Keeping on top of all of your social media accounts can be a challenge, especially if you run multiple accounts for marketing purposes. Each network operates slightly differently, and it can be extremely time-consuming going from account to account, making posts, checking messages, and engaging with your followers on every single social posting platform. There must be a manageable and easy way to run your entire social network presence, without having to switch between accounts and commit enormous amounts of time.

However, you don’t want to miss out on things, either. You don’t want to miss a tweet from a customer complaining about your service, or a question asked by a potential customer on your Facebook page.

There is a way to streamline the operation of your social accounts and it doesn’t have to cost the earth either. There are now quite a few social media management tools that help you manage your social accounts in one location. If you have relatively small needs, many of these have free plans and even those that don’t offer free trials allowing you to evaluate their worth.

Social media management tools:

Loomly

While Loomly doesn’t provide a free plan, it does offer a free 15-day trial, and its cheapest plan is $48 per month (or $36 per month if you pay for a year up-front). That Base plan permits two users and a maximum of ten social accounts.

You can connect all your Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts to Loomly. It is a simple process, although, like all social media management software, you have to live within limitations set by the social posting platforms, e.g., you can post to Facebook business accounts, but not personal profiles.

Loomly asks you to set a workflow that matches the way you run your accounts, whether you are part of a team, or operate your accounts solo.

You can select from three views in Loomly:

Calendar view – shows all posts in a calendar month.

List view – displays all posts as a list and includes essential information for each

Post view – allows you to examine individual posts

You can do more than just schedule posts in Loomly, however. It offers an interactions feature where you can manage comments, messages, and track social handle mentions.

Analytics are available for your accounts on social posting platform, as well as Loomly’s main dashboard containing an overview.

Monday.com

Monday.com doesn’t include a free plan, but it does offer you a free 14-day trial and its Basic plan costs $8/seat/month. That plan is intended for teams just getting started with managing all their work in one place.

Monday.com doesn’t specifically target social media marketing. Instead, its focus is on improving the efficiency and workflow of your team. It is ideal for marketers and those wanting to create a logical workflow for their social posting platform.

Boards are at the heart of Monday.com. A board is a fully customisable table for managing your projects, workflows, and everyday work. You build boards that represent your workflow and Monday.com includes numerous templates to give you a starting point, one of which targets social media management. That template creates two boards:

Campaign ideas and requests

Campaign progress and status

Team members can make suggestions for upcoming posts on social posting platforms on the Campaign Ideas and Requests board. If you decide these ideas are viable for a post, you can use the board to create an efficient and standardised workflow for a social media campaign.

The Campaign Progress and Status keeps track of your campaigns, split into: Upcoming Campaigns, Live Campaigns, Completed, and Stuck.

Falcon

Although Falcon is not a free social media management tool, with the cheapest plan (Essentials) costing $129 per month for single users and small teams, it does offer a 14-day free trial. It doesn’t give a price for its more advanced Full Suite plan, targeting larger companies with multiple teams and markets, although it does allow you to request a demo.

Falcon emphasises that it offers 7-days a week support, with a real-time in-app chat, email, and telephone service. It also provides weekly training sessions, and you can find answers to common questions  in its help centre.

The Essentials plan focuses on publishing, scheduling, and social media engagement. You can use an editorial calendar to plan, schedule, and edit across multiple social posting platforms. It offers a content pool, meaning you can store assets for repurposing, plug into your DAM, and use Falcon’s cloud storage. It provides a customisable inbox, where you can arrange multiple feeds to build the inbox that suits you best. If you have a team, you can share notes and add messages to your team members. Existing contacts’ profile cards appear beside their messages. Falcon offers advanced metrics for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

The Suite package offers everything available in the Essentials plan while also allowing for larger teams and more significant usage and additional features. These include social listening, where you can monitor social media and the internet to discover much information about your business. You can track brands, topics, keywords, and phrases and even refine them with advanced parameters.

With Falcon’s Full Suite, you can benchmark your strategy across all major social networks. Falcon has a database of over 100,000 brands, letting you benchmark your performance on multiple levels. You can also schedule and post ads on Facebook and Instagram without having to leave Falcon.

Falcon identifies the visual elements of images from the most engaging branded content. You can even invite your team to collect and comment on highly engaging branded content from other brands.

AgoraPulse

Although AgoraPulse offers a generous 28-day free trial, it is a more professional, and therefore expensive, social posting platform, once you’ve concluded your trial. The cheapest plan is the $99 per month Medium plan.

It features an extremely user-friendly interface with the heart of AgoraPulse being its unified Inbox. It shows your comments, mentions, conversations, and reviews relating to each of your social accounts. The Inbox Assistant allows you to set rules that automatically clean up and organise each account’s Inbox.

It also includes a Social Listening module that allows firms to keep an ear open for mention of their brand name or any other term.

AgoraPulse provides a variety of ways to publish content. The default Publishing tab takes you to a calendar, showing the social messages you have scheduled, queued, published, sent to approval, had assigned to you, or failed. AgoraPulse is at its most potent when you use its bulk publish feature. This lets you import a series of posts from a CSV file, a website using RSS feeds, or as a group of pictures to transform into posts.

It provides an extensive array of reports, both globally about your social account usage, and also about specific items of content.