Are you making the most out of your social media strategy? It goes beyond just having the latest and greatest tips at your disposal, or even posting every single day. Sure, both can help you, but you have to be able to measure your results to adjust your tactics and grow.
You also need a way to post efficiently and quickly, or you will end up spending hours on your social marketing. Social dashboards are no longer a nifty luxury, but an absolutely essential tool.
Even small blogs or websites should have some kind of dashboard to optimize their social postings, and scale their efforts based on the valuable metrics they provide.
Knowing the popularity of these tools, they have been sprouting out of the ground like weeds. How do they measure up?
Which one will be best for you? Here are eight of the biggest names compared.
Hootsuite
The Pro version of the tool has more advanced scheduling, search and monitoring tools. You can add more apps to customize it to your needs. You add networks, then create streams for each one with different segments like Retweets, Twitter Lists, Direct Messages (DM's), Scheduled Posts, and more.
You can also create streams with constantly updating hashtag or search monitoring, or general keywords. Three can be added per stream. A Pro account comes with three free analytics reports that regularly update. These are for Facebook, Twitter, and Ow.ly. But you can add additional reports using credits. To add more credits you can pay a bit more.
The benefits of the credit system is that analytics is as in depth as you want it to be. You don't have a lot of frills you don't need, and it keeps costs down. Paid plans start at $9.99 per month.
The downside to Hootsuite is that they no longer support Pinterest, though there is an app for integrating with Tailwind (another tool on this list)
If you need a basic understanding what social media tasks you are going to be dealing with, check out this detailed guide that takes you right through essential basics.
TailWind
As mentioned before, Pinterest is not a supported platform on most social dashboards, though it used to be. This is an annoying (but workable) solution. Tailwind provides a number of helpful tools for planning, scheduling and monitoring pins. In this video Ms. Ileane shares 5 Ways to Use Tailwindapp to Scheduled Your Pins.
Tailwind also offers Instagram scheduling and their Hashtag finder is very unique.
Cyfe
When you hear ‘all-in-one', this is what you expect to find but Cyfe is a unique entity that actually delivers on the promise. It isn't just about social marketing, but also sales, support and infrastructure.
You can use both pre-built widgets and customized data reports to monitor everything in your company from the same platform. It creates different dashboards for each need, so users can switch between them without getting overwhelmed.
They have a free version, with a paid membership $19 per month ($14 per month paid annually). It is perfect if you are needing to export a lot of data for later use.
Oktopost
Oktopost is the only truly B2B dashboard on this list. It's all built around the ability to manage the team effectively. It even has an option to manage interns or newer employees giving you the ability to approve their update queue.
It has one of the most powerful conversion tracking functionalities I am aware of: You are able to see which exactly social media update let the customer convert and even previous messages that user saw and clicked. It's incredibly useful for understanding what led the customer to the final conversion.
MavSocial
MavSocial seems to be the perfect solution for a visual marketer.
It has a strong support for visual updates (You can upload an image to with each of your campaigns) and it supports YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr.
It would be a perfect tool for me only if it supported Pinterest. I love visual marketing and MavSocial is all about it but Pinterest is a huge part of visual marketing for me!
There's no Google Plus support either (which I still love using)!
Otherwise, the functionality is just awesome… And free!
SproutSocial
SproutSocial is very similar to other social dashboards in that it offers most of the same features. You can discover, search, plan, post and monitor from a single account. It allows you to add plenty of different networks.
But it has two focuses that make it a bit different: relationship building, and adaptability for different devices. You will be getting more in depth with SproutSocial than with most others.
For teams, their software is pretty customizable. So if flexibility is more important to you in how your team interacts and works together, this might be a better option than the more rigid Hootsuite. Though you are going to pay a higher price, with paid plans starting at $59 per month for the first tier.
Sendible
Is measuring ROI alongside your social strategy important to you? If so, this tool is great. Sendible is a social media management tool that has a surprising number of compatible sites (Pinterest and Flickr included). You can even compose blog posts from right there on your dashboard.
It is a bit more expensive than most, but if you are willing to pay the $59 and you have a blog, this one might be a good option. Their lowest plan allows up to 30 services to be added. It is compatible with group work.
Viraltag
Find the best way to publish posts on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and more. Get the best hashtags for the content, and improve your overall engagement with users. Pinterest is an interesting platform, as it doesn't often engage on a deeper level than pinning.
This could potentially up your chances of finding that deeper involvement.
But it doesn't stop there; you can also improve your marketing to help drive lead generation, or for direct engagement with either your customer base or influencers.
Their free version is limited. But their basic plan is only $29 per month and it supports Tumblr! Watch Ms. Ileane demonstrate why you should Schedule Your Pins With ViralTagÂ
Schedule Instagram Posts with ViralTag too!
Buffer
Buffer is unique. It doesn't just give you scheduling, but an easier way to constantly update. Where tools like Hootsuite are a well rounded dashboard, this is a simple tool.
You fill up your queue, set the times it should release content, then let it go. It has limited applications, but if your goal is to remain active and build a follow base as a consequence, it has what you need.
