Eighty-three percent of customers feel increased loyalty to brands that provide instant responses on social media. However, this rule might not apply to solutions that receive hundreds of direct messages each hour. Building a community around your or your client’s brand is impossible without investing in better social media management software to deliver a more responsive and tailored experience to your customers.

What is social media community management software, and how do you choose the best CRM system for your business? We’ve created a list of the top eight solutions and why we love each one. If you’re ready to dive right in, jump straight to the list of the top eight tools for community managers.

What is community management software?

Community management software combines social media management with traditional customer management software to help brands do the following:

• Enhance their customer relationships
• Improve marketing strategies
• Unify all social notifications
• Integrate with existing contacts on a digital platform
• Contact potential buyers
• Create a sales funnel
• Execute loyalty campaigns

These social media community management tools are typically bundled with social media management tools. Examples are Sociality.io, Hootsuite, and Buffer. They usually include social media analytics as well.

Community management tools provide a better customer service experience on social media and can save you a lot of time. You can respond to conversations, resolve customer support requests, share your conversations with team members, and reply to requests across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and many other platforms from a single collaborative team inbox. You can send conversations to your colleagues, avoid duplicate responses by seeing who else is viewing a conversation, write private notes and feedback, and share notes with others.

Does your business need online social community management software?

A community management tool is a must-have for every business. Let’s take a quick look at how companies of all sizes, from start-ups to large corporations, can benefit from such solutions. 

Community management in small businesses and start-ups

If you have a small business or a start-up, you are probably dealing with a lot of things, and you don’t have a dedicated person for community management or social media management. In a typical start-up environment, people are busy, creating frequent miscommunications with each other and, subsequently, with customers.

You might not have face-to-face interactions with your customers, but you still need to introduce a system that provides information about your company to each customer individually. A social media CRM tool that doesn’t require too much investment can help you better engage with your online customers.

Medium-sized businesses and corporations

Medium-sized businesses, on the other hand, tend to grow fast and must deal with more and more customers every day. Community management software makes this management painless. For large businesses, thousands of customers can only be engaged and managed at the same time via a sufficient, successful, and ongoing CRM system.

When you use the software, you manage all mentions, inboxes, hashtags, and comments on a single dashboard. Plus, through community managers’ software, you can place your customers into convenient categories for further interaction based on criteria such as their needs, buying habits, purchasing backgrounds, feedback on your service or product, and many more, depending on the software you choose.

The eight best community management software to boost effectiveness

Let’s reveal our top eight social media community management tools and the reasons they made a list.

1. Sociality.io—social media engage

Social media engagement has dynamically transformed into a customer success channel. Thus, here at Sociality.io, we aim to bring CRM-like features into your social inbox. 

Imagine a world where you can measure the success of your team’s performance inside every conversation. 

Inside the Engage module, you can see all conversation logs, assignment times, first reply times, and closing times, in addition to the entire history of all your teams’ actions to help social media audiences. 

You’ll see graphs and metrics, such as the busiest time for conversations, new versus replied conversations by page, and a team performance overview (number of replies sent, number of closed conversations, median response time, etc.). 

2. Buffer—reply

With Buffer’s reply feature, you can tag and create custom folders and keep track of your conversations. For ease of use, there’s a keyboard shortcut for most common tasks. You can set the status of a conversation, measure the quality of your customer service on your social media channels, and get in-depth insights into team productivity. Buffer Reply also allows you to export reports (such as volume, response time, and tag usage) in CSV format.

Read our article about Buffer to learn more about its use and alternatives.

3. Keyhole—social mention

Keyhole masters social media monitoring of your brand on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news sites, blogs, and forums. By responding to these mentions, you can increase revenue and improve your customer service. You won’t just have a nice relationship with your customer or potential customer; you will improve your brand reputation. Keyhole also listens to your competitors and their prospects. You can take some action on it and reach out to new customers. Monitoring social mentions allows you to catch up on trending topics. Be aware that Keyhole doesn’t have access to your inbox.

4. Agorapulse—social media inbox

Agorapulse lets you manage LinkedIn and YouTube profiles, as well as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter—all on a single dashboard. Agorapulse’s inbox captures organic and paid post comments, mentions, direct messages, and reviews in chronological order. This real-time collaboration tool allows you to see instantly who is taking care of business in your inboxes. The one-click translation of inbox items and the mobile app comes in pretty handy, too.

5. Hootsuite—inbox

Hootsuite lets you manage profiles, respond to messages from customers, monitor mentions, and more. Hootsuite Inbox is available through professional, team, business, and enterprise plans. Business and enterprise customers can tag inbox messages. Enterprise customers can also create automated inbox assignments and measure message-handling efficiency with the team metrics in Hootsuite Analytics.

Read all about this tool and potential alternatives to Hootsuite in our guide.

6. Sprout Social—social customer service

Sprout Social’s social customer service feature lets you monitor keywords, hashtags, and locations to discover unique engagement opportunities. It also allows you to sort your inbox by tagging, filtering, and hiding messages to prioritize what’s important. There’s also conversation history management for you to see where your relationship with a specific customer started. Plus, their new smart inbox makes it possible to streamline your social inbox management perfectly.

7. Emplifi—care

On Emplifi Care, you can add permission levels to your team members to avoid critical mistakes. Spelling errors, off-message content, and awkward posts can be caught before they are published. You can ask for changes and write notes to your teammates too—which is ideal for team building. Also, every post is labeled, organized, and analyzed using AI. Once you create rules for your content and inbox, automation will take care of the rest.

8. Brand24—mentions feed

For the ultimate reputation management tool, your brand needs the Brand24 mentions feed. This feature gives you real-time updates on what people are saying about your brand, allowing you to react quickly. You can also measure how much people talk about your brand with the discussion volume chart or get a general sense of how people feel about your brand with Brand24’s sentiment analysis. Handling negative feedback is an important part of community management on social media, and a tool such as Brand24 makes it easy.

How much do community management tools cost?

Sociality.io created a transparent overview of social media management tool pricing to see how tools compare. Prices for social media management tools vary greatly, so it’s vital to consider your brand’s needs before purchasing one. Hidden costs to look out for include:

• Adding more team members
• Signing up for additional features
• Connecting multiple social media accounts

The best way to know which tool is best for your business is to sign up for a free trial of the tools in which you’re interested. This way, you have the opportunity to test the features that matter to you and compare the capabilities of each software.

✨ Bonus: Compare 150 + social media management tools

Choosing the best social media community management tools

Community managers’ software undoubtedly has a huge impact on your business. Customer service via social media has become more important than ever, and a powerful solution makes it easy. Manage your social media presence and nurture relationships with customers using one tool. The eight tools listed in this article all have features that help teams better understand their social media presence and engage with customers. Try them out to see how you like them.

Related article: Ridiculously effective tactics to grow social media community

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