Maintaining your company’s social media presence can be time consuming. It’s frustrating having to copy and paste messages to different accounts whilst trying to favourite items that appear in your news feeds. Wouldn't your job be much easier if there was a tool that could help you with these tasks?

Such tools are available and we have provided you with an outline of three different tools for managing your social media accounts.

HootSuite

HootSuite is the most popular social media management tool available. We also use this tool at Expert. This popular tool allows users to monitor their accounts from HootSuite’s easy to navigate web dashboard; publish content and schedule posts across multiple social networks within seconds; shorten links; track conversations; measure post and campaign results; and much more. HootSuite is compatible with eight different social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, foursquare, WordPress and mixi. 

HootSuite have released an app that permits marketer's to update their social media accounts and share content on the move. This app also makes sharing content from other smartphone apps easy via app sharing integration. Hootlet has also been developed by HootSuite as a browser extension in Google Chrome and Firefox browsers for quick sharing.

HootSuite offers multiple account types; free, pro and enterprise versions are available and they provide users with different levels of access to features of the tool.

Buffer

Buffer is similar to HootSuite but it is a much more basic and simple tool. It is predominantly aimed at small businesses, who don’t have the resources to be constantly monitoring and updating their social media accounts but would still like to maintain a social presence. Buffer allows sharing and scheduling content via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. Posts can be staggered throughout the day, week or over months to ensure constant updates are being published by the company. Buffer provides the marketer with analytical results of their posts and engagement but it does not allow for monitoring discussions.

A Buffer app is also available for publishing content on the go and extensions can be installed on Chrome, Firefox and Safari for quick sharing. A free version of Buffer is available to users for a short amount of time and then they will have to pay for usage and additional features, such as: additional post scheduling, adding social profiles to the tool for management and multiple users having access to a single account.

SocialFlow

SocialFlow is an interesting tool that provides marketers with unique data on posting to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. SocialFlow captures and measures data from the user's Facebook and Twitter accounts, and calculates insights for the user based on SocialFlow’s own unique algorithm. For example, SocialFlow uses data from Twitter to rank and send out your tweets in real-time based on your followers and when they will be the most receptive and engaging on Twitter. The company’s message to its customer is ‘’relevant message, right audience and right time’’. SocialFlow wants to ensure your message is distributed at the optimal time. The service can be costly at around $99 a month, but the benefits from this service are invaluable to marketers.

There are many other social media management tools available, these are just a couple that we selected. 

Other Tools

There are also tools within social networking sites that are useful for managing social media accounts.

• LinkedIn Pulse App: struggling to find content to publish? This news app provides professional content and insights in a single news feed
• Tweetdeck: owned by Twitter, this web and desktop solution assists within monitoring and managing Twitter feeds
• Facebook Ads Manager: this tool includes three levels of organisation: campaigns, ad sets and ads.The levels provide better Facebook campaign structuring, budgeting and scheduling.
• Facebook Business Manager: designed for large businesses and agencies to manage their Facebook pages, apps, ad accounts and the people who work on them. It was officially released this week
• Facebook Pages Manager App: lets you manage up to 50 pages from your smart device. 

The different tools your company chooses to use will depend on your company’s needs and resources. For example, HootSuite suits expert due to its versatility, the number of features it possesses and the availability of it across different mediums.