Try this Buffer Tip for Finding Top Tweets
Also, I prefer those shorteners that use 301 redirect (moved permanently) to my URL. That means, if someone use that shortened link in the article, my URL still gets all the credit. This tool is a quick way to check that out:
Which ones do you choose?
| Cheapest monthly price | Supports | Best for… | |
| Hootsuite Pro+Tailwind | $9.99 | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus | Monitoring and contributing/scheduling to multiple Facebook business pages and Google Plus pages. |
| +$9.99 | [Integrates with Hootsuite to add Pinterest to it] | ||
| Cyfe | $19 | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, Pinterest, Slideshare, Flickr, Vimeo, Youtube | Monitoring basic social media stats of your team members, archiving social media search results, managing your brand |
| Oktopost | $55 | Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google | Best for B2B business (agencies providing social media services) |
| MavSocial | Free | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and Tumblr | Great for lots of purposes. It's a very robust and user-friendly solution, especially if you are into visual marketing. |
| Buffer | $10 | Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google Plus, Pinterest | Quickly creating social media editorial calendars (especially if you are getting ready to your travel season!) |
| SproutSocial | $59 | Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. | Managing a team working on a social media campaign together |
| Sendible | $59 | Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook | I haven't tested this one enough |
| ViralTag | $29 | Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest | I haven't tested this one enough |
Any dashboard you think belong on the list? Have experience with any you want to share? Let us know in the comments!
Recommended Reading:
- The Tao of Twitter, Revised and Expanded New Edition: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time
- Marketing Automation for Social Media – Bad or Good Idea
- Social Media Marketing – when you have NO CLUE!: Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook (Beginner Internet Marketing Series) (Volume 4)
Hello Ann. I have been using Hootsuite from quite sometime and I find it to be one of the best platforms to manage and automate social media. I can also add my team members for delegating work.
I so much agree, Joseph! I love Hootsuite too but it doesn’t do all I need! Some of my networks are not supported, plus it’s not enough for real-time sharing.
Ann/Ileane, thanks so much for including MavSocial, most appreciated! We definitely plan to add Pinterest and we also have lots of other exciting functionality that we will be adding soon.
I am looking forward to those! LOVED my experience and I am going to test the platform more and more!
Ann, thanks so much for sharing these tools. I didn’t know there were so many options. I’m about to check them out.
When I started writing it, I didn’t realize there would be so many! Now I am finding even more! Looks like a competitive market to me!
Hi Ann,
Thank you for putting this together for us. Having it all in one place makes it easier to compare. I’ve never heard of Cyfe before but I like the features for the price.
I’m going to study this more. Thanks for sharing!
Cori
Good luck with Cyfe, Cori! Please do let us know what you think!
Thanks for including Oktopost in the post. We have an awesome release coming out soon, with analytics that will blow your mind!
I’ll look forward to that release, Daniel! Please keep us posted!
Most of them are paid tools any free tools is avaliable for social media except MavSocial, because most of tools are paid version, any other free tools avaliable.
Mavsocial is actually a great tool and it’s free!
Hi Ann,
Thank you for the article. I am about to start using Ahalogy to schedule my pins. I am a huge advocate of HootSuite. I am looking forward to checking out your other suggestions. Thank you again.
Janice
Ahalogy is newer one to me! I’ll give it a try! thanks for the comment, Janice!
I found Mavsocial is better for my social task however all of these are good. Thank you for your valuable post.
Hi Ann,
First of all thanks for sharing great information about social media related tools and price comparison, these days I am use hootsuite pro a/c and these make my ad a social media admin life so easy.. and which alternative you covered here all are great. good work.
Regards
Mohd Arif
Thanks for sharing a great post. But I like MavSocial dashboard most. But Cyfe dashboard is also so good. I hope you will continuously share this kinds of articles.
Hi Ann,
Indeed a great post with lucid information. Thanks for sharing spectacular tools of social media. Right now i am using Buffer but now i have decided to use Hootsuite 🙂
Hello Ann!
Brilliant presentation of information of different social media dashboards!
Though Sendible is a bit expensive, I would like to go for it. I would first love to focus on basic and simple social media platforms with Sendible rather than go for too many at a time. I have a blog and ROI is what I like about it the most.
Great list of tools for social media shares! Time saved is very valuable when sharing to multiple networks at once! Thanks alot!
A few of these I have never even heard of! Thanks for the enlightenment. For me there isn’t just one dashboard that does everything I want (at least I haven’t found the right one yet).
Right now I use Do Share for G+ because you can post in communities and schedule it. I also use Buffer. I have used Hootsuite a few times, but it just seems clunky and cumbersome to me. I feel like I need to take a tutorial refresher everytime I use it.
Now, I’ll have to check out Ahalogy and MavSocial.
Thanks Ann for writing yet another awesome post!
Thanks for Doshare reminder, Corrisa! Good luck with MavSocial and Ahalogy!
These are all useful dashboards Ann,
I’m not really familiar with lots of them expect for Hootsuit and Buffer. Having a means through which you can manage all your social media campaigns is one place is really a huge time saver.
You can’t afford to be login in and out of one different platform to the other i mean, it will just be burning your time unless you have nothing else to do with your time.
I’m going to check out the list and see which i can start using immediately.
Thanks for sharing.
I use Mavsocial (its free) and I really like it.
Can’t wait for Pinterest and G+ on it.
Buffer has been huge for my business! But I must admit I have not heard of some of the others, thanks for sharing the knowledge.
Hi, I have been using Hootsuite and I think that it is one of the best tools to automate and handle accounts on social media. However, I’ll try MavSocial and see if I can get profit of it.
So, I used to use hootsuite.
But after a while I started to dislike it.
I could not really find another tool but thanks to your post I’ll look into some of the options you gave!
When I find one I like I’ll let you know!
Thank you!
Hey Theo, what exactly did you dislike about Hootsuite?
I am a Hootsuite user for years now and I am satisfied by their service.
I have used several of these platforms to manage social media for our clients and have found that Hootsuite in compared to the others provides the best tools and resources. From The Hootsuite University to other bells and whistles. Great blog- thank you!
Thanks for Sharing!
We already use some of these platforms to manage content for our clients. A few of these I have yet to try thank you for the post!
I’ve tried all platforms but my preference is hootsuite. Anyways – great article!