“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” – Ferris Bueller
Well, apart from being a fictional high school-ditching teenager, Ferris does share some sound advice.
You know what else moves pretty fast? Social media.
Clearly designed to serve as real-time, digital communication, messages, posts, videos, memes, GIFs, pictures, etc. are all flying across your social channels, every second of the day.
So when you’re handling the accounts for your company, brand or side business, you’ve got to be at the top of your game, you know, like a social media expert.
Clearly, reading a blog post won’t make you an overnight expert, but I’m offering you the closest thing to it: expert advice. Specifically 100+ experts sharing their top three all-time favorite social media management tools – the ones they use on a daily basis for the best results.
And to get get the best results, there is a general consensus on the top 10 social media management tools.
Top 10 Best Social Media Management Tools (As Voted by 134 Experts)
- Hootsuite (56 Votes)
- Buffer (54 Votes)
- Google Analytics (16 Votes)
- Tweetdeck (15 Votes)
- Canva (14 Votes)
- Sprout Social (10 Votes)
- Tailwind (9 Votes)
- IFTTT (9 Votes)
- ManageFlitter (8 Votes)
- Buzzsumo (6 Votes)
To skip straight to the favorite social media tools of the experts – and read all of their insight, click here.
Or if you want to cover social media management basics, keep on reading.
What is social media management?
Social media management is the process of monitoring, engaging, strategizing, and measuring social media activities of a person, brand, product or business. And through proper social media management, you’ll be able to get more out of your social media initiatives.
And social media management is important because social media is not a monologue. It’s a dialogue. So in order for things to progress and develop, there needs to be some degree of back-and-forth going on.
Therefore, you shouldn’t just be aware of what your followers are saying, you should also be engaging with them, sharing your own content, creating content, sharing other people’s content, scheduling out future posts…essentially “managing” everything that’s going on.
Additionally, your social media channels play into your brand or business’s overall persona. You want to make sure your image is a positive one, right? You need to help solve issues, respectfully respond to complaints and provide thoughtful, engaging interaction with your current and potential customers.
Furthermore, you need to make sure you’re keeping your channels active – by sourcing, creating and sharing the kind of content your followers are interested in. I mean, would you keep returning to a Facebook page that regularly posts boring articles or one that posts once every three months? I think not.
Regular engagement with your followers is a must-do as well. You can’t employ a post-it-and-forget-it strategy and then expect to be earning new followers and making waves in the social community. Social media just doesn’t work that way.
Like life, social media moves fast. And if you don’t stop to really pay attention to what’s going on and respond/have a proactive strategy in place – you could miss out on big opportunities.
Social media management: What to do
Seems pretty daunting at first, huh? Managing everything going on – ideally, 24/7, 365. But if you break it down, there are really only a few things you need to do to take control of the activity across your arsenal of social media accounts.
And believe me, the tools my expert contacts recommend can help you do just that – successfully.
But firstly, social media management essentially boils down to these six things:
- Develop your strategy (tip: create a social media content calendar)
- Create/share original content
- Source/share “external” content
- Monitor your channels
- Engage with your followers/customers
- Analyze results
Simple enough: Outline a plan, create stuff to post, find other people’s stuff to post, take note of what’s going on/being said, react to it and analyze how your plan worked. Then adjust and do it all over again.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these six “what to dos” to better understand how everything works in unison to make you a successful social media manager.
1. Develop your social media strategy
Ever go to the grocery store without a list? Guess what happens. You do 18 loops around the store, back-and-forth to different isles, buying everything you don’t need – and forgetting what you came there for in the first place.
Or even worse…you can’t find everything on your list. And in the end, it just takes forever. Am I the only one who can never seem to find the beef broth? /end grocery shopping rant
Social media management is the same way.
If you go in without a plan of attack, you’re going to end up scrambling around with no clear direction – and end up with no real results.
Your social media strategy is your plan. And every plan starts with a goal.
What’s your goal when it comes to social media management? What is your company or brand trying to achieve by having a social presence?
These are the most common goals of social media management:
- Build brand awareness: ex. sharing posts that highlight you as a thought leader in your industry.
- Earn more followers: ex. sharing content that your data supports as popular and by monitoring conversations for opportunities to provide a constructive response.
- Gather customer data: ex. assessing popular questions and comments and analyzing data trends.
- Source leads: ex. sharing original content that resonates with your audience and that includes effective calls to action (CTAs).
- Sell your products or services: ex. sharing content with appealing social media graphic design images, at the proper times, on the proper channels, with CTAs that inspire a conversion.
These all sound great. But in order for your social media strategy to be effective, you need to choose one goal and direct all efforts toward achieving it.
Let’s say your goal is to source leads. Knowing this, you’ll want to be developing and sharing original content that inspires visitors and followers to share their contact information with you via download form, subscribing to your blog, etc. Once you’ve gathered their information, you can add it to your database and include these leads in your direct mail and e-mail lead nurturing campaigns.
At the same time, you’ll also want to source and share external content to give your channels balance – e.g. so you’re not only posting about yourself all the time.
Then you can monitor and engage accordingly and finally, analyze your social media results to see if your efforts were effective in achieving this goal.
How many clicks did your CTA generate? Impressions? Did you end up meeting your goal number of earned new leads? (need help creating engaging social media posts?)
If you did, celebrate – then work on the next goal or find areas for improvement.
If you didn’t, then maybe you need to scrap your original strategy and start over.
But without a strategy in place, you won’t have anything driving the rest of your activity forward.
Start with a goal, make a plan, then everything else has a place and a purpose.
2. Create/share original content on social media
In accordance with your strategy, you’ll need to be sharing content about your company, products, industry – but where will it come from?
You’re going to create it!
The best way to do so is by starting a blog.
You don’t need to be an English major or a published author to put together an effective and engaging blog. Blogs are essentially just collections of thoughts, tips, suggestions, ideas, etc. in the form of articles.
Focus on timeless topics that help further your ultimate goals or that share knowledge about your business or brand. And don’t forget to include an engaging image.
Say you’re a florist, for instance. And your ultimate goal is to generate brand awareness, so your floral shop stands out from all the others in your city.
You might have a blog and post articles such as, “10 Ways to Accent a Room with Roses”, and include images your customers have shared with you in the past, or maybe, “The Ideal Bouquet to Buy for Every Romantic Occasion”, complete with photos of your top-selling bouquets.
These types of articles position you as an expert in your field. They cover topics of interest to your followers, based on the questions you’ve received in your shop. And when you share them on your social channels, you can purchase and design paid ads aimed at local audiences similar to your current customers…
…all in the effort of generating brand awareness, your overall strategy.
That’s a lot to think about. But all the expert-recommended tools I’m about to show you will help make getting everything done a ton easier.
3. Source/share “external” content
No matter how awesome your brand or business is, you shouldn’t just be posting about yourself all the time. You need to create balance by sharing content from other sources as well.
That’s where external content comes in.
So what is “external” content?
It’s really just content from other media outlets that accents your original posts by sharing other ideas within your industry, from a different source/perspective.
In keeping with the florist example, you might source an article from Reader’s Digest on how to properly cut and display gladiolas. And then maybe another one from Real Simple that focuses on pictures of homes beautifully accented with flowers to inspire readers to do the same in their homes.
When you share these resources on your social channels, you can put your own spin on the post copy, showing you gain knowledge from trustworthy sources that are familiar to your followers, sources they also trust and learn from.
And all of this only adds to the trust and respect they have for you. A win-win.
[Tip – If you’re looking to save some time, you can use social media automation to post content from related websites to your social media accounts.]
4. Monitor your social media channels
With a strategy in play and your original and external content being shared according to your predetermined schedule, you need to keep an eye on what’s going on.
Is your content resonating with your audience? What comments are being made? What content is being shared the most?
Take a look at how a customer trapped in a Waterstones store put out a plea for help on Twitter:
Since the company was monitoring social conversations, they were able to help their customer out. Literally.
By monitoring the activity across your collection of social channels, you can ensure posts are being received in the way you intended, read questions your followers post, identify customer complaints, follow conversations – all so you can decide when and where you should chime in.
With the right expert-recommended social media tools in play, monitoring your channels is a cinch.
5. Engage with your followers/customers
Is someone asking a question about one of your products? Answer it.
Is one of your customers angry about the way a refund was handled? Respond.
Is there a conversation you think you can positively add to? Leave a comment.
Just ensure that how you respond aligns with your brand voice and persona – and shines a positive light on your business.
Aggressive complaints or nasty comments can be mitigated by a suggestion to take the conversation offline to provide assistance. Kind words from a happy customer can be further highlighted by your thanks or appreciation of support.
Take Morton’s Steakhouse who was tweeted at by Peter Shankman.
Not only were they monitoring social conversations, they made good on his request.
Talk about engagement! Both on and offline.
Every response, share, comment, question, etc. is an opportunity you can use to work in your favor, toward achieving your ultimate goal.
And the more activity that occurs, the better your results will be.
6. Analyze results
Once everything is said and done, you’ll want to know if your strategy was effective – if you achieved your ultimate goal.
Because otherwise, what’s all the creating, posting, monitoring and engaging for anyway?
Once you determine how successful (or unsuccessful) you actually were, you can adjust your strategy accordingly and begin the process all over again.
Social media management: How to do it
It’s great to know the “what to do” when it comes to putting your social media strategy into action – now it’s time to learn the “how to do it”.
If you’re like me, you don’t just want to know the basics of how to do something, you want to know the most effective (and hopefully, the quickest) way to do it.
Social media tools are the answer.
For all the social media management basics I’ve listed and explained above, there are social media tools readily available to you to help make the tasks at hand quicker, easier and more effective. If you are not much of a “tools” person, there are a variety of social media management services to choose from who can handle the process for you.
Take creating/sharing original content, for instance. Once you’ve composed the copy for your newest blog post, you need to decide on an image to include.
Say you don’t have any of your own pictures on-hand to support this article, and you definitely don’t want to use some run-of-the-mill stock image.
But you’re no graphic designer either. Now what do you do?
Ever tried Canva? It’s a great online tool for easily designing your own images – the best part being it’s totally free. Just create an account, choose a template, add a background/icons/text (you can choose to pay $1 here or there for premium images), download and voila! – a totally unique image for your newest blog post.
Canva also offers a variety of templates so you can create additional images in the correct sizes for your social channels as well, such as Facebook and Pinterest.
That’s just one example, but the list doesn’t stop there. Here are a few more awesome social media tools for your consideration:
- Hootsuite: An easy-to-use platform for monitoring, scheduling and engaging with followers on all of your social media channels, all in one place.
- Bitly: A free online tool that condenses lengthy URLs into short URLs with a simple copy and paste action.
- Buffer: A streamlined online scheduling tool that helps you build out social media content schedules and schedule posts in advance.
- Bulkly: A social media automation tool that works in unison with Buffer to allow you to upload lists of posts for scheduling and set them on a continuous, random posting schedule.
- Tailwind: An intuitive app that helps you build out Pinterest schedules and set up lists of future pins in advance.
Pretty cool, right? I’ve got a ton more (over 600 social media tools) – but I’m only one social media expert, so don’t just take it from me.
Social media management: 100+ experts reveal their top three favorite social media management tools
Like I said earlier, I’ve got some pretty awesome contacts in the industry. And I was curious on how they get things done efficiently on social media.
So I decided to ask 100+ of them one question:
If you could use only 3 tools for social media management, which 3 tools would you use?
Let me tell you, the insights I received from these 100+ social media experts were nothing short of amazing. All of which I share below.
You’ll be amazed as they reveal some of the best social media management software available.
I even made it easy to filter to see who uses what tool. Simply use the dropdown filter menu.
After you have read about their favorites, be sure to tell me your 3 favorite tools in the comments below.
Aaron Orendorff
TWEET NOW
Adam Connell
TWEET NOW1. Sendible – This is my go-to social media management tool. It’s got all the features I need and more. The feature I like most is their social media inbox. It’s significantly improved my productivity when checking for messages/comments via social. There are a bunch of social tools that offer this feature but I’ve found their’s to be the most robust so far. It’s a refreshing change from using tools that offer streams. No more wasted time trying to figure out who I’d replied to and who I hadn’t – especially good with high volumes of social messages.
2. Tailwind – This is the only Pinterest tool you’ll ever need. Handles scheduling and even has a ‘Tribes’ feature that can extend your reach. There’s a Chrome extension as you’d expect to make scheduling even easier. And you can create lists of boards to speed up scheduling even further.
3. Canva – One of the best free image creation tools on the market. Plenty of templates, layouts and graphics are included. Along with pre-set sizes for specific networks (and various other image types).

