Little Business, Big Social Dreams
What’s the importance of a social media management tool? Evaluate and compare two social media management tools. Explain how a social media management tool can assist with community engagement and social listening.
The Social Media Management tool is a gift sent from heaven! Let me lay it out for you. I work in sports…that by itself is unpredictable. I work many hours and my schedule is ever-changing. So, to say I have limited time is the understatement of the year (that’s saying a lot in 2020). I mean BMT (Before Management Tool) I was creating my content in advance, emailing it to myself, and then posting on-the-go. While it worked with alarms, I would still miss times to post and then panic and stress myself out. Let me tell you: panicking and stress don’t go together. When I started using the social media management tool it not only saved me time but also my sanity! Thank goodness!
While your sanity is important there are other reasons to adopt a social media management tool into your business. As you will see this tool saves you time giving you more time to focus on your other job requirements. It is like a control panel on a spaceship, you can see everything! Information from across all accounts centralizes in one location and everything filters together saving you from future embarrassment by posting from your personal accounts. Another reason to use the tool is its ability to track the analytics for each account: demographics, best time of day, likes, comments, reviews, and impressions. It works as a listening tool tracking what people are saying about your brand, and even your competition, thereby increasing your ROI (Return on Investment). Listening and monitoring your consumers is the best way to understand and be proactive. The management tool gives you the ability to engage without leaving the site, increasing response time, and customer satisfaction.
There are a lot of similarities between the two; in my opinion, one of the biggest benefits is the mobile app availability. Essential for a person on-the-go who needs to constantly track and post to accounts, both apps are straight forward and easy to use.
SPROUT SOCIAL 1 — MAVSOCIAL 1
Another similarity is the ability to plan and automate content posts. Unfortunately, MavSocial doesn’t have a content calendar to provide a visual idea of the post. Looks like Sprout Social won this round and becomes my lifesaver since I thrive on organization and am a very visual worker.
SPROUT SOCIAL 2— MAVSOCIAL 1
One of the biggest blessings in engagement? The inbox each tool uses to centralizes all engagement in one location. It increases community engagement from all platforms by not requiring a search on each individual platform; therefore, responses can be speedy and in real-time. The inbox also saves replies and interactions that can be revisited in the future when helping consumers with similar questions or concerns. Instant replies or chatbots can be programmed to help customers with common questions immediately keeping the brand consistent with goals and messaging across all platforms and ultimately increasing customer satisfaction. While both management tools allow you to split your inbox by account and by message type, I prefer MavSocial. It allows me to complete a task and delete it from my to-do list while still storing a record of the task. This tool allows me to increase community engagement with followers through response time and customer service. Other helpful features include the UGC curation where you can request and get permission in one hassle-free place in MavSocial. There is also Message Tagging which labels and sorts messages to easily find communication-related to specific topics in Sprout Social. These can boost your community engagement while keeping you on brand.
SPROUT SOCIAL 2— MAVSOCIAL 2
Next, we have the listening tool which follows what consumers are saying about the brand, competition, and industry through keywords and filters. This is a huge bonus to have directly in a management tool. You are not only able to see what your customers want and need but you can respond to them on the spot. Long gone are the days when you had to search for this content; now it comes directly to your front door. Your brand gets a leg up as you learn about your ideal customer, where you may find an influencer in the mix, and what the consumer loves and hates about you as well as your competition.
All of this gives you the ability to adjust your content strategy to their wants in real-time without leaving the site. The social listening tool also helps with increased engagement as you can join a conversation that can tie into the brand (keep it topical) but also establish your expertise and credibility on a topic. Unfortunately, I find the listening tool in both sites confusing. When trying to establish keywords or filters sometimes they appear and sometimes, they say no one uses it on a common word like NFL. While the listening tool is extremely important and beneficial, these sites could streamline the listening page a bit easier for a beginner. Therefore, I chose to use a dedicated social listening tool for my social media accounts.
SPROUT SOCIAL 2 — MAVSOCIAL 2
Finally, there is the analysis and reporting of each tool and while they both have great depth, I think MavSocial wins my vote again. MavSocial gives me a better overarching view of how my account is performing. While Sprout Social and MavSocial both focus on the engagement per impressions and the top overall hashtags used, MavSocial also focuses on my consumer engagement based on days, time of day, top comments, and engagement by post type whereas Sprout Social lacks to incorporate that information. Knowing all this information is essential when understanding and communicating with followers. We want them to see your content, not miss it because you didn’t pay attention to their most active times.
Drum Roll Please……
Final Score: SPROUT SOCIAL 2 — MAVSOCIAL 3
MAVSOCIAL WINS!
That was a lot of ground to cover but I hope it taught you how much you desperately need to download a social media management tool for your own benefit….and remember your sanity.
Sources:
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/listening-vs-monitoring/