Some companies have the web producers or marketing team also handle social media. Other companies are a bit smarter and have hired 1 person to run all their social media accounts (which is a daunting task)! Have you ever tried to make intriguing photos or videos, edit them, come up with creative captions, schedule when they should be posted, answer follower questions, reply to comments and any other posts that pertain to you from social listening, while making time to analyze what posts worked and didn’t for you and your competitors? It is a lot! Which is why the really smart companies have hired Social Media Teams to get it all done. Even these big teams need social media management tools to get it all done (employees do not want to feel overwhelmed, instead companies should empower them to let their creativity come to life).
I have used Buffer since 2017 to schedule my posts (which by the way was before IG posts could be on a scheduler; it was so inconvenient!) But with technology changing, social media management tools must upgrade as well. So let us compare two of the giants Sprout Social and Buffer.
Sprout social is great for medium and large business (ie, not the best for influencers or the local ice cream shop). The price starts at $99. It allows chatbot creation, social listening, and trend monitoring. So you can monitor your own analytics and also get insight into everything the target audience is talking about. This insight allows you to engage with what your followers really care about. If you are a woman’s retail store and your followers are searching bathing suits, you now know doing a Facebook Live on what type of bathing suit works best with different body types is a genius idea. Community engagement that shows how to use the product that your followers were talking about.
Sprout Social minimizes time going from platform to platform checking messages with the Smart Inbox, which brings together incoming messages from all social networks into one feed. (You’ll never miss a message again, thus investing in long term relationship building.) It has easy to locate inboxes, pre-built social analytics reports, and pre-populated, automated social responses for your account inboxes. It has been said, by fool.com, that Sprout Social is the most intuitive and user-friendly social media management tools ever used, with no bugs that need to be worked out.
Sprout Social offers training to all its customers as well as a phone number for help. They also utilize Twitter for customer service help. It sounds like all positives, right? Their only downside appears to be that it does cost a pretty penny.
Buffer is terrific for smaller social media teams (this is the spot for influencers and local bakeries, smoothie shops, and cafes). The best part about it is that is free, gratis, the five finger discount. However you can purchase some add on options to make life even easier. For $12 a month, Buffer Polish can help you manage your social media calendar and help you create new content to post (using Pablo). Buffer is focused on the performance of each post so it really helps you know what content your audience resonates with the most on each platform. The analyzing tool is great for marketing insights and data analysis, but it is still a relatively new feature (as of 2021) that still need more development. For example, it still needs work comparing posts on different social networks. It also needs work on its social listening capabilities. Buffer Reply helps you social listen on Twitter but does not work so well on IG (sorry influencers)! Buffer also lacks in influencer identification tools that really could help grow a brand to a new audience.
When problems or questions do arise, Buffer has great customer service help through email, Twitter and Facebook. So, Buffer isn’t perfect and has it’s flaws… but remember it can be free and cheaper than many of its competitors.
Allowing social media tools to handle the dirty work of collecting and analyzing the data, creating an easier way to never miss a mention or message and scheduling posts, frees up Social Media Teams to think more creatively about their posts and how to pull it off. Welcome to 2021 where we are all becoming wiser on the power and importance of social media.
