5 social media SaaS tools that businesses must try out this year

5 social media SaaS tools that businesses must try out this year

Starting with the GDPR compliance and ending with the privacy scandal that hit Facebook, 2018 was a year of declarations and revelations. Despite all this, the impact of Social Media continues to grow unabated.

In 2019, Social marketing will play a vital role in the success of business marketing efforts. If you are a business owner ready to invest in social media marketing, try out these five Software as a Service (SaaS) products tailored for reaping success.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite

Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, the social media management platform Hootsuite, is one of the most popular SaaS tools in the industry. Ryan Holmes founded it in 2008. The signed-up users get a dashboard with a wide variety of features. It supports the integration of all major social media channels including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.

Strengths

• A basic free plan is available for the users. It is one of the very few social media tools to feature a free plan.
• It features post scheduling facility. Users can upload and schedule bulk post using .csv files.
• Supports team communication. Admin can add the users, delegate tasks, and manage the whole workflow.
• Available in both iOS & Android platforms.
• Advanced analytics with an option to create custom reports.
• Post updates from RSS feeds.
• Hootsuite offers to track with Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and custom.

Weaknesses

• Packages that offer advanced analytics & the point system reports is too costly for small businesses to afford.
• Since 2010, Hootsuite has been pushing the users to try their URL shortener tool - Ow.ly.
• One of the known issues of Hootsuite is with the image preview option. At times the image preview goes blank.
• Posts cannot track the likes, shares, and comments received if they are published through Hootsuite. There seems to be a syncing issue with Facebook's Insights analytical data and Hootsuite.
• Lower Facebook Reach & Engagement.

Pricing

Annual billing plan starts at $29.99/month. The free version of the marketing tool allows the users to try fundamental features.

Grade

A (4 out of 5 possible)

2. Buffer

Buffer

Buffer, a SaaS application designed by Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich - two European expats based in San Francisco, is one of the most popular Social Media Management tools. Launched in December 2010, Buffer grew as a million-dollar company with over 4.5 million users already subscribed.

Strengths

• The free version of the tool is available for the users who wish to check out the features before buying.
• One click publish option to post content across multiple social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.
• One of the most significant add-on features of Buffer is Pablo, it’s free image creation tool that can assist users while creating custom images that attract customer attention on social media channels.
• Unlike Hootsuite, Buffer gives multiple URL shortening options. Users can also select a default URL shortener. They can either use the well-known bit.ly, buff.ly or j.mp.
• The chrome extension of Buffer is a handy tool as users can share links and multimedia content on the go with the click of a button.
• The data analytics provided by Buffer is one of the best in the industry. It has options to segment the results based on the user engagement, type of post and reach.

Weaknesses

• Unlike its immediate competitor Hootsuite, the free plan offered by Buffer doesn’t provide many features.
• The free version has limited the number of social accounts that you can link. In addition to this, there is a threshold even for the number of updates the user can publish.
• Despite the increasing reach of Instagram as one of the popular social media channels, Buffer lacks Instagram integration.
• The makers of Buffer are yet to add monitoring tools. There is no way users can keep a tab on mentions, searches, and hashtags. Users may have to use a third-party tool for these functions.

Pricing

The paid plans for Buffer start from $15/month. The most expensive plan goes up to $399.

Grade

A (4.3 out of 5 possible)

3. Commun.it

Commun.it

If your business is focusing more on Twitter-based growth, Commun.it is the best social media SaaS tool currently available online. This tool comes with features such as tweet scheduler, publisher, and other functions. Founded in 2010 by Ran Margaliot.

Strengths

• Like most other Social Media Management SaaS tools, Commun.it also provides a dedicated dashboard for its users.
• Excellent tool when it comes to recommending social media trends to Tweet. The quality of the topic will be based on hashtags or topics you search.
• The tool makes it easy for the users to thank their followers and find new influencers whom they might have missed out.
• The intelligence and learning algorithm of Commun.it can find the "best time" to send out tweets and get you more engagement.

Weaknesses

• Some users complain about the cumbersome dashboard when adding multiple accounts.
• The free version of the tool only allows a maximum of 20 actions a day. In addition to this, the free users, often, get notified about the paid plans.
• Be prepared to get tons of emails as commun.it sends at least 2-3 emails asking you to get back to the dashboard.

Pricing

Users can sign up for the paid version of Commun.it for a monthly plan of $20. The corporate package is priced at $117.99/month and the users can add up to 24 Social media profiles with unlimited use of all the features.

Grade

A (4.5 out of 5. Based on the total experience of businesses that concentrate more on Twitter for marketing)

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social

SproutSocial is yet another social media management SaaS tool that boasts as a Twitter and Facebook Certified product. Like other tools that we discussed, it can be integrated with Instagram, LinkedIn, Zendesk, UserVoice and Salesforce in addition to Facebook, Twitter, and G+. The tool was founded by Justyn Howard and is extensively used to publish content, monitor social presence, engage with the audience and analyze social media efforts across multiple social channels.

Strengths

• One of the biggest advantages of SproutSocial is its simple user interface. Most of its users claim that it has a clean and less complicated dashboard.
• It has a dedicated interface to monitor content calendar across multiple social media platforms and helps in syncing them. The schedules can be exported into PDFs.
• Like most of the other apps listed here, it is easy to create and schedule posts with SproutSocial. In addition to this, the users can search and find potential influencers to follow.

Weaknesses

• The overall pricing of the packages is on the higher side for the kind of social media management features that Sprout Social provide.
• Compared to other Social Media management tools listed here, Sprout Social is yet to excel when it comes to social listening and social analytics.
• One of the biggest weakness of the Sprout Social tool is that it doesn’t support Pinterest and YouTube integration.

Pricing

The standard paid package for Sprout Social comes at $99 per month and the most advanced version costs $249 per month.

Grade

A (4.6 out of 5 possible)

5. Quuu

Quuu

Quu is a relatively new Social media management tool that has been getting traction during the last couple of years. This social media SaaS tool was founded by Daniel Kempe and Matthew Spurr in 2015. Quuu projects itself as the number one source for content suggestions. It also says that every post that appears on the user’s dashboard is hand-picked by their in-house team.

Strengths

• Users can easily schedule content and publish them on their social media channels. Thanks to the Quuu Promote feature, the users will get hand-curated content as suggestions.
• The intuitive dashboard of Quuu is user friendly and it even provides tips and advice to the new users.
• The content published by the users will get displayed on the dashboard of the people who are interested in a particular niche.
• Easy to engage with people who shared the content by integrating Twitter handle or any social tracking tool.

Weaknesses

• Unlike the other tools, Quuu doesn’t have a basic free package. Instead, they offer a trial version for 30 days after which the users have to sign up for a paid package.
• One of the biggest weaknesses of this SaaS tool is that you can only select one category per account. This means you have to have a vertical niche rather than a horizontal niche.
• Adding to this, the tool doesn’t have enough categories to fulfill the needs of all users.

Pricing

The basic paid package starts at $15/month and is available on an annual subscription basis. The Medium Business Plan, which is the most feature rich package comes at $99 per month.

Grade

A (4.3 out of 5 possible)