Newest Tools Give You a Shot at a Slam-Dunk

by Joe Dysart

One of the great advantages in marketing on social networks is the collection of social-media management services currently available to help you.
For the careful buyer, these services offer businesses a suite of effective tools to handle and assess their social-media marketing campaigns across a wide array of networks.
Says Jamie Gilpin, chief marketing officer of Sprout Social: “By giving every department access to the latest social intelligence, marketers can lead their business strategies while
ensuring their organization stays ahead of the competition.”
Generally, best-of-breed social-media management services enable you to auto-post to all the social-network services you promote on, check on what your competition is up to and give you in-depth analysis on your promotional goals.
These services also include top-notch analytics that allow you to trace all the data associated with your posts, get a precise look at the size and demographics of every social-media hangout you’re on, and see metrics on how your audience is engaging with your posts.
Plus, these analytics allow you to aggregate and compare your relative performance on every social network where you have a presence—further enabling you to get a much better idea of where you’re hitting and where you’re missing.

While marketers have been keen on promoting heavily on social media for some time now, new polls indicate that the competition for attention on digital will be getting even more ferocious in coming years.
For example Sprout Social, a social-media management service, recently reported that a May 2023 Harris poll found that 80% of business leaders will
be increasing their marketing
budgets for social media during the next three years. (See “The 2023 State of Social Media:
AI & Data Take Center Stage,” at Sproutsocial.com.)
And 96% agreed that their social-media presence is integral in their efforts to capture customer sentiment and feedback.
Meanwhile, a 2023 Sprout Social study found that 53% of consumers say they’re using social media even more than they did during the COVID epidemic, when a great percentage of the population was shuttered-in-place.
A good way to get a bead on state-of-the-art social-media management services is to take a close look at the top five providers in the genre identified by G2.com, a highly respected software rating service.
Essentially, G2.com has a reputation for soliciting and posting authentic reviews for actual customers and then carefully analyzing those reviews to deliver its take on the top software services in any specific genre.
For 2023, G2.com found that in addition to providing a wide array of posting and analytical services, some of the most popular providers are also attempting to distinguish themselves in the market by offering unique services.
Sprout Social, for example, offers a complete module for managing contacts and social-media campaigns with professional social-media influencers, as well as everyday consumers who post reviews, comments, evaluations and demos online regarding products and services.
And Reputation weighs in with a heavy emphasis on requesting, triggering, collecting and responding to reviews, in addition to its standard social-media management and analysis tools.
Meanwhile, SEMRush, which started out as a tool devoted to optimizing digital content for high returns on the search engine optimization (SEO), unsurprisingly has retained that primary focus as it has expanded its service to include more standard social-media management and analysis.
That said, here’s a look at the top five social-media management services as judged by actual business users on G2.com—services you can use as a benchmark to compare and contrast other services currently vying for your business:

• Zoho Social, 4.6/5 Stars (Zoho.com/social): Like very best-of-breed solutions, Zoho Social enables you to schedule posts, monitor social-media mentions of your company and track social-media conversations that are relevant to you.
Zoho Social also enables you to create and regularly generate custom reports analyzing what you’re looking to learn about your presence on social media. And you’re also able to create custom dashboards that give you a quick glimpse at any given time on the key performance and analytical metrics you’re tracking.
• Reputation, 4.5/5 Stars (Reputation.com): Reputation offers a heavy emphasis on reviews and is designed to help automate the process of triggering, collecting, analyzing and responding to customer reviews on the web and social media.
Other analytics enable you to track customer sentiment directed at your brand on the web and social media, check up on what your competitors are doing, and optimize your product and service web landing pages for SEO.
Reputation is also sold on the idea of companies creating a library of authentic customer reviews—even if that means posting reviews on your website that are less than flattering.
Sara Rossio, chief product officer of G2, agrees with that approach. “To be most valuable though, reviews must be authentic,” she says. “We’ve seen that brands are actually viewed as more trustworthy when they have some negative reviews, as long as they engage with reviewers and respond to them.”
• SOCi, 4.5/5 Stars (Meetsoci.com): SOCi is designed with a heavy emphasis on monitoring and protecting a company’s reputation online. Its tools enable you to monitor and respond to conversations and comments, monitor the performance of your promotional content across all networks and coordinate your responses to customer reviews.
SOCi also offers customer survey tools, customized reports, and is designed to be easy to use on a smartphone or similar mobile device.

• SEMRush, 4.5/5 Stars (Semrush.com): SEMRush has established a reputation as one of the ultimate go-to tools for optimizing your promotional content posted on social media on the web for SEO.
Master SEMRush and there’s a very good chance that your promotional content is going to show up much higher on Google, Bing and other search engines, as well as social-media platforms that offer their own powerful search box, such as YouTube.
Lately, SEMRush has expanded into offering more standard social-media management tools, such as social-media posting and analytics, as well as tools that help you manage and analyze the advertising you do on social media.
• Sprout Social, 4.4/5 Stars (Sproutsocial.com): A long-time player in social-media management and analysis, Sprout Social is a sophisticated service that offers all the standard tools for planning, creating, managing and analyzing your social-media posts across all networks.
Sprout also distinguishes itself from many competitors by offering an Influencer Campaign Management Module. Marketers looking to connect and work with social-media influencers will want to take a look at this module, which enables them to reach out to social-media influencers, negotiate terms, create and manage contracts, review and approve content and pay creators in any currency.
The module also enables a marketers to glean a holistic view of the overall focus, direction and success of their work with social-media influencers.