Adel de Meyer
TWEET NOWHootsuite is an all-in-one social media management tool. It has a combination of scheduling, monitoring, engagement, analytics and 3rd party app store all accessible and managed from one dashboard. Hootsuite is easy to use to manage all your profiles from one place and that is what I enjoy about using Hootsuite the most. I can quickly read my notifications and even my emails from Gmail, pull up the latest analytics from my profiles and schedule or publish to various platforms in one click.
To be successful and to track your success or failures you need a robust analytics tool to give you all
the data necessary to adjust your strategies hence why Google Analytics will always be on my must-
use list for social media management.
A busy and big Twitter account can become unmanageable very quickly hence why I love to use a
tool specifically just for managing my Twitter account. I love to stay on top of my account by
regularly flushing out unfollowers, inactive accounts or spammy followers. I want to reach out and
find influencers about certain topics and the Commun.it tool makes all of this very easy to do.

Aimee Beck
TWEET NOWHootsuite: Managing multiple channels and keeping in touch with my audience can be extremely time-consuming. Seeing all my social accounts in one screen helps dramatically. Hootsuite also has a simple Chrome plugin and a good scheduler so I can reach my audience at peak times.
Bufferapp: Although very similar to Hootsuite, I like Bufferapp for its “suggestions” on topics I may have otherwise missed.
Good old fashioned spreadsheet: Ah, Excel, we go way back. It’s a work-horse and it never lets me down. I can import and track data, sort and filter messages, hashtags, keywords, dates and target URLs. It’s just super easy to us—no muss, no fuss.

Amy Purdie
TWEET NOWFor social media management, my top three tools would be Buffer which I use to update Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and sometimes to post in my private Facebook groups. It’s well worth upgrading to get a bit of extra information and it’s so easy to use. Also Facebook’s own scheduling and insights is great. Both of these work wonderfully on my phone, which is my third tool – using my phone to manage social media, be it for scheduling or just actually using any network – makes it very easy to keep everything going. A few moments whenever the kettle is on and that’s all I need! I do drink a lot of tea…

Andrew Hutchinson
TWEET NOWThere are so many great tools, each purpose or process has its own best tool, but if I had to specify three I really like:
1. Hootsuite – Hootsuite enables me to do so much in one place. It takes a moment to work out what’s what, but once you do, the amount of things you can do via your Hootsuite dashboard is pretty amazing. I use it to track mentions of myself, my content and related topics in my region, to schedule posts and to remain aware of what’s happening across all my networks.
2. BuzzSumo – Over time, I’ve found myself using and recommending BuzzSumo more are more. It can help guide your content strategy by showing popular content by network and build your market awareness through competitor research. Also, influencer outreach – influencer marketing is going to become more important, BuzzSumo helps you find and connect with relevant people.
3. SocialBro – Obviously, it’s relative to the platforms you’re utilising, but SocialBro is my favourite tool for managing Twitter. There are so many options for managing your own account, and for analysing the profiles of other Twitter users.
It really is hard picking just the three, but that’s it, that’d be my list.

Andy Colwell
TWEET NOW1. Canva
I love Canva! Canva is a free tool to use whenever you need to design any visual for your
business.
I use Canva to create image quotes to post on my Facebook Page.
You don’t have to be a professional designer to use the too. Canva makes design super easy
and accessible to everyone.
2. Manage Flitter
I use Manage Flitter to grow my Twitter following.
You can grow a targeted following of people who are likely to be interested in your business.
Manage Flitter also lets you unfollow users who are not following you back.
3. PostPlanner
PostPlanner is a great content curation tool. PostPlanner helps you find proven content that
is already popular and has proven to go viral. A very useful tool for finding great content.

Ann Smarty
TWEET NOWHere are my 3 tools!
1. Tweetdeck: I use Tweetdeck to manage my multiple (both personal and business) social media accounts. I love this tool because it delivers important Twitter notifications right to my desktop so I can interact in real time! Here’s a detailed explanation on how to set up Tweetdeck to succeed on Twitter.
2. Cyfe: I use Cyfe to monitor my brand mentions, important hashtags and social media growth stats. Cyfe supports an array of social media networks including Google Plus, Pinterest, Youtube, Slideshare and many others: Everything within one handy dashboard.
3. Hootsuite: I use Hootsuite exclusively to manage my Facebook business pages. It makes sharing easy. It has started supporting tagging. Plus it allows you to monitor Facebook page interactions within one dashboard.

Ann Tran
TWEET NOW1) There are many tools to measure social, but it is easy to overlook Google Analytics. I am a big fan of GA.
2) Big debate on where to publish. I think it is still important to, in the end, own your publishing platform, e.g., http://ann-tran.com/. And in turn, one of the core free tools to measure the effectiveness of your publishing and the use of social is Google Analytics. “”Remember MySpace”” ツ
3) Simply Measured is a great tool with many clean readable charts. You can easily use to identify your influencers and start engaging them frequently. Sharing their content, etc.. We use it for our weekly #InfluencerChat

Ashley Faulkes
TWEET NOW
Brandon Shaw
TWEET NOWThere are a few tools I use currently for social media management that have yet to let me down. Buffer, Hootsuite and Sprout Social each have their quirks and benefits for helping me manage different types of social accounts.
Sprout Social is my current favorite in this ever-changing business, mainly because of the resources if offers. Not only am I able to manage multiple clients and their different social accounts, but Sprout also offers a variety of engagement reports. This certainly helps with monthly reporting and understanding your current demographics.
Hootsuite is a very reliable resource, and one that I typically recommend when it comes to community management and social listening. I jumped on the Buffer train a little over a year ago, and recommend anyone to give it a try. I’m a fan of Buffer’s clean dashboard, analytical platform and scheduling capabilities.

Brian Carter
TWEET NOW
Brian Fanzo
TWEET NOWMy 3 favorite tools for social media management are focused around engagement and social listening since I believe to be great at social media first you have to be social and second you have use tools that allow you to scale and have more time being social not just doing social. For me TweetDeck is my favorite must have tool for active real time Twitter Engagement. Buffer was a game changer for me as the scheduling, analytics and account management makes it easy for me to share, analyze, share again providing the most value at the right time for my audience. Third is Hootsuite, which might surprise many but I use both hootsuite and Buffer as Hootsuite gives me the ability to setup streams and feeds for certain social listening terms, keywords and hashtags while also allowing me to manage company, client and friends accounts in one easy to use dashboard. For me these 3 tools are my favorite but the key is having a great strategy that is linked to your business goals because those who manage social media the best don’t blame the tools rather use the tools to scale and amplify their message.

Brittany Harness
TWEET NOWAs I work with multiple clients across a variety of industries, I try to maximize my own time while still producing thoughtful, engaging, stimulating content.
Canva allows me to create grabbing, visual imagery to accompany content, Buffer allows me to strategically plan the timing of my outreach to target key audiences at peak times and schedule content accordingly, and SocialBro assists me in creating highly targeted audiences, identifying and interpreting other relevant analytics, and creating a reporting structure.
I find that in tandem, these three tools provide the best, strategic basis for designing, scheduling and measuring social media engagements.

Brittney Wilson, BSN
TWEET NOWIf I could only use 3 tools for social media management they would be Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and Canva.
Hootsuite will give you a powerful tool to help schedule and monitor the success of your various social media profiles. Google Analytics helps you monitor the overall success of your social media strategy and help you determine which of your website pages earn you the most business and from which social media channels. Images are key in a sound social media strategy, especially if you want to capitalize on the current Holy Grail of social media: Pinterest. Canva has got you covered on the image front and offers stock images for $1 a piece, if you need them.

Bryan Adams
TWEET NOW1. Hubspot
Hubspot is my complete inbound marketing dashboard of choice that combines and co-ordinates our email marketing, social media engagement, SEO and much more. It helps us focus all of our efforts towards generating a defined lead generation ROI and it provides an invaluable insight into what works, what doesn’t work and what should work in the future based on the current plan.
Having a decent marketing automation platform to co-ordinate and intelligently manage any multi channel marketing effort is an absolute must in this day and age.
2. Uprise.io
Uprise is a fantastic content research tool, similar to Buzz Sumo you can very quickly see what content your competitors are getting the most value from and also, you can see what content is currently very popular in a certain category. You can search with keywords and the way they return the results is very useful indeed. Seeing the results listed by, publisher, articles, sharers and influencers is extremely valuable and knocking hours off the week when researching for great ideas, insights into what gets shared and who to target to build a valuable community.
3. Nuzzel
Nuzzel is a small iPhone app with a big appeal. This simple app is fantastic for showing you what’s currently being shared by your immediate network (Twitter & Facebook) and also what’s popular with friends of friends. For finding content quickly, it’s tough to be beat because it even has a ‘new you may of missed’ feed in case you’ve had a busy day and it integrates with Buffer so you can schedule a raft of great content in one sitting.

Chad Pollitt
TWEET NOWYour question, “If you could use only 3 tools for social media management, which 3 tools would you use?” is a good one.
The fact of the matter is, I’m probably the only one of the people you asked that actually has real disdain for social media as a marketing channel in general. However, it’s a necessary evil in the business world we live in today. Most would never guess I feel this way based on my usage.
That being said, I do have three tools I use on a regular basis:
1. Relevance uses HubSpot’s Enterprise Marketing Suite which includes a very robust social media calendar, scheduling tool, measurement and tracking scheme, and listening platform. It’s integrated across both demand generation for the agency and the Relevance digital magazine. We also have most of our executives’ accounts dialed into the tool for easy management by our Content Coordinator.
2. Another tool I can’t stop using is TweetDeck. Without this tool I’d feel like I was flying blind in the digital marketing industry. I literally have my finger on the pulse of real time news, trends and insights across our entire industry – worldwide. While I do use it as a broadcast channel, its major benefit to me is in its propensity to deliver the timely information I need to make every day content and marketing decisions. TweetDeck keeps me in the know because for the last six or seven years I’ve painstakingly sculpted and curated the most relevant columns (lists) for me in the industry.
3. Believe it or not, I have an iPhone app that I use multiple times per week for social media – specifically, Twitter. The app is called Unfollow. About three or four years ago I noticed a trend of people following me and quickly unfollowing me after I followed them back. It was a trend back then, but today it’s an epidemic. I make an honest attempt to follow back everyone that follows me that is real and interested in marketing. However, when these people play bot games with the twitter API it downright pisses me off. Unfollow helps me identify the folks playing follow/unfollow games so I can purge them from my circles.

