions, and you have compiled a list of features to look for. Now what? 

Here are five cracking social media apps you should consider:

1. Buffer

A great budget tool, with a free plan available. You can schedule posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. But it doesn’t integrate well, and the free plan is limited to three social media profiles.

2. Hootsuite

You can manage up to 10 social media profiles on Hootsuite, scheduling posts across them. While the app comes with plenty of tools to help you track and analyze your social media performance, some of these tools come at an additional cost.

3. ContentStudio

ContentStudio is targeted at agencies and businesses. If you intend to use influencer marketing, ContentStudio has you covered. It can also help you identify keywords and auto-publish on your social media profiles.

4. Social Pilot

This is a useful tool for smaller teams, and you can get a discount if you pay for a year of use in advance. You get access to unlimited and bulk scheduling, across up to 10 social media profiles, and analytics and customer support ─ but the number of posts you can schedule is limited, and the basic plans don’t include all the features of more advanced (and expensive) plans.

5. BlabberJax

BlabberJax is more than a social media planning tool. It’s a whole end-to-end content marketing system, developed to help businesses create content their customers will love, optimize content and marketing campaigns to engage visitors and users, to deliver convertible leads.

Would you like to see why businesses like yours are turning to BlabberJax? Click here to book a live demo of BlabberJax in action.

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