Social media is an integral part of businesses these days as it is the most powerful marketing channel. Let’s face it, to be successful and stay relevant, you must have a strategy and the right set of tools. This article will cover the most popular features of social media management tools comparing our favorite, eClincher, with Hootsuite and Zoho Social.
Social platforms are a great way to connect with customers and thus, it has become an increasingly vital part of many advertising and marketing campaigns. You can use them to find new people interested in what you do or what you offer, drive traffic to your website, and keep in touch with existing clients. With social media management tools, it’s even easier to make live decisions and real-time monitoring.
Companies spend lots of money creating killer content on social media platforms. However, that is not enough if they don’t consider how to effectively monitor information and make quicker real-time decisions from only one dashboard.
The key to success seems to integratively get the most out of the chosen social media platform and the marketing content as part of your overall online marketing strategy.
If you really want to run your social media and get excellent results, you need to know about the right social media management tools and how to get the most out of them.
What are social media management tools?
The best social media management tools allow users to keep in touch with their audience and spread the word about their products, services, and culture.
Designed for entrepreneurs and freelancers, these social media products seamlessly monitor and manage every network you need from a custom-made dashboard and make sure that your strategy is really bearing the fruit of your labor!
To make it simple: It is software designed to allow members to schedule and share content on social networks and simplify the response to any kind of engagement from customers and potential customers. The design and optimization of these apps are based on UX.
10 Features Social Media Can’t Ignore
Just like a smartphone must have a battery, good internal memory, and internet connection -among other things- social media management tools must have 10 vital features, which are listed below:
- Social media monitoring and listening
People engage with your business across different platforms that allow social media management tools to discover information like queries, mentions, keywords, and other data collected by specialized tools.
- Scheduling
It is necessary to have a strategy that includes a social media calendar to visualize and plan your content ahead of time.
This will give you a quick outlook and will allow you to make any necessary changes to optimize your content. It’s better to leave everything ready to publish automatically for ease of mind.
Besides, studies suggest that there are better moments to publish based on traffic variation that may not adjust to your timetables.
- Engagement
You can’t just post content and hope people will react to it, you need to establish engagement with your customers to get them on board.
It is important to respond to your audience’s questions but you can save time by using approved suggested replies when clients have repeated questions.
- Analytics
Without data to analyze the effectiveness of each social media channel and post on those channels, you can’t measure success.
Your strategy should include goals that you want your content performance against (specifically) to achieve these desired results.
- Security
As there may be many members working across social media channels, you have to be sure they have the correct permissions.
Apart from that, you can get notifications if any suspicious activity on your social media channel is detected.
- Team collaboration
This feature helps to make sure no tasks are being double-handled.
Many collaboration tools have live activity updates where team members can check if someone else is responding to a message.
- Keywords
You should be keeping track of your brand’s keywords to ensure that you are staying fresh and relevant.
It is a great way to find followers that are more likely to be interested in your company.
- Social media ads
Advertisements are a big part of marketing strategies to get your message out there. The most effective way is through targeted advertising.
Targeted advertising allows you to put your ads in front of people who are more likely to buy what you\’re selling because they have similar interests as the product or service.
- Content library
Thanks to this feature it will be easy for you to add approved images or graphic elements to create your brand’s identity, which is an important part of the marketing mix.
It helps companies gain recognition and provides consistency across all channels for customers to recognize businesses.
- Support
With social media evolving rapidly, you need to choose the type of software that will best suit your needs.
Make sure the company is still in a position to offer support should anything go wrong with their software so they can help fix things quickly and easily!
Hootsuite vs Eclincher
eClincher vs. Hootsuite, Hootsuite vs eClincher, what a dilemma! Both are very well-known and highly recommended tools. However, here is a comparison between their most relevant plans for you to decide according to your needs.