Chantal Bechervaise
TWEET NOWIf I could only use 3 tools for managing social media they would be the following:
1) HootSuite – I have been using HootSuite for close to two years now and could not imagine myself without it. I have tried many tools out there and it remains the one tool that I always fall back on. It is the first app that I open in the morning and usually the last one that I close at night. I like it because of its versatility. I can schedule posts to many social media accounts, create tabs and streams for tracking keywords, phrases, hashtags, competitors, and lists, plus it also has the functionality of using other apps within HootSuite itself. I use one for trending topics and my demographics. HootSuite also has analytics and various reporting features too. If I only had one tool to use, this would be it.
2) IFTTT (If This Then That) – I admit to still being a fairly new user with this one but it is quickly becoming one of my favorites to use. I love it because of how it is simplifying my life. I create and or use exciting ‘recipes’ and it does the work for me. I don’t need to remember to back up photos to the cloud, it does it automatically for me. If I want to create a new Twitter list with people using a certain hashtag, it does that too. It’s great! It’s like having a personal assistant behinds the scenes doing some administrative work for me so I can focus on other social media details.
3) My last tool is a good old fashioned agenda and pen. I love using tech and will try out everything that I can get my hands on, but there is something about writing down ideas and goals on paper that I love and can’t give up. I use an agenda to keep track of deadlines, content ideas, campaign ideas, metrics, and pretty much anything that pops into my head. Of course, you can use a variety of online tools and templates as well but I still like writing things down. It is my go to for inspiration and help me plan for the future.

Charise Strandberg
TWEET NOWSocial Media without a doubt takes up a large portion of my day and there are a number of tools and apps that I use to help make my process more efficient. In order to narrow them down, I have to imagine three apps that I couldn’t do without or be nearly as effective.
Buffer – My go to app for shortening links, scheduling (sometimes) and managing multiple accounts. They also provide great recommendations for curating content.
Feedly – I subscribe to about 50 blogs and use my RSS feed every day to scan and look for the latest and greatest breaking news, technology and other resourceful information that I can push out to my followers.
Zite – I love this magazine app that allows me to create a huge number of topics and then allowed me to search all current articles all related to those specific topics.
All of these apps are and important part of my day and keep me up to date by providing me a seamless and efficient way of delivering content to my audience.

Chris Abraham
TWEET NOWMan, which would they be?
I think I might use:
I know that SS can do most of what Buffer does but I just can’t quit
Buffer. And, GaggleAMP is indeed a super-secret weapon.

Chris Lee
TWEET NOW
Chris Makara
TWEET NOWIt’s a tough choice when there are well over 600 different social media tools. But if I had to choose just 3 social management tools, I would pick:
Buffer – It is very easy to schedule social media content to your various social media channels when using Buffer. Whether you use their Chrome Extension to add content in a few clicks or use my next tool listed – there are several ways to ensure you keep your social media queue full with great content to share.
Bulkly – While I might be a bit biased since I created Bulkly, it does pair up nicely with your Buffer account. What it does is allows you to recycle social media updates in your Buffer queue as well as a few different ways to automatically add content to your account. You can create hundreds of updates by uploading a CSV file to Bulkly which will drip them (and even recycle them) into your Buffer queue. Additionally, you can leverage RSS feeds to curate dozens of feeds on a single page or even use these RSS feeds to automatically post content to your Buffer account.
Google Analytics – When it comes to anything digital, if you can’t measure it then it never happened. So it’s important to have a system in place that can show you the results of your efforts. And this is definitely true when it comes to social media. I recommend making the most out of UTM parameters to better track your social efforts.

Chris Ward
TWEET NOWI only use 1 tool, Buffer. Does everything I need.
Then just a Twitter client, facebook website etc…

Chuck Bankoff
TWEET NOWMy favorite tools are Buffer for scheduling posts in combination with Snip.ly to bring the visitors back to my landing page, & Pocket for content curation.

Codrut Turcanu
TWEET NOWI don’t play with Facebook for business. Never tried Pinterest. Rarely used Linkedin.
I love Twitter instead. That’s where my target audience is. It plays a key role in my online activity because I do expert roundups for clients as well as for my own projects.
I assume most of your participants will mention HootSuite, TweetDeck and BufferApp to manage their Twitter account(s).
Let me give you three tools that most people aren’t using or heard about yet.
GrabInbox – that’s how I schedule my Tweets in advance, particularly the expert roundups and respective quotes.
Twitonomy – that’s how I analyze my followers and competitors activity. Plenty of features for a cheap monthly price.
Commun.it – that’s how I manage my Twitter relationships with key influencers and followers.
These services I consider to be complimentary.
Quick tip: The Ultimate List of 35 Free Twitter Tools that each blogger should use
http://technocr.com/ultimate-list-of-35-free-twitter-tools/
Enjoy and follow me on Twitter for more social media tips.

Cori Faklaris
TWEET NOWMy 3 “desert island” tools for social media management are:
— Tweetdeck. It’s a great way to keep all of my conversations sorted and myself alerted to what’s going on. I rely on its scheduling function for Twitter so that I don’t have to feel like I must be onlin 24/7.
— HootSuite free version. I rely on its scheduling function for Facebook and LinkedIn. But: I’m not happy about how they handle images.
— Photoshop. Visuals are key to getting attention on social media, so being able to edit images and add text when necessary is vital!
Of course, considering I focus mostly on Twitter and Facebook, I often post directly using their own apps! And I’m looking at their native analysts consoles for that data almost constantly.

Craig Poston
TWEET NOWInteresting question. I’m constantly seeking out new tools I can utilize across our brands for various purposes whether it’s to automate tasks, increase brand awareness, improve engagement or a slew of other initiatives. I try to keep my finger on the pulse of the rapidly-evolving industry, so it can be difficult to not be distracted by every new and shiny tool out there (and there is a ridiculous amount!).
At the end of the day, it’s imperative to find the right tools that enable you to efficiently and effectively monitor your brands, communicate with customers (and prospective customers), while also aligning with what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization. Social media can be used in so many different and clever ways that usually your organizational goals can likely dictate some of the tools you should be using.
So, to answer your question, the three tools I use the most in my current role are:
Hootsuite – Managing 15 brands online across several platforms can be challenging as well as time consuming. Hootsuite enables me to set up streams of customized content so I can easily communicate with colleagues, prospects and customers of all brands on one dashboard. It also makes it simple to track trends, hashtags, and keywords in addition to integrating with other tools. The dashboard is highly customizable, so you can be as creative as you want in how you’d like to track and interact with content online.
Mention – If you’re a digital strategist or community manager, it’s absolutely critical to monitor your brands online. Prospects, customers, and even your employees are talking about your business. And more often than not, your brand is not being tagged, so it’s important to monitor what is being said and with what sentiment. Mention is a great tool that allows you to track several brands or keywords across the entire web… blogs, sites, social media, forums, images, videos… everything. Before you plan and implement a marketing strategy, you must first understand what the public perception is of your brand(s) and identify your brand advocates.
SumAll – Social media analytics are constantly evolving and becoming more and more robust. There seems to be almost an infinite amount of data we have access to nowadays which can be both exciting as well as overwhelming at the same time. SumAll simplifies this data and displays it in a way that is easy to comprehend. You can track several brands across many social media platforms (and integrate with other tools like Google Analytics, AdWords, WordPress, Amazon, and more), filter by custom date ranges, show data visually using graphs, generate and share reports, and so much more.
When it’s all said and done, you want to provide your prospects and customers with the best experience possible. There are so many tools available now that there will likely always be something better out there that you just may not be aware of yet, so use what you feel comfortable with while also allowing yourself to be as efficient and effective as you can.

Dan Marks
TWEET NOWBuffer – great for easily curating, scheduling, and analyzing impact of personal social posts
Tracx – enterprise social management platform
Omniture – understand how social impacts key eCommerce metrics like visits, conversions, and sales.

Dan O’Brien
TWEET NOWWith regards social media management tools the 3 ones I use are:
Tweetdeck – While this is solely for Twitter its one of the best tools around in my opinion. You can create as many columns as you want on lists, keywords, videos, news etc. Its is terrific for mining Twitter and the internet for relevant content. When I started work at BlueChief no one else had heard about it. Now they all use it.
Buffer – The extension for chrome and the fact you can manage individual profiles on multiple networks makes this a fantastic tool. I’m only new to using it but I already see the benefits. You can manage multiple profiles with a single button.
Hootsuite – Of the 3 this is the one I’m less enthusiastic about because its so clunky. However it is so organised and allows you to create tabs for each brand that you manage. This is its biggest strength.

Dan Purvis
TWEET NOWHootsuite is great tool – it should be bread’n’butter for everyday social media activities. The popular social media marketing dashboard provides so many features, but we particularly like its ease of use. It’s very easy to schedule individually or in bulk, as well as simple to take advantage of the auto-schedule feature to help save a lot time. You can assign tasks to members of your team with other collaboration features too, monitor for hashtags and competitors and so on easily. We use it for our individual social networks and also for Comms Axis, as well as for our clients too. It allows us to manage all the necessary social networks and also provides various reporting and measuring features as well.

Dave Schneider
TWEET NOW#1 Hootsuite – I use this to manage my twitter profiles. I’ve done Twitter outreach with it as well, where I schedule tweets at influencers and ask questions.
#2 Google Analytics – I check this daily to see my traffic sources. It helps me understand, which social media platforms are delivering the most value.
#3 Feedly – I subscribe to about 50 feedly feeds, which is more than enough for me to find great content to read, curate, and distribute.
(Update – Dave no longer runs these websites, but can be found at lesschurn.io and daveschneider.me).

David Galloway
TWEET NOWMy 3 tools for social media management would consist of Buffer, Buffer, and Buffer. I’ve found that since going with Buffer I don’t use as many other tools–it offers scheduled posting, multiple platforms, content discovery, link shortening, and basic analytics in one package. I really sound like a shill for them, but I’m really just a happy user. Plus their customer service is great, I support their values, and I very much enjoy their social media blog and side projects like Pablo.

David Hamm
TWEET NOWFor me, the three tools that I find I use the most, and rely upon for data and information are Hootsuite, Bitly, and Google analytics. I’d use Hootsuite to schedule,track, and monitor conversations. I’d use bitly to track the attractiveness of a tweet ( vary the language and tone of a tweet set) throughout a comm plan. Use analytics to desperate the productivity of particular messaging.

David Leonhardt
TWEET NOWMy three favorite social media management tools are Hootsuite, Crowdfire and Tweetguru.
Yes, these are all Twitter oriented, since that is the most unwieldy platform and I have multiple accounts. Hootsuite, for all the reasons others have listed – managing multiple accounts, timing posts, tracking multiple streams by function and by hashtag. Crowdfire, since it helps me track who is no longer active or no longer following me. I can better manage how I allocate my follows. Tweetguru, since it helps me network with select groups of individuals more efficiently, sending multiple DMs at a time. Managing the receipt of those DMs is one of the big advantages of Hootsuite.<

Deborah Reynolds
TWEET NOWThe 3 tools that I would use are:
Hootsuite: Scheduling, monitoring, targeting
Google Drive: Team collaboration and file sharing
Buffer: Content and queuing of posts

Dennis Yu
TWEET NOWThe three must tools I use for social media are quite non-social: Boomerang for Gmail, Skype, and Facebook Business Manager. If you want a bonus, add in Facebook Graph Explorer.
Here’s why:
Boomerang tracks when people don’t reply or when I need to follow up. In “doing social media”, follow up is critical, especially when you have a LOT of relationships. There is nothing magic about social– it’s another channel you must be on, so the impetus for organizational skills becomes even stronger. Sidekick by Hubspot is pretty good, too.
Skype is way bigger than whatever the latest chat tool is. The various marketing platforms have evolved into personal communication tools such as Snapchat, WeChat, and the like. But Skype is how I collaborate with people who I want to have an on-going relationship with. And on-going is what counts, not the 150,000 people that follow me on Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook Business Manager is how I manage all the various pages, ad accounts, and apps among the various people that need different types of access. You might have a HootSuite or Sprinklr, but nothing is going to be native apps, especially if you want to do it free. But even if not free, Facebook’s Business Manager is far ahead of everyone else in terms of tying in training, new features, and the like– it’s their own platform!

