Effective social media management can make your life easier. Connecting to your audience consistently leads to better engagement and brand awareness. However, navigating the vast number of resources can become overwhelming. Having a lineup of productivity tools can aid in your social media execution. Below we have provided different social media calendars, tools, and templates you can utilize to enhance your social media planning.

Trello

A beneficial calendaring and organization tool is Trello. When scheduling out social media for the month, having a project management tool for team members to use will help streamline any roles or actions. By having social media assets contained in dashboards, members can assign notifications and alerts for specific projects. Trello offers social media templates for its users to use and personalize to make planning efforts more effective. 

Pros

• • Customizable dashboards for social media campaigns and groups
  • Collaboration and easy member additions 
  • High-quality notification system 

Cons

• • Limited storage 
  • Great for smaller projects
  • Cannot post from the user interface 

Sprout Social

A second beneficial social media calendaring and publishing tool, Sprout Social, helps companies manage their publishing, data and analytics and social media assets all in one space. Sprout Social is known for its social media algorithms, which leads to your company’s social media content being more relevant in user feeds. The algorithms support features like social media listening and its optimal send time feature, which help ensure content is released to maximize engagement. 

Pros

• • Publishing is easy, and aids in Bitly link creations
  • Social media listening
  • Optimal send time feature

Cons 

• • Lacking notifications
  • A limited number of social networks 
  • Limited tagging capabilities

Hootsuite

Additionally, the power behind Hootsuite is in its capabilities to provide both calendaring and publishing technology to a wide variety of social networks. With additional security and analytics, Hootsuite helps manage content and ad success in your campaigns while protecting your brand’s information. To maximize internal communication, team members can collaborate using Hootsuite’s inbox feature to discuss trending posts or campaign decisions.

Pros

• • Social publishing and content calendaring
  • Access to more social networks than Sprout Social
  • Social media listening 

Cons 

• • A learning curve for the user interface
  • Limited low-tier packages
  • Minimal automation capabilities 

Google Analytics

Finally, social media efforts are only as effective as the analytics completed at the end of each campaign. Taking advantage of tools like Google Analytics, a web analytics service provides the necessary analytical tools for marketing and social media. Ranging from custom dashboarding capabilities to tracking conversions, visitor information and tracking embedded link clicks, Google provides an added layer of reporting for your data and analytics needs. The post-campaign analysis is key to understanding where to improve. 

Pros

• • AI automated insights to find connections in the data 
  • Integrates with everything (ex: Facebook, WordPress, Shopify, CRMs, etc.) 
  • An advanced set of free tools

Cons 

• • User interface challenging for new users
  • Missing information from visitor cookies opted-out
  • Difficulty finding reasons why a user acted in a certain way with social media links

Find Your Fit 

Every business has unique needs that can be met using social media tools like Trello, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Google Analytics. Decide what works best for your management needs and take advantage of the calendars, tools and templates that help maximize the return on your social media investment. 

With advanced training modules, taking advantage of those tools is easier than ever. Learn how to manage your social media more efficiently to save your team time and allocate resources to other marketing efforts. 

Interested in learning about more tools to enhance your social media strategy? Contact Burkhart Marketing for more information.