Creating a social media platform presence and beyond

The various social networks have different peak times when their users are most active. If you want to engage with as many of your audience as possible, you need to post at these peak times. It would be near impossible for a business to make all of their posts live and even if they could, it would be a highly inefficient use of their time and could easily consume all of your social media manager’s working hours. So, just creating a social media platform presence is not enough in itself, it is the ROI that ultimately matters.

That is why software providers have come up with solutions to make social media posting manageable. You can design and bulk schedule multiple posts at once, at a time that suits you, and then use the tool of your choice to deliver your posts at the best times.

With a social media scheduling tool, you can operate your social account efficiently. They also free up your time so that you can create and push more content. Your audience will come to expect posts at a specific time, and your post scheduler makes it more likely that you can make that happen.

Therefore, creating a social media platform presence is necessary for businesses, but it is equally important to ensure that the social campaign is effective.

Top social media posting & scheduling tools:

1. Loomly

Loomly is a powerful social media management platform with a clean, intuitive interface. It offers four pricing tiers after a 15-day no credit card trial. This includes a Base plan for those with 10 or fewer social accounts up to the Premium Plan, allowing up to 26 users and 60 social accounts.

One useful feature of Loomly is that you can set various calendar workflows. The default setting for teams with more than one collaborator is:

• Draft
• Pending Approval
• Requires Edits
• Approved
• Scheduled
• Published

There is a straightforward process to go through when creating a post. You can either begin a post from scratch or pull in post ideas from RSS feeds that automatically create draft posts from them. You create the base copy of a post before you customise details for whichever social networks you want to use. If you intend to create a paid post for Facebook, you can customise your audience and set a budget for your campaign, all from within Loomly.

Another useful feature of Loomly is its interaction screen, where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle mentions through tagging..

2. ContentCal

ContentCal is the ultimate content calendar and content management platform that helps thousands of individuals, businesses, and agencies with their content planning and social media. The platform also defines user permissions and streamlines the approval process, manages multiple accounts in one centralised location, and communicates and collaborates with your team on upcoming content. With ContentCal Analytics and Respond you can also keep tabs on content performance and learn how to improve for the future.

Features of ContentCal include post scheduling, keyword filtering, collaboration, feedback analysis, reporting, project management, and more. Content creators can use the application to design visual content by modifying the layout and adding a header colour and personalised logo. Additionally, employees can create and store posts as drafts, receive feedback from collaborators, and preview posts before publishing.

With this tool, you’re able to save time, collaborate with team members or clients, and create even better social media content. This platform is perfect for agencies, distributed organisations, or anyone who needs to manage and participate in multiple social media accounts. It could not be any easier, which is perfect for teams with varying degrees of ability. Finally, the ability to create custom workflows and approvals that reflect your unique governance plan is unmatched.

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse provides an affordable social media management tool for teams and agencies. It offers four plans from their Solos plan through to the Enterprise plan. The main difference between each option is the number of social profiles and users catered for, although there are also differences relating to data retention and ad comment monitoring.

You can use Agorapulse to publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate with your social networks. It supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google +, and YouTube.

You can centrally post to all of your social accounts with a queue or schedule, ensuring your content is delivered at the best times. It allows you to re-queue or reschedule evergreen posts. You can also tweak each post to take advantage of features specific to each social network.

4. Sendible

Sendible describes itself as “The #1 Social Media Management Tool for Agencies”. While it lists the Medium Plan – “For Growing Agencies” as its most popular plan, it does cater for other organisations, with a Micro plan for solopreneurs and a Small plan for small businesses, along with a Large plan, for large teams.

You can connect to just about any social network, as well as post directly to your WordPress, Medium, Tumblr, or Blogger blog and you can use Sendible’s geo-targeting features to reach specific segments of your audience. Sendible helps you upload videos to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Sendible features an integrated dashboard and tools relating to publishing, collaboration, analytics, CRM, listening, and mobile.

In the area of publishing, it allows you to plan, schedule, and publish posts, images, and videos to multiple social networks simultaneously using their powerful compose box. You can schedule social media posts, images, and videos individually or in bulk as far in advance as you need. Sendible allows you to set your best-performing content on repeat to keep your social media profiles active. You can also visualise your content on a shared publishing calendar.

Another useful feature is a tie-in with Canva to help you design better-performing visual content.

5. Promo Republic

Promo Republic offers a full-scale social media management platform, with a range of plans catering from the Solo plan for personal use through to the Advanced Plan, for large businesses and agencies.

You can use Promo Republic to automate your social media publishing and scheduling. You simply enter all your posts and visuals in one social media publishing calendar, scheduled in advance, and the content is posted automatically to multiple social media. They integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

But they offer more than just scheduling posts. You have access to a 100,000 post ideas library and graphics editing tools; not to mention the other features expected of social media management and planning software, such as analytics and reporting and smart posting using AI.