Donna Moritz
TWEET NOWAgorapulse: Agorapulse is absolutely my go-to Social Media Management Tool for posting, scheduling and engagement. It’s one of the few tools I believe can truly be called a “Social Media Management Tool”. Their recent update is better than ever, with some cool new features including real-time team collaboration. I use Agorapulse every day to post, engage and respond across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn so I don’t miss a tweet or comment!
Tailwind: The visual web is huge, and having a tool that helps me schedule pins and repins to Pinterest is just as huge. Not only does Tailwind allow me to post at the best times for engagement with its smart analytics, it gives me information on what my readers and fans are sharing from my website, and the best content (and times) to post. Having insight into what they are sharing helps me to create more visual content that resonates. Tailwind is like having a key to the visual web in your back pocket. I would be lost without it and now that they have an Instagram tool as well, it’s even better!
Last time I listed Post Planner as my go-to tool for scheduling and curating content, using their Viral Photo Tool for finding content ideas that are most likely to get shared. I have to add a visual content tool to the mix here, as I use the ideas I get to create my own unique images. For creating visuals, I’m loving Easil. They have loads of social media designs as well as unique templates for visuals like infographics and multi-image Instagram Stories. You can easily resize images, it’s very drag-and-drop and you can even print your designs. I fell in love with their funky fonts and layouts. They make it easy to create visuals that really stand out on my social networks.

Dorien Morin-van Dam
TWEET NOWMy favorite go-to tool for graphic design is RelayThat. This tool makes creating branded images so very easy. The best part of RelayThat is that it saves all my brand assets, as well as all the assets of my clients, so that I can create new images with the touch of just a button; no need to keep track of colors, logos and fonts for each client.
I love using Tailwind to schedule my Pinterest pins and Instagram posts. I was an early adopter of Tailwind as I saw the value of scheduling pins to the perfect time. I have several client accounts for which I use Tailwind and I just love being able to schedule out pins for a whole week (or longer) in just one sitting! It saves so much time. It’s also important to know that each pin is optimized to go out at the perfect peak time my audience is online.

Doyle Wheeler
TWEET NOWIf I had only 3 tools? Hmmm…. In 2 seconds of thought:
–MacBookPro (connects to the internet REALLY WELL and will allow me to care for all internet platforms organically)
–iPhone 6+ (awesome camera for content, hotspot for emergencies, takes care of Instagram and has all the alerts and capabilities to respond at any hour)
This would be my wish list in a split second decision.

Dr Nancy Richmond
TWEET NOWMy 3 favorite social media tools are @Zite to be relevant, @hootsuite to be timely & @befunky to be visually interesting.

Dubie Bacino
TWEET NOWMy favorite Social Media tools are:
IFTTT is a great tool for aligning content across different social networks and automation. It saves time by letting you post your content on only one network, and then pushes it to your other networks.
CIRCLESCOPE is a Chrome extension for managing your Google+ following. It gives invaluable insights into engagement, so it’s very useful in marketing and targeted community growth.
SMQUEUE lets you easily schedule your posts for different platforms. It also has a recurring queue, and allows for bulk-import of posts. This way you can publish and re-publish your best blogposts over and over again.

Eric T Tung
TWEET NOWThe three key steps in social media management are listening, posting, and reporting. For most small-to-medium-sized companies, something like SproutSocial does a great job of scheduling and measurement. For real-time interaction, I love TweetDeck. You can track conversations around conferences and live events. Finally, I love suggesting Buffer for employee involvement. It’s really user-friendly, and relatively inexpensive for a license. These have been my main go-to tools for social media!

Eric Wilson
TWEET NOWTwo things about me: I love talking social media and love Disc Golfing. One of my favorite type of videos on youtube are the disc golf “ What’s in your bag?” videos. I thought that would make for a great social media topic as well. What tools are in your bag to use for your social media marketing campaigns. Since I primarily only use two here they are:
My first tool is hootsuite. I use this for the flexibility and the scheduling. I know they are tools that may better equipped but like my first car it is trust and reliability that keep it attached. I like to do most of my social presence manually and I put in the elbow grease but I have come to appreciate the ease at which hootsuite enhances my social engagement and awareness.
My number one tool and go to is google analytics. Now you can use any analytics platform you choose but the reason remains the same. Measurement. The most important thing to me in social media is the ability I have to measure my activity. When coming up with a social media marketing campaign I find it best to set a goal and second to set a way to measure results.
I know it is Old school to be so hands on. The social managers that work for me use a wide variety of tools and software but for me the best way is to be patient and measure the program set in place.
Esther Turón Perez
TWEET NOWThere are a lot of good tools to Social Media Management but my three favourites are:
Hootsuite. Although the free version allows you to manage three accounts
of Social Profiles, to manage more accounts , reports, teamwork, in addition to other social
networks and extras you need bare minimum Pro version.
Feedly. I love it, no doubt for me the best tool to sort lists, and read content. Thanks to Feedly I
can read lots of content and keep up in my sector. Allows schedule and publish, thanks to the
integration with social networks, Buffer and HootSuite . Me is a great time saver.
IFTTT. And The Magic Wand is.. IFTTT or “If This Then That”. It is the easiest way to program
actions building “recipes” that automate processes. So that, when I do something then directly
becomes the other. For example: “I want every time a new post is published on my blog tweeted
this directly”, with a recipe saved for this work is done only. ¡Wonderful!
My advice for the success: “If you Want Be Prof be PRO” Some free tools are OK, but the better and more effective resources never are real Free, you can paid with money or with time.

Evan Carmichael
TWEET NOW
Fabrice Briatte
TWEET NOWCanva : it’s a fantastic tool with enough easy-to-use features to create pictures, infographics and other engaging content. Canva offers plenty of free images, backgrounds, templates and more. You can even adapt your content to any social media platforms. I also use it to prepare presentations. FAST and EASY!
Spark video: As we know, videos including a great storytelling are more and more used because of their engagement rate. It’s why I wanted to try this app couple of months ago. I can choose my photos or their free pictures, free musics and then I just need to record my voice. That’s it!
Slideshare : Can we consider Slideshare as a tool? I do! It’s a great way to create impactful presentations and to share them though social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You can even add tags to be more relevant.
As I said previously, it’s just 3 social media tools among the broad range of tools I use every day.

Faith Warren
TWEET NOW1) The top tool for me is likely one mentioned by several others as well – Hootsuite. While it has its share of limitations, overall I find it an effective way to monitor the brands we manage online, as well as their competitors. Their efficient social scheduling feature is my favorite component of the software. I can quickly optimize a post for several different platforms with just a few clicks.
2) RavenTools is another that saves me a LOT of time. I find Hootsuite’s reporting features very cumbersome and limiting, so I rely entirely on RavenTools’ fast reporting to provide daily and weekly updates across multiple platforms. Their automated scheduling means I can arrange to have social media reports land in my Inbox automatically. I can also choose which reports to send directly to clients, so they’re kept in the loop continuously about the effectiveness of their social campaigns.
3) Mention.com is the 3rd in my list of top 3 most useful social tools. Anytime a brand is mentioned or content we’ve put up is linked I receive an email notification and can quickly capitalize on opportunities to connect with those excited about our brand. It’s a great way to make new connections and network with industry influencers.

Fisnik Sylka
TWEET NOWI use a lot of tools for managing social media accounts of my clients, but I’ll mention three of the most important.
The analytics feature of Socialbakers is for me a must! With the data provided by it, I can understand how the brands develop on social media platforms and also compare that to their competitors across different platforms. This is a key feature to increase the brand awareness and build relationships with the clients’ customers.
For creating successful campaigns on Facebook, I use heyo. It is a great tool which lets you create contests, promotions, and deals in a few easy steps.
And last but not least, Buffer. It’s very handy for scheduling posts. I use it mostly for scheduling image content which I create with Canva.

Gaurav Sharma
TWEET NOWHootsuite is great because it’s very comprehensive and allows you to monitor social profiles, schedule content, and conduct real-time analytics. I love how there are different plans and features depending on what kind of user you are.
I also love Visage for creating original and attractive social media graphics to increase engagement on my posts. I can easily design awesome graphics optimized for different social media platforms.
Socialbakers is an excellent analytics tool that I use to make more informed social media decisions. I can use it to compare my performance with that of my competitors. I can then use the insights to improve my content and plan my budget more effectively.

Ian Cleary
TWEET NOWEdgar – Edgar is great for creating a continuous queue of content that is going out to your social channels at pre-determined times. The categorization of your content works really well so you can send different types of content at different times.
Agorapulse – For general management of my Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Circloscope – For management of my Google+ Circles.

Jacob Curtis
TWEET NOWA sustainable social media management strategy takes a mixture of community management, frequent content generation, and optimizing that content for social distribution.
The first tool that comes to mind when I hear the term social media management is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is great for community management and I enjoying having one dashboard that I can mange multiple accounts’ social feeds with. Even with the free version, you can schedule posts and get basic reporting to benchmark your progress.
For Content generation, I’m checking out Buffer pretty heavily right now as an RSS feed curator to help with frequent content generation and scheduling. So far, Buffer’s got an easy to navigate interface, loads of resources, and a pretty solid chrome extension so I can see myself falling in love with this tool.
When it comes to optimizing content for social distribution, i.e. adding relevant hashtags to post copy to increase its reach and shelf-life, I’ve found RiteTag to be very helpful. RiteTag provides trending hashtag and reach grading and integrates seamlessly with Twitter, Buffer, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Sprout social, and Facebook. Their latest updated also generates images (equally as important for content optimization) based on keyword for your social posts while you’re composing them.
Regardless of the tools you use, my best advice is to research, ask fellow marketers what they prefer, (use this blog’s comment section to start a discussion?) and take full advantage of the free trials most social media managing tools offer through their sites. In most cases, it’s worth spending the small monthly fee to make the most of what the tool was made for.

Janice Wald
TWEET NOWI am such a fan of IFTTT I have actually blogged about it. I have published 27 reasons why IFTTT is a must-have here.
Buffer
I love Buffer! I use Buffer to schedule my tweets on Twitter. First, I type the tweet promoting my article; then, I give the link. As soon as I put the link into my Buffer queue, my graphic shows up! Buffer optimizes to put your tweets on social media at optimal times.
Missinglettr
Like the others, I am a huge fan of Missinglettr. Missinglettr is a free service. The Missinglettr crew will schedule your blog posts on social media for you. Missinglettr conducts drip campaigns which is a slow promotion of your article over a year’s time. Just when you’ve forgotten about your post, it’s being promoted by the Missinglettr people on the social media site of your choice. Missinglettr is free although there is a premium plan.
Like the others, I am such a fan, I blogged about Missinglettr.

