Week 14: Social Media Management Tools

    Social media management tools can be an incredibly helpful tool to individuals and businesses that need to run multiple accounts. These tools allow for an individual or a focused team in a business access and manage multiple accounts within one hub and provide analytical tools to evaluate the effectiveness of each platform and their posts. Utilizing these tools can help keep on brand, cut costs, and save time from having to switch between platforms/devices and create posts for each individual platform.

    My first thought was that finding the right management tool is very specific to one's own needs and plenty of research has to be conducted into what tool would best work for a business in terms of specs and cost. A business should not opt into the most expensive option, that can host the most people/accounts, and with as many of the tools that are available; At the end of the day, if most of the options from a tool are not being used and a business is paying a pretty penny for it then this could count as a loss for the business as they are not able or willing to utilize the tool to its maximum potential to help grow their business. Having a clear set goal in terms of tools needed, budget, scheduling needs, and analytics will help any business, small or large, to determine which social media management tool they need if they need one at all.

    Another thought that crossed my mind while researching was that the tool will most likely will have some kind of limitation that a business would have to overlook and find a solution to either on or off that management tools platform. It would be a dream for any individual or business to find a management tool that fulfilled all of their needs but this is mostly unrealistic. The Investopedia article broke this concept down very easily and made it clear that there are pros and cons to every management tools and it is up to a business to determine if these are make or break deals for them; having a limit to 3 team members may be ok for one business but could be absolutely devastating to a larger business that requires more team members on these hubs. Of course, the cons don't always mean that they are deal breakers for a business but just presents them a problem that they have to overcome with another tool; if a management tool has a weak communication channel this can be combatted by using Google Chat to quickly and efficiently communicate within the team.

    My own experience with these kinds of tools was so-so most likely because of the social media management tool I decided to go with but I definitely could see the benefits that came from using it. The tool I used in the past was Lately Social and it was relatively cheap at $9/month; this cheaper plan greatly limited how I could use the tool but it was a good price range when I was on a stricter budget. It was able to connect my various accounts in one hub, it allowed me to upload a limited amount of media, save favorite hashtags and formatted posts, and allowed me to schedule posts for multiple platforms at the same time. It worked pretty decently for me in the beginning but I quickly found out that the limited media I could upload made it very difficult to make new posts without having to constantly go in and delete old media. Another downside was that the platform was a bit "broken" because it would sometimes take minutes to process uploads and posts as well as the tool sometimes would have trouble accessing accounts from time to time. The final nail in the coffin for me was that scheduling posts was no longer viable and no matter what I did my future posts would get scheduled immediately; at this point, I was almost exclusively posting on Instagram so it just made more sense for me to create draft posts and post when I needed them to go up.