Prices and features
eClincher Premier Plan costs $119 a month and offers the following features:
- 3 users
- 20 profiles (you can optionally add 5 profiles for $30)
- All-in-one social inbox
- Visual Content Calendar
- Scheduled Posts
- Multi-Channel Posts
- Auto Posting Queues & RSS
Eclincher provides Auto Post with smart Queues and Auto Post with RSS Feeds for the sake of time-saving. The first feature is used for scheduling and deleting posts once published. The second one is used to connect any RSS or Atom feed to automatically publish new content to any of your profiles.
Hootsuite Team Plan costs $99 a month with the same characteristics except for Auto Posting Queues & RSS, which is not available for that type of Hootsuite plan.
The Team plan offers 20 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, and 3 users. If you need a special plan with further features, there is also an Enterprise plan that offers custom solutions.
Free Trials
Here we find another difference: Once you sign up, you get free access to all eClincher plans for 14 days, without payment information. If you choose to continue using the service you can add your credit card anytime during the trial. If not, your account will expire.
Hootsuite, on the contrary, offers a 30-day trial to test it out but if you decide not to buy it, you will need to cancel your trial or else you will get charged. It doesn’t offer an automatic cancellation as Eclincher.
Integrations
Eclincher offers integration with leading 3rd party applications such as Google Analytics, Canva, Bitly, Zendesk CRM, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn.
On the other hand, Hootsuite offers integration with almost the same 3rd party applications as Eclincher (without Google Analytics and LinkedIn), but it adds Mailchimp, Slack, WordPress, and Zappier.
Bearing in mind the differences, it is pretty much clear that Eclincher wins in terms of price-performance ratio without having to renounce quality as a result.
eClincher vs. Zoho Social
In this case, Eclincher has been on the market for less time than Zoho Social. There are likely to be more differences between them, but both are good options depending on your needs. Zoho Social is an eClincher alternative.
Prices and features
Eclincher offers three plans with monthly prices ranging from $59 to $219 while Zoho Social offers five plans starting from $15 to $400.
Let’s compare “Agency” plans from both tools:
eClincher
eClincher Agency plan costs $219 and it offers six users, 40 social profiles with unlimited brands.
Using Eclincher you have unlimited Auto Post with Smart Queue and 10 Auto Post with RSS feeds per brand.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social offers five users, 8 social profiles and just 10 brands for $275.
Zoho Social offers publishing queue slots that can be created to set up a posting timetable and 20 RSS feeds.
Free trials
As we said before, Eclincher offers a free 14-day trial that automatically expires if you didn’t add payment information.
With Zoho Social initially you get a 14-day Professional trial. Once the trial period expires, your account will be automatically moved to a Free Plan with lifetime validity but many limited features.
In that sense, Zoho Social does offer a Free Plan but it offers basic features as one team member, 1 brand and the possibility to publish in 7 channels.
Integrations
Eclincher is the social management tool that offers more integrations comparing to Zoho Social. With a total of 26 integrations against only 8 from Zoho, Eclincher wins this point.
Zoho Social offers Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Worktato, Google my Business, Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk. The last two are charged additionally to any of Zoho Social Plans.
Eclincher is fully integrated with Dropbox, Google Drive, Feedly, Zendesk, Yelp, just to name some.
At Wizards, in Magic We Trust
EClincher is a marvel of modern technology. It\’s intuitive but powerful enough to manage the growth and reputation of any company online. You have over ten popular features to get things done on social media including suggested content and free media assets, scheduler and visual calendar, and free media libraries that you can use from the mobile app or Chrome extension.
According to Delfina, Head of Social Media at Global Wizards, eClincher has improved her job at least in 3 ways: Enlarging the number of accounts needed, publishing (and scheduling posts), and speeding up the process of delivering to the clients.
“You can plan, create and schedule content in a visual calendar with tag suggestions according to the topics related. When you want your client to see what you\’ve done, there is an \’Approval\’ section where the customer logs in and has the opportunity to edit, modify or leave some comments and approve, or not, your work”Delfina, Head of Social Media at Global Wizards
Also, It has incredible customer service with 24/7 LIVE chat support willing to help you anytime needed. Probably that is why users say it\’s just as good, or even better than some more popular social media management tools.
It is considered by far our favorite and we encourage you to try it out and see how easy it is to manage your social media!