Jason Acidre
TWEET NOW
Jason Falls
TWEET NOWIt really depends on the business and the need. For most businesses, large and small, Sprout Social is a fantastic management tool. I would add on a more advanced listening platform, probably a Sysomos. And then, I’d go for a more advanced management tool for Pinterest and Instagram, provided you had a visual brand and those were important channels. I like Piqora.

Jason Squires
TWEET NOWPicking ONLY three tools to use for Social Media Management would be easy for me – HootSuite, ManageFlitter, and Twilert.
HootSuite is great for scheduling posts in advance, and for having an overall view of your social media profiles.
ManageFlitter also has a scheduling option, although the power with this tool is in finding relevant Twitter accounts to follow and interact with (hint: your competitors followers!).
Twilert is a lesser known app, but also worth its weight in gold. Twilert allows you to search the content of tweets, within a specific location (for example: “Can anyone recommend a web designer?”) – lead generation at its best!
So there we go – HootSuite, ManageFlitter and Twilert!

Jean Newman Glock
TWEET NOWHootsuite is first and a must when traveling to keep up and organized. Excellent photos are essential now for all social media ( and most especially for travel social media). Managing high res photos requires a good storage system. I use Dropbox and love it. And finally, still on the photo theme, I have 2 cameras that are wifi enabled and automatically download all my photos to Dropbox. I then can access both Hootsuite and Dropbox on my iphone, which always has a global data plan, so I can post anywhere in the world….and have.

Jenn Herman
TWEET NOWIf I could only use three tools for social media management, I would have to pick the Facebook (in-app/in-site) scheduling tool, Hootsuite, and Photofy.
The native Facebook scheduling tool is my life saver on Facebook, allowing me to be able to plan out my content weeks and months in advance while ensuring I don’t get penalized for using a third party tool. I use Hootsuite for Twitter (and Google Plus) and it saves me so much time and hassle for scheduling content and monitoring content too. And, of course, because I love Instagram, I would have to narrow down my favorite Instagram tool (outside of Instagram itself obviously) to PhotoGrid which allows me to add text overlays and create graphics and collages easily and effectively for immediate upload to Instagram.

Jennifer Sable Lopez
TWEET NOWThis is a pretty easy one for me because these three tools are what we use every day at Moz.
1. Sprout Social – The entire team uses Sprout to manage our day-to-day incoming and outgoing messages on social. We mainly use it for Twitter, as Twitter is by far the most active, but we also schedule G+ posts and such there as well. We have *almost* around the clock coverage on social, so this is a nice, robust tool that allows us to handle things in one “inbox” with multiple users. We couldn’t live without it!
2. RivalIQ – Although RivalIQ is made for competitive analysis, we often find ourselves using as a content aggregator. We set up 10 different “competitors” which are essentially other blogs that talk about online marketing that our community probably reads as well. Then as we get alerts saying that Search Engine Land has a post that’s doing really well, we go check it out. Often times we’ll then share that post on Google+ (or other places depending), because we know it’s relevant to our audience. It also helps our team stay up-to-date on the major things happening in the industry. And this is just one tiny aspect of the amazing data you’ll find in this tool.
3. TrueSocialMetrics – There’s no other tool out there that breaks down engagement rates per channel in this way. You can read more about how we use TSM in a post I wrote last year: http://moz.com/blog/social-engagement-metrics-that-matter.
These are all the tools we use internally at Moz. If I could pick one more tool to add for my personal use it would be Buffer. 🙂
John Paul Aguiar
TWEET NOWThese 3 tools I have used for years to manage all aspects on Social Media and will continue to use for a long time to come.
- Hootsuite: Hootsuite is what I use to manage all sharing across all my Twitter accounts, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Having the ability to schedule content on the desktop as well as on my mobile has made managing all my account MUCH easier. Great tool that does what it does very well.
- Audiense: This used to be called Social Bro, but it is really the only tool I use to grow my Twitter reach. From finding quality, targeted followers, to finding content and influencers around a certain topic, it pretty much does everything I need to kick butt on Twitter.
- Buffer:I like using Buffer to schedule content across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ that I don’t need to be so hands on with. Easy to use and easy to setup.. makes it a great tool for me for over 5 years.

Jonathan Nuñez
TWEET NOW- Sprout Social provides in-depth analytics that helps us make educated decisions. If something isn’t working and we are not growing then we need to stop doing that and focus on something else. It’s also a great way to manage all our messages in one place.
- TweetDeck is the best Twitter management dashboard available. It’s flexible, powerful, and easy to use.
- Tailwind is the best dashboard I’ve used for Pinterest and Instagram management. They focus on analytics and help post your content when it’s likely to get the best results.

Kami Huyse
TWEET NOWI love tools that help to streamline my social media management. As a more-than-fulltime serial entrepreneur, agency CEO, podcast host of Communities That Convert, founder of the Houston Social Media Breakfast and Mom of three very active kids, time is more valuable than gold for me.
While I use a few more than three tools for social media management, these are the three that you could not pry from my cold, dead hands:
- Buffer Pro, because I can add 10 profiles, schedule content, and it connects with almost anything.
- Feedly.com, because it allows me to read a massive amount of content in a minimal amount of time and share the best gems to Buffer. It allows me to easily run social media for three very different audiences.
- Quuu.co, because it surfaces interesting content found by humans (not machines) by category and automatically feeds it into Buffer. You can check the content in your Buffer que to make sure it meets your standards. I have only had to cancel a handful of content during the past six months I have used it. Plus, I have seen and read some great content I would not have found otherwise.

Kathryn Mager
TWEET NOWBuffer is great for content curation as well as basic auto social publishing and reporting. Most of all, I am a huge fan of their blog. I get lots of the latest and greatest news from them.
Oktopost is a tool I used for a long time and love. It let’s you auto social publish by campaign very easily, visually displays the publishing calendar in a way that’s easy to see and work with, allows for easy follow up to responses, and the reporting was so visually appealing and easy to see what was working and what needed improvement. It also provided great content that I could pull from and share based on my publishing history.
Hubspot is a great tool for teams that need to fulfill sales, marketing, and social media activities. This way each can fulfill their role, while staying in sync with the other’s activities. For example, if the sales team is giving a webinar on a specific subject, the marketing team can create a landing page to sign up, email campaign for it, and they can each track exactly what’s important to them. Parallel, social media activities can push out content that supports the webinar subject. It is great to simply align all sales, marketing and social activities, report and measure across the board, and have a very transparent overview as well as in depth view of all activities and results. I also really like their blog.

Katy Howell
TWEET NOWLet’s start with the basics. A set of tools that just make life easier. Scheduling tools. From Hootsuite, to Tweet Deck and Buffer, these technologies let you plan ahead and take the pain out of being always on.
For those serious about social it has to be analytics tools. Understanding customer social behaviours is the route to ROI. Best to use third generation, intelligent tools such as Crimson Hexagon.
My last tool, isn’t a tool, but is essential to social. Park the tech. Social is about people. They are your smarts when it comes to social media. Plugged into the social Zeitgeist, it is people that interpret the data, flex the tone of voice and deliver the best results.

Keith Keller
TWEET NOWTo manage Twitter (and other Social Media sites) successfully you simply must have the right tools.
There are literally THOUSANDS of tools to choose from now but here are a few of my favourites.
(1) NIMBLE QUOTES
A really cool tool that automatically tweets out quotes for you with AMAZING images.
It’s my latest obsession & I simply can’t recommend this one highly enough.
(2) TWEEPSMAP
A very good “ALROUNDER” tool for managing your Twitter accounts.
I use this one every day and it is invaluable to me.
(3) BUFFER
I just loooooooove the simplicity of this tool.
Great for scheduling your tweets fast – really fast.

Keri Jaehnig
TWEET NOWIf you make me pick just 3 tools for my social media management tool kit…
* BundlePost
* Hootsuite (though I’m being wooed away)
* ManageFlitter
BundlePost allows me to do many things: Brand Content Curation, RSS & Google Alert Feeds intake, Quick attribution through Follow Fridays, quick & easy hashtagging, and bulk scheduling. This tool is rapidly developing, and I don’t know what I would do without it, as it saves me TONS of time!
Hootsuite Pro – I use this in conjunction with BundlePost. While this is cost-efficient tool, and allows me to engage with followers, there are other tools out there that intrigue me as a social media manager.
ManageFlitter is an essential! Keeps Twitter the relationship catalyst it is. The free account offers great value, but the juice is in the Pro plan.
There are other favorite tools I use, but you asked for three. So, those are the bare minimum.
I currently use Instagram as a tool. Though it is also currently my favorite social network too.

Kerry Butters
TWEET NOWOK – tough choice!
#1: Rignite – I prefer this to Hootsuite, although I do use both, as once you have your strategy down it really shaves a lot of time off scheduling posts. I use a mixture of scheduled blog posts and personal posts and always reply to retweets personally.
#2: Post Planner – Great for Facebook, I’ve not been using this long but love the options it gives you to find viral photos and articles in your niche for quick and simple sharing that boosts engagement.
#3: Social Oomph – Excellent tool for managing your Twitter account, especially when it gets bigger.

Kim Fischer
TWEET NOW- Tweetdeck – this is the most streamline way to see my tweets, responses to them, and the list of other tweets I need to see right now. It keeps me up to speed on the newsworthy things happening right now.
- Buffer – I like that I can tweet/post all from one place and see the analytics associated with each share.
- CrowdTangle – this one my station uses to keep up with all the journalists at our station and all the other stations. We get to see which posts are gaining the most traction and it reminds us to stay engaged with viewers online.

Kristi Hines
TWEET NOWIf I could only use three tools for social media management, they would be the following.
1. Buffer for social media update scheduling to keep all of my main profiles up to date with interesting content within my industry.
2. IFTTT for automation between various tools (like Buffer) and social networks. I find this service particularly useful for sharing the content I write on the top social networks, bookmarking, and blogging sites.
3. Rival IQ for research, analysis, and monitoring of my competitor’s social media and search marketing strategy. It also comes in handy for a lot of posts I write when looking for brands that do something particularly well on social media.

Larry Kim
TWEET NOWMy favorite social media management tools are Facebook/Instagram Ads, YouTube Ads and Twitter Ads. Let’s face it – in the last few years, organic social reach has become awful and if you don’t run ads, it’s as though you’re invisible. By running paid campaigns along side your organic campaigns you can help ensure that your content gets the exposure it deserves.

Lauren Hug
TWEET NOWI’m a big fan of hands-on social media management. Time-saving tools are great, but they can also remove you from one-to-one interactions. So the only social media management tools I regularly use are Buffer and the scheduling feature in Facebook. Buffer makes it easy to queue up lots of great content for sharing on Twitter. Facebook scheduling allows me to implement weekly, monthly, and annual content calendars. I use other management tools, of course, but those are the two I consistently tap.

Lauri Stevens
TWEET NOWI have to admit that my social media use for my personal branding focuses on Twitter, followed by LinkedIn, Pinterest, then Facebook. So my answers will reflect that.
Tweetdeck – Because I’m mainly using Twitter, this is just the best way to filter and monitor my lists.
Tweepi – I use Tweepi for weeding out Twitter followers who are inactive or who don’t follow me back. It’s also pretty helpful to find new accounts to follow or list.
Buffer – Obviously for scheduling across social media.
My 4th choice, if allowed would be Hootsuite, but I use the above more.

