Battle of social media management tools

Social media is the buzz of everyones’ lives.

People wake up posting their daily inspirations, firms post about their latest engagements or news. As more social media platforms emerge, people surprisingly tend to balance their use of a pool of popular and user friendly social media platforms everyday, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr and etc.

Similarly, in contemporary digital marketing, social media marketing receives immense priority. Companies are adopting many social mediums to their palette with the shifts in their target audience’s preferences.

However, in order to effectively reach the audience despite of the medium, firms need to be consistent in their selected palette of social media. This includes posting, engaging and monitoring every platform.

Among the thousands of tools that you could use to manage Social Media, Hootsuite and Buffer are two main tools that are used by more than 10 million users. Therefore, this article will discuss the battle between Hootsuite and Buffer and how you could use both platforms to manage your social media.

Battle between Hootsuite and Buffer

Hootsuite lets you have it all, not just manage Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn but multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook Pages, Foursquare, WordPress, Google+ Pages, LinkedIn Pages, Instagram, Youtube, Tumblr etc., while on the other hand, Buffer supports Facebook profiles, Facebook Pages, multiple Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn Groups and Pages.

How does Buffer work?

Buffer allows you to set up posting schedules according to your preference and to match different social media platforms based on their peak usage times. For example, late evenings would work best for Facebook and mornings for LinkedIn.

Also through its “Buffer extension” for the Google Chrome browser, it enables you to go through your past articles and reschedule them through the “Add to queue” function. Similarly, when you find great articles, you do not need to post them all at once but you could buffer them and share them at appropriate times.

Buffer is not about the automation of your social media activities but buffering the activities with a personalised touch and crafting them to match the different social media networks.

How does Hootsuite work?

Unlike Buffer, Hootsuite does not have a easy-to-use scheduler, but you are required to create individual posts, select the social networks you wish to post on, and schedule them for a preferred date and time.

However, it provides a user-friendly dashboard that helps you to get a view at all activities at one glance, while allowing you to communicate with all your followers in a matter of seconds.

The key benefit of Hootsuite is, its Auto Scheduler function. The “Auto Scheduler” allows to you post at the optimal time to post which is determined by Hootsuite. Hootsuite will automatically select different optimal time to match the selected networks.

Also, it has a custom reporting function that allows you view the performance of all your social media accounts and create a report view that you wish receive through an email. Then Hootsuite will schedule for reporting with an ow.ly link for the period you desire (daily, weekly, monthly and etc.)

Another interesting element is the “Contacts” tab, it allows to see background information of your followers and their “Klout” score. A Klout score is a reference score that show how influential the particular contact is. So if it is higher it shows that, that person interacts well on the selected social media, and you could build communications with them. You could know your Klout score through https://klout.com/

And for more social media monitoring tips and tools refer “Monitoring and measuring success of social media”.

In Conclusion, Hootsuite and Buffer serve many distinct but important roles to enhance your social media presence. In order to have corporate success through social media it is vital to have a social media plan to guide you even though you use complete suite tools like Hootsuite and Buffer.

Created: October 9th, 2014