Leon Spencer
TWEET NOW
Leonard Kim
TWEET NOWGoogle docs to create a content calendar and to create social intros.
Sniply to add call to actions onto links.
Buffer to schedule posts.

Liz Azyan
TWEET NOWI use 3 main tools for my social media management.
First is my own tool called “Digital Matchbox PRO“. It helps me to not just find strategic and high quality content for me and my clients, schedule, queue them, bulk upload and manage them in content libraries. It also helps me find the best time to post them in just one click. It also generates all the reports I need so I can compare my social media performance every day, week or month. It’s saves me so much time and money every single day!
I also use Google Analytics, which is built into “Digital Matchbox PRO” to see if my campaigns and blog posts are performing well on social media. It helps me to understand what’s working and what’s not so I can ensure my social media is always generating a good return on investment (ROI).
Another tool I also use mainly for research purposes is Postradamus.
It sells itself as a “Viral Content Curator and Facebook Scheduler”, but I mostly use it as a research tool and benchmark to challenge myself. I use it to understand what content is working with different types of audiences because I manage multiple social media accounts for a variety of clients. It helps me to understand what is working and what isn’t so I can keep on top of my game. I think research is a HUGE part of social media management, which is why I love to use tools to help me get it done faster.

Liz Cramer
TWEET NOWIf I could only use three tools for social media management they would be the following:
1. Scoop.it: I like scoop.it because it helps to find and organize interesting content and pushes it to you privately before you send it publicly. Scoop.it allows you to create daily searches for topics that are relevant to you and your audience using search terms and hashtags. It searches a number of platforms (google, twitter, youtube, blogs, etc.) so you don’t have to. When you receive your daily list of possible content, you review and choose what content you feel is most relevant to you and your audience, add your own personal insight to each piece of content, and then share with your audience via Scoop.it, Twitter, Facebook or WordPress. You can also make Scoop.it boards to create a home for all the content you have shared. It has free and paid capabilities. I use the free.
2. Bit.ly: Free, quick and easy link shortener. No brainer. No need to eat up characters in a post with a long link. Also allows for some analytics.
3. Manage Flitter: Free and paid. Great tool for managing Twitter- finding interesting people, running some analytics, unfollow dormant accounts etc.

Luke Jordan
TWEET NOWMy favourite social media management tool has to be IFTTT, just because of the huge range of capabilities that it has. Admittedly, I don’t make big enough use of it although that’s something I’m looking to change in the near future.
Buffer is great from both the sharing and publishing side of things; I love giving people the ability to instantly schedule posts from my site if they don’t want to share things right away. Similarly, it’s good to be able to schedule posts for a future time so that I’m not overloading people with content on my social media channels all in one go.
I also really like ViralContentBuzz, you’ll need to pay to make the best use of it but it can be a good way to get some important amplification of your latest articles. Simply put your latest posts on there and you can invest between 1-4 credits for people to share your content; the price is automatically determined based on the size of the sharer’s following.
Madalyn Sklar
TWEET NOWMy top 3 social media tools are Hootsuite, Buffer and SocialJukebox. I’m all about time saving strategies for both myself and my clients and have found these three to be the most effective.
I love Hootsuite because it’s so easy to quickly scan through columns of Twitter lists, saved searches and mentions. In seconds I can have a handle on everything.
Buffer is my favorite tool for scheduling tweets. I read lots of articles every day and the ones I feel will best resonate with my community, I’ll add to my Buffer queue. I love their interface and integrations on both the web and mobile and I like their robust analytics.
For my “evergreen” tweets, I use SocialJukebox. It’s a great tool that allows me to “set it and forget it.” These are tweets that don’t expire right away or even at all. So for example, I’ll set up several tweets that promotes one of my new courses. The information doesn’t go stale. It’s good today, next week and even in 3 months. SocialJukebox save me a ton of time so I highly recommend it.

Mandy Edwards
TWEET NOWThere are a lot of social media management tools out there than you can use. For me to pick 3, it’s very easy – these 3 are my go-to programs I use every day. First and foremost, Sprout Social. Sprout is the program I use for account and content management for myself and my clients. I could write a whole article on why I love them. The options and the customer service are second to none.
A second program is ManageFlitter. To keep a Twitter account current and clean in regards to followers and who you are following, this is the program that gives you the best options to manage your Twitter community.
A third program would be Facebook’s Business Manager program. This allows you to view all of the pages and advertising accounts to manage in one, nice place. The best feature is that this is separate from Facebook itself so you do not have to worry about getting distracted.

Marcus Sheridan
TWEET NOWFor all of my social media sharing, communication, and listening I use HubSpot. My reason for this is simple: It’s tied in to all my analytics. And at the end of the year, I want to always be able to say: “I know using Twitter generated X traffic, X leads, and X sales this year.” The same can be said for Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other platform.
Granted, Social Media isn’t all about numbers, but it sure helps justify time and effort when you can definitively measure revenue generated from one platform. This is also a big deal because once you truly start measuring, you can then see which platforms are generating your business the greatest returns. This will in-turn all your to focus your main attention to that which is generating your greatest ROI versus spreading yourself too thing.
When it comes to social media, you’re much better off NOT being a jack of all trades and instead becoming a master of one (platform). This is exactly why using HubSpot is so critical for me and my business.

Mark Schaefer
TWEET NOWI use a variety of tools depending on what I’m working on but I definitely use Hootsuite every day. It is affordable, versatile and well-designed. I have been doing some influence marketing work lately and am experimenting with Traackr. They had added some nice features recently that are CRM-like. The last tool might surprise you — it’s simply Microsoft Excel. That might seem old-school but you can create so many custom approaches to management with this platform that it is indispensable.

Martin Shervington
TWEET NOWNod3x.com for influencer find and reach analysis across all platforms.
Very smart, and super user friendly dashboards.
Circloscope.com for taking posts/events/communities from Google+ filtering them, then adding them to circles.
Commoogle.com (not launched publicly yet, and is our tool) which overlays our database onto Social, via Chrome. This enables us to ‘know who we are sitting next to’ and communicate with them accordingly.

Matthew Marley
TWEET NOWBeing an early adopter I like to test all the latest new tools when they come out.
For my top 3 tools just now I would have to say:
Buzzsumo – This is great for finding relevant content and also finding influencers within your niche.
Hootsuite – This allows me to manage multiple social profiles for clients, schedule posts and create custom lists which allow me to monitor influencers, keep up with all the latest news and also assign tasks to other team members which is really useful when working with larger organisations. I also use Hootsuite to monitor other networks such as Tumblr and Instagram using apps which you can find in the app directory.
Buffer – My final tool has to be Buffer, I use this daily for scheduling and finding new content. I also love the deep integration Buffer has with other apps such Pocket and IFTTT I have various recipies set up in IFTTT that allow me to automate many of the manual process of curating and sharing content across multiple social accounts.

Melany Berger
TWEET NOWIf I could only use 3 tools for social media management they would have to be Buffer, Crowdfire and Canva.
Buffer keeps track of what I need to schedule on my social media channels when sometimes I can’t. I also love the Buffer Daily app because it suggests content for my feeds. This app helps keep my feeds full of interesting content. It also helps when I have nothing to say, which isn’t often.
Crowdfire (formerly Just Unfollow) allows me to see who is following and un-following me on twitter and IG. It lets me clean up the people that aren’t interested in following me. If they aren’t interested, neither am I. It is all about building meaningful relationships and interacting on social media.
Canva give me the creative power to create snarky-isms in graphic form. I am known for my snarky one-liners. “Snarky is witty but younger and better looking” looks so much better with a fun, colorful font over a bright backdrop. Don’t you think? Also, I can create graphics for blog posts and save a lot of money that I used to spend on graphic designers. People love fun images. I change my images as often as I change my underwear. WIN. WIN.

Melissa Galt
TWEET NOWThis is market dependent, my market is established service based entrepreneurs who want to transition their practice to a boutique brand with exclusive clientele for more revenue from each sale and every client. It’s about working with fewer better clients to make more money in less time. This goes against most social media of more, more, more. I keep it simple, my best tool is BufferApp. On Twitter I do use Tweetadder and couldn’t do it at all without Tweetdeck. I’ve used a lot of others including socialoomph and hootsuite but don’t love them. I know there are a ton of tools out there, for me, I’ve found less tools means more engagement!
I use LinkedIn to make connections with my ideal prospects and stay in touch with my ideal clients. It allows great visibility and credibility with their expert author blogging platform, and group interaction. LinkedIn only gives me a 180 degree view, their professional side.
I use Facebook to get the “rest of their story,” their lifestyle priorities, entertainment tastes, hobbies, and fun interests. This allows insights into points of connection and how to engage beyond the work side of life.
I use Twitter currently for connecting to influencers and ideal prospects, but am making a shift to G+ particularly exploring hangouts and leveraging YouTube. There is tremendous power in video blogging, trainings, and events where you can experience the personality of the presenter.
Nutshell:
LinkedIn
Facebook
Youtube

Michael Babcock
TWEET NOW- Crowdfire, it reminds me to engage with my twitter followers every day, and provide me a list of people I should possibly look into engaging with in the future. I love it on my iPhone and Accessible for the most part to Voiceover users (blind iPhone users).
- Hootsuite, especially since it’s possible to just tell it to Post my posting when it thinks the best time is. Crowdfire also does this as well, so I don’t have to think about scheduling any of my posts, that’s what made me not use some of the other social media management applications on a regular basis.
- MeetEdgar, though I’m not presently using at this time when I was using it helped a lot with posting content on a consistent basis.

Michael Musto
TWEET NOWI am happy to be a part of the roundup! And I think that this is a great question because I am quite sure we all have used many different tools over the years for management. I currently have a client that focuses entirely on marketing for doctors’ offices. They handle over 100 locations, some individual clients have multiple locations. They are currently developing a dashboard, in-house, to funnel all of their marketing efforts through and function as a portal for their clients. Besides handling their social media for these locations, I am working with them on which social media management tools they should integrate into their dashboard.
I spent the 1st 20+ years of my professional life in electronic distribution and manufacturing for a global corporation so I am all about having data at your fingertips and easy to manage. So naturally I was excited to get this email.
I would say if I had to pick just 3 it would be Hootsuite, Tailwind for Pinterest and SocialBro. I do like to use Dlvr.it as well as it always shows the images in the posts, whereas Hootsuite, for example, does not for Twitter.

Michalis Tiritas
TWEET NOWBuffer
My favourite tool for scheduling posts is Buffer. What I like most about Buffer though is everything that goes with it. They not only have a great, simple to use dashboard but the right support. Although some features are better on other platforms, they always respond personally to comments and are friendly, transparent and go a step beyond in social customer service. I also really enjoy their blogs which are interesting, exciting and engaging.
ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter is a favourite Twitter management tool. I love being able to sort followers and lists using a range of criteria and it’s one of very few platforms I have found which allows me to unfollow my unfollowers in chronological order, ie oldest ones first. They also have a Powerpost option which allows you to optimise your posts by publishing them at the best time to be seen and replied to.
Rignite
The potential I see for Rignite is as a solution for team working especially when working on campaigns. As well as the usual analytics, they have the ability to monitor multiple social media platforms and schedule posts. A social media manager is able to allocate tasks to individual team members and speak to them all via instant message.

Michelle Schroeder
TWEET NOW- Hootsuite. With Hootsuite, I can schedule things for Facebook and Twitter easily.
- Boardbooster. Boardbooster allows me to loop content on Pinterest with very minimal work from me.
- Tailwind. Tailwind lets me take part in tribes, so that I can share great content and others can share mine as well.

Mike Allton
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Mohd Imran
TWEET NOW#1 @Buffer || All-Star tool to Strategize, Optimize, Schedule, Automate, Publish, Track, Measure and Analyze All-Things Content all over the Social Web.
#2 @Postgrain || All-Star tool to Research, Strategize, Optimize, Schedule, Automate, Publish (& Re-Post), Monitor, Manage and Engage All-Things Instagram.
#3 @TweetenApp || All-Star tool to Make the most of Twitter.
Good combo of Top 3 Tools making operations even easier in the symphony of efficiency. There is always more. Nothing is enough. Rest of the tools like @Canva (for Visual Content), @Bitly (for Customized Link Analytics) & such, jumps their positions up & down according to the priorities of operations in real-time. To each their own!

Natascha Ljubic
TWEET NOWMy 3 Social Media Management Tools that I would not want to miss are:
For spreading and scheduling news across various social media channels
For social listening
For automating tasks
Beside those 3 tools I love to use
For graphics
Natascha Thomson
TWEET NOWLet me answer this question for small business owners like me, as the tools for enterprises are a completely different ball game in terms of investment.
Personally, I use the three following “tools” almost every day, and can’t imagine doing my work without them.
Bufferapp.com – The freemium version lets you schedule 10 free tweets at a time to send out at days and times of your choice.
Bitly.com – You might know Bitly as a link shortener (which is great, and I love to customize my URLs) but what I use it for most is measuring the clicks on my URLs all over social media. There is a surprisingly large set of stats available.
Twitonomy.com – IMHO, one of the better free tools to manage your Twitter following in an efficient and easy to understand way.
Buffer and Bitly both let you integrate their services via browser extensions, as well as connect with Twitter, Facebook etc.
For example, I can Buffer directly from my Twitter profile to fill my Buffer schedule. Any tweet I send is automatically tracked via Bitly.
Last, Buffer also let’s you fill your Buffer directly from websites. Say you read an interesting article on SocialMediaToday, just use your browser extension to put it on the tweet schedule.

Natasha Caldwell
TWEET NOWI love Buffer for its simplicity, clear analytics, and great content suggestions. Raven tools is my go-to for producing clean social media reports that can be delivered in PDF or live link format to a client! I use mention for social media monitoring–it’s a great tool to see all the conversations surrounding a brand or topic!

Neil Patel
TWEET NOWI use Buffer to schedule my social media posts. And I use Simply Measured to optimize how I market on the social web. Both of those tools are great and easy to use.

Nicole Buergers
TWEET NOWFor Social Media Management, I’m not a fan of scheduled tweets or sentiment measurement. What I care about: monitoring, easy posting (to one channel at a time, each with a different message) and any resultant traffic to site. If I had to pick three tools, I would say the most important are Google Analytics, Tweetdeck and the Facebook Pages Manager App.

Nirav Dave
TWEET NOWHere are my 3 favourite tools for effective social media management.
1. Hootsuite: This is the most user-friendly tool when it comes to monitoring and scheduling social media post for different social media networks. Hootsuite is easy to use. Allows me to respond directly from the dashboard and provides a centralized unit from where my entire social media team can collaborate seamlessly. Hootsuite is also a secure platform. Plus, it provides weekly reports that come in handy when tracking and measuring different social channels.
2. Canva: Visual content gains a higher number of clicks on social media and as such, Canva is the best tool for creating visually stunning images that capture audience attention. It is free to use and provides ample of design options for a range of social media networks
3. Google Analytics: It is only when you understand where your audience is coming from, what their preference is and what type of content is garnering more leads, would you be able to boost your ROI. And this is where Google Analytics comes into the picture. From a social media perspective, Google Analytics help me track and analyze my social media posts providing me with insightful data that helps me improve my marketing strategy.

Pauline Cabrera
TWEET NOWThat’s a tough question Chris, I use so many tools but if I could use only 3 tools for social media management, I’d choose Tailwind, Hootsuite and IFTTT.
1. Tailwind for Pinterest – I’m a heavy Pinterest user so I definitely need a tool for scheduling my pins, and Tailwind is the best tool for that. It has so many features. I love how I can bulk schedule pins, track my profile performance and my competitor’s and how I can monitor my pins (see my top pins, top repinners, latest pins, etc.)
2. Hootsuite for Twitter and Facebook – I’ve been a loyal customer of Hootsuite since day one. I love them because they’re 1) inexpensive 2) so many features. I like how I can easily schedule my posts, monitor my social media networks, their content suggestions feature and most of all, I love how I can auto share my favorite websites’ latest posts to my social media channels! Amazing, right?
3. IFTTT for Auto Posting – Who doesn’t love IFTTT? It’s free and super useful. I run a business where my clients are required to report their activities. Since I want my team to see the reports as well, I use IFTTT’s “Email to Facebook Group” recipe – where all my clients’ emails are automatically posted on my Facebook group. From then, my team and I can easily see the reports without opening each email – which saves us a lot of time! We just simply go to the Facebook group and see all the reports all at once. Also, I use it to auto share my favorite websites’ posts to Twitter.

Peg Fitzpatrick
TWEET NOWMy three power tools for social media management are:
Buffer • Easy to use, great customer service, and I love the drag and drop features.
Evernote • I save ideas, create lists, and use it for my mobile social media posting especially on Instagram. I save groups of hashtags to use on posts. I love that it syncs to all my devices.
Mentions app for Facebook • super charges my engagement for my Facebook pages with the ability to respond on the go.
My bonus social media tool that is moving up in importance for me is Trello. It’s amazing to work on projects with other people and keeps me uber organized with apps on my iPhone, iPad, and a desktop version.

Peter Banerjea
TWEET NOWI have used a wide variety of social media tools at SuccessIsWhat and at the various companies I have worked/ consulted for. I believe the choice of tool depends on the platform used, the size and structure of your team, your social media budget, and so on.
To answer your question, let me talk just about what we currently do at SuccessIsWhat, where we have one colleague working on social media for around an hour a day, in addition to me spending a few minutes a day.
We have more than 16,000 followers on Twitter, I will talk about what works for us primarily on Twitter.
- We use Viraltag to schedule recurring posts on Twitter and LinkedIn. We don’t have time to search for fresh content to curate everyday, and therefore, we have a large library of quotes, curated articles and our own posts that keep getting recycled. We have observed that there’s nothing wrong with recycling posts .
- Personally, I spend a good amount of time on Twitter to network with people and I used to get distracted and lose track of time. To keep ourselves in check, my team and I use Time Doctor, a time tracking tool, which automatically monitors the amount of time each of us are spending on social. Since we are a services company, it’s vital for us to track our time to determine our ROI on social media. Time Doctor is therefore a crucial part of our social media arsenal.
- We have recently begun using ManageFlitter to follow relevant people on Twitter. It has incredible targeting features and it’s much faster than trying to follow people from directly within Twitter. We also use it to unfollow inactive people.

Peter Lynch
TWEET NOWI use Buffer, Daily and Tweetdeck. These 3 tools provide everything I need to find content, queue my feeds and engage with people. They provide me simple and easy to use tools to stay engaged!

Peter Trapasso
TWEET NOWWhen it comes to enterprise-level social media management and analytics Sprinklr and Socialbakers are hard to beat. Both are best in class today. If you have thousands of employees in different time zones around the globe, these are the tools to use.They also require admin support and SMEs on staff or available as needed for the vendor to configure each platform and support the users well.

Phil Pallen
TWEET NOWYou only need three. Buffer, Crowdfire, Google Drive. Buffer schedules it all and I love their approach – keeping your account “topped up” – and I suggest keeping it topped up with evergreen content. Post time sensitive stuff day-to-day, and engage a few times a day. Use Crowdfire to grow your audience. That app and chapter 6 of my book (philp.al/buyshutuptweet) are a dangerous combo. And then Google Drive is where I plan out all of my posts with my team. That’s all you need.

Raelyn Tan
TWEET NOWBoardbooster to schedule my pins without having to be on Pinterest all day, the post scheduler within my Facebook page itself, and Google Analytics to allow me to track if my social media efforts have been effective.

Randy Milanovic
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Raul Tiru
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Rebecca Coleman
TWEET NOWHootsuite is my number 1 social media management tool. I use the Hootsuite Syndicator to subscribe to RSS feeds, and then I go through every day, and use the autoschedule feature to populate my twitter. It also allows me to manage multiple accounts all in once place.
Currently digging Promo Republic and Agorapulse. Also Adobe Spark is bomb.

Rebekah Radice
TWEET NOW

Rick Cooper
TWEET NOWSocial media is critical for both my own business and for clients. Having access to the right tools gives me increased efficiency, faster response times and increased profitability.
My 3 favorite tools for social media management are:
1. Hootsuite is the simplest tool I have found for managing and scheduling social media posts. I like the Publisher interface that lets you drag and drop social media posts anywhere on the calendar. You can also bulk upload queued social media posts.
2. Bundlepost is an amazing tool for Social Media Managers. It allows you to create a huge repository of social media content to easily select from and create bulk upload files for Hootsuite and other social media platforms. The team at Bundlepost has compiled a list of over 1,500,000 RSS Feeds and makes it easy to select blog posts to share on social media sites. You can manage content, schedules and exports for multiple clients from one account dashboard.
3. ManageFlitter is a useful tool for growing your community on Twitter. You can easily identify which accounts are active or those that are no longer in use. Plus, you can identify people you follow that are not following you. I have been able to grow my own Twitter network to over 24,000 followers by cleaning up the list of people I am following and finding new people to follow on a regular basis.
I use a variety of other tools to create content for social media and manage social media accounts. I’m always looking for other tools I can use to get results.

Rick Ramos
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Rob Petersen
TWEET NOW3 indispensable Social Media Management tools are: Topsy, BuzzSumo and Social Searcher (that’s social-searcher.com). I use them for different reasons and the insight and reporting they make possible.
TOPSY: Is great for real time reporting that start any social media analysis. It let me know what people are saying about an industry or brand and the keywords used most often. Topsy was recently acquired by Apple so, apparently, someone else saw their value, too.
BUZZSUMO: Identifies who are influencers for a particular keyword or topic. Once you see what people are saying, BuzzSumo identifies who is worth following and links that might be relevant.
SOCIAL SEARCHER: Has great analytics and dashboards. For a particular topic or keyword, it shows: 1) What social network are most active, 2) What days and times are most active 3) What people post (e.g. status, links, video) and 4) what the Sentiment Analysis is by social network. It a great way to summarize and show social media activity with great data visualization.

Ross Copping
TWEET NOWWell my challenge is getting what I use down to three.
I would be lost without my CRM Nimble. Why I include my CRM is that once I find someone or a business online I want to connect with all I need to to is paint over their name anywhere I might find them across the social ecosystem. Then Nimble intelligently does the rest. It gathers up all it can find from their presences online, asks me to confirm I have the right person/business and loads all then detail. Their website, social platforms and other presences and keeps them up to date. I can see their online activity; I can engage with them, make notes just generally build my all the intelligence I need. They can be cliens, potential clients, clients of competitors or competitors.
I use Hootsuite for managing all my general online presences; engaging with my network, monitoring, analaytics etc. Covers just about everything I need. I do use a couple of third party products that have an interface with Buffer so in come cases I would uses that as well, but not often.
I find it difficult to define a finite third platform, it would be a mix of Appearoo – I use to manage my all my social presences and grow my network. SocialBro and Commun.it for managing my Twitter network and Circloscope managing my Google Plus network.

Ryan Biddulph
TWEET NOWTweetdeck is a must for its ease of use. I pop in and out quickly, scan lists, engage and connect with rocking Tweeters through the platform. SocialOomph is a seamless scheduling tool, great for a “set it and forget” aspect of your social media marketing campaign. Hootsuite is a meld of the 2 in many ways; you can engage freely through the platform through your lists but can also use the nifty auto scheduling feature which sends out updates at optimal times.

Ryan Crockett
TWEET NOWI actually don’t even need 3 choices for social media management:
Shareist is really the only tool I currently need for social sharing and content marketing in general. This amazing software is something I’ve been searching for since I started in this industry, combining the best aspects of Evernote, Buffer, Klout and many others in one user-friendly interface. Through their chrome extension, I’m able to save quality content from the web on the fly, organize it, and schedule it for future posting. This platform allows me to create and share my own posts, perform research, and track social interaction on a myriad of different social sites. The team behind shareist is friendly, knowledgeable, and responsive, answering questions quickly from a convenient chat window or their active Facebook group. For so long, I’ve had to use multiple programs for social media management, but now there is only one… and it’s made all the difference.

Sam Hurley
TWEET NOW#1: Buffer
One of the most popular social management tools out there! And it’s easy to see why…
Simple to use, highly efficient and the support team are amazing. Schedule your posts across all the top networks in just a few clicks.
No social tool list would be complete without Buffer!
#2: Quuu
Puts your content scheduling process on auto-pilot by feeding your Buffer account with awesome content.
The perfect duo!
#3: Backly
A great allie in any robust content marketing strategy…
You can direct visitors back to your own content and always be in mind.
Try this powerful trio!

Samantha Kelly
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Sandra Tedford
TWEET NOWI use Hootsuite as it simplifies the process of planning and scheduling content in advance which is a huge time saver. The dashboard gives you a snapshot of all your social feeds on one screen. This allows you to strategically deliver social content based on your content strategy. Moreover, the Hootlet tool within Hootsuite gives you the ability to find interesting articles around the web and share on your social media channels.
Although similar to Hootsuite, Buffer helps to cut your time posting to social media channels in half. Reach your target audience by using the post scheduler to schedule posts during peak hours.
I always say the proof is in the numbers. Therefore I use Google Analytics to track all of my web statistics. This powerful tool not only helps you determine organic vs. paid traffic it provides real time data to monitor web traffic which is invaluable. Google Analytics gives you the ability to gain insights into the types of content that are resonating with readers.

Sarah Dudley
TWEET NOWIf I could use only 3 tools for social media management, I would use Hootsuite, StatusBrew & Canva – all for very unique purposes.
With Hootsuite, the value comes in the ability to manage the posting and scheduling of content to your channels. Rather than go directly into each channel, Hootsute enables you to easily schedule content across multiple channels and manage your channels directly from the dashboard.
StatusBrew is fantastic for community management. As you’re working to build your community, this tool is excellent in helping you identify new people to engage with and follow, as well as help you get a better understanding of how to pare down your community to only those who are really interested in connecting with you – as opposed to just following for a follow-back.
Finally, Canva is great for anyone doing social media on a budget. I am no graphic designer and Canva makes it easy to create great images at no-cost or low-cost. For a small monthly charge, you can even create a style guide for your brand or company that helps with consistency across imagery.

Sarah Pendley
TWEET NOWWith every new social media platform that takes center stage is a social media management tool waiting in the wings. Here are 3 social media management tools I find extremely helpful, one newly discovered and a few oldies but goodies. We understand the importance of consistent posting to grow an audience and engage with followers.
SkedSocial is my recent discovery in effectively scheduling for Instagram posts. SkedSocial features web uploading, scheduling, and supports multiple accounts.
Another social media management tool I utilize for content is Viraltag. Viraltag holds the ability to schedule Pins on Pinterest. Scheduling out Pins is a safe way to post to the platform without going down the rabbit hole of succulent DIYs and 4-ingrediant kale chip recipes.
Lastly, Hootsuite is classic yet remains the emperor of social media management tools. Hootsuite gives the user the freedom to schedule out posts on multiple platforms and download customizable reports. As a famous infomercial for Ronco Rotisserie once emphasized, on Hootsuite you can literally set it and forget it.

Shane Barker
TWEET NOWBuffer’s definitely number one because not only does it help with content scheduling, it also has a comprehensive analytics feature that lets you see how each of your social media posts is performing.
Sprout Social is also among my top three choices because of its in-built customer relationship management feature that enables you to provide better service and engage with them more effectively.
I also love CoSchedule’s calendar, which makes it so much easier to manage my social media marketing strategy. It helps me stay organized and on track with my posts. I can also use it to collaborate with my team regarding events and tasks.

Sheena White
TWEET NOWHootsuite is definitely one of my favorite tools for social media management. It lets me monitor and engage with my Twitter community quickly and easily. Post Planner is my Facebook tool of choice (and now it works on Twitter too, which is very convenient). I use it to get ideas for content that I can create and then also use it to do all of my scheduling. Social Quant is the other tool I couldn’t give up. It’s allowed me to automate my growth on Twitter, which has saved me a ton of time while still allowing me to create a massive, targeted community on Twitter.

Sheldon Payne
TWEET NOW“A Carpenter Is Only As Good As His Tools” and the same holds true for social media professionals. While there are many tools that make social management successful for my clients, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Google Analytics are my 3 must haves.
Hootsuite almost encompasses everything you need with it’s scheduling across multiple social profiles, team collaboration, analytics reports, and more recently it’s content suggestions for content curating.
Tweetdeck is my go to tool for social listening and real time interaction. It’s great for live events and twitter chats.
Measurement is vital to the success of social media management and for that I rely on Google Analytics. I use it provide data on what content is working on my clients webpages and from which social media properties. This data allows me to determine what future content to develop and which social channels to distribute the content.

Srish Agrawal
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Staci Salazar
TWEET NOW- CoSchedule — When you run a small business, there is only so much you can do yourself. Therefore, finding tools that help me automate some of the processes I already use is essential to my time management. I may have found the most efficient tool yet: CoSchedule.
- Tailwind — Pinterest is undoubtedly one of the biggest referrers for most bloggers. Tailwind helps to make Pinterest (and now Instagram) scheduling easy!
- Canva — People are visual and you need great graphics to capture their attention. Canva makes design simple for everyone. Create designs for Web or print: blog graphics, presentations, Facebook covers, flyers, posters, invitations and more.

Stephanie Wiriahardja
TWEET NOW- GoVideo by Vidyard: Record and embed video easily to your compose box! I get lots of email every day and it gets tiring to just read text, video is a cool way to show off one’s personality and to get the message across faster.
- Hootsuite: Tested and true for me for the last 6+ years! It’s still the best tool out there for social media management and Hootsuite made some really strategic acquisition the last few years that made the tool even better.
- Canva: Oh man, it’s so easy to create any beautiful graphic with Canva! I’m a little bit of a design snob as I graduated with a degree in Interactive Arts and Technology, but Canva seriously made designing so easy for anyone. Best of all, no expensive software needed!

Tiffany Ford
TWEET NOWThanks for including me… When I was searching for a social media management tool I came across sprout social and used their trial I was truly impressed. I use buffer as well. For tracking projects I use google drive spreadsheet logging the tasks I do for agents.
I’m an engager on all social media platforms for real estate agents so I’m a personal tool not a robot doing an automated task. For instance, truly wishing people happy birthday, happy anniversary, looking at photos of posts then commenting congrats throughout the day. Until I hit it big time, My system is my own involvement as a virtual assistant. Taking the load off Realtors so they can do what they do best sell real estate.

Tiffany Jennings
TWEET NOWPercolate: Great way to curate fresh content every day without having to manually set up lists, searches, etc. It also has scheduling, publishing and monitoring capabilities.
Simply Measured: For a little deeper look at analytics, measuring campaign, reach, engagement this is not only helpful it’s got a great UI.
Buffer: Cheap, suggests content, schedule/publishes and shows light analytics.
Runner up: Sprout Social: Great, reasonably priced platform that lets you schedule and see light analytics.

Tim McGee
TWEET NOWIf I could only use three social tools I would probably use Buffer, Canva, and the Twitter App (boring I know).
Buffer: To me Buffer is a vital part of my social presence because it helps me schedule out my posts simply and get a quick view of the results of each post I share.
Canva: I love including images in my social updates. They are a great way to engage my audience in a different way and Canva is my favorite tool for creating images and editing photos.
Twitter App: I struggle to find a social listening and engagement tool that meets my needs for a price that fits my client base. This has lead my to use Twitters official iphone app to monitor engagement and engage with friends online.

Tom Lyons
TWEET NOWMy favourite is: amplifr.com making it really easy for me to work with my team, they can create drafts assign the post to different social media sites, change the post to fit a certain post type. Facebook vs twitter. Then I can approve or edit, boom done, love it.
Zapier has replaced Ifttt, giving more options and better integration.
Stencil or Canva – We use Getstencil.com, it’s just like Canva, not quite as good, but we have lifetime access and they are improving it constantly, it does a great job with custom templates making the creation of SM images fast and efficient.

Tony Wood
TWEET NOWRather than going with the usual suspects which I’m sure many others will talk about, here are 3 of my indispensable social media tools that some people might not be so familiar with:
– Twitonomy – Easy on the eye, easy on the pocket. One of the best client reporting tools out there for Twitter.
– I’m a Gentleman – utterly bizarre name; utterly brilliant Chrome add-on. I use it countless times a day to save time when sharing images on social media. Does the job in seconds and probably saves me hours over the course of every week.
– Social Oomph – I’ve been using Social Oomph for more than 5 years as my go-to tool for curating ‘evergreen’ content. 100% reliable, 100% indispensable.

Valeria Landivar
TWEET NOWIf I could only use 3 tools for social media management, my choices would be:
Hootsuite: To manage, schedule and organize all of my social media presence and curate content at the same time. It also allows me to listen to my community and learn about them with analytics.
Google Analytics: To understand the impact of my social actions, know what is working and adjust my strategy accordingly. It’s very important to know who my visitors are and which actions they take when visiting my blog.
Canva: To personalize the images I share on Social Media in a very easy way. I love this tool because it makes it so simple to get optimized graphics for each platform.

Valerie Eaton
TWEET NOWI use Buffer Chrome app to share interesting articles that I come across to my social media accounts.
I use Hootsuite to track conversations, mentions, lists and keywords – and also do some bulk post scheduling.
I use SocialOomph to manage social media accounts and research followers.

Wendy Forbes
TWEET NOWIf I could only use three tools for social media management, at the top of my list would be Hootsuite’s Enterprise edition. I feel like I’m cheating by picking that because it integrates so many important components and apps all into one dashboard, but I couldn’t run my social business without it. Although it’s not necessarily a management tool, Canva is my choice for creating visual content. And third would have to be Scoop.it. Not only can I find great content there, but using the pro version, I can share across all my social networks.

Yasmine Trulley
TWEET NOWIt´s a pleasure to share with you my favorite tools:
Bitly: For me the best tool for shortening my links, control my brands and capture data. It´s very easy to use and you can shorten, share and track your Bitlinks in seconds.
Socialbro: The best tool for Twitter. You can find out when your best time to tweet is and get accurate information about your community. The Pro Plans give you a large list of Features which are very interesting.
Hootsuite: Because of the ability to manage all your social networks and schedule messages for future publishing.
