Online marketing firms solve a diverse set of challenges on a daily basis. Some of the best online marketing firms work with a large number of customers across industries and business environments.

The sheer number of social media platforms, posting schedules, content calendars can be hard to manage across clients. A single client alone can have multiple Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat handles, and Facebook pages.

To be able to manage their workflows efficiently the best online marketing firms make use of robust social media management tools.

For a tool to be versatile, it should have certain core capabilities –

• Scalable collaboration capabilities since many users would be operating it, both at your end and the clients.
• Multiple accounts since you’ll be managing many accounts across social media networks.
• Comprehensive reporting capabilities that create clean reports as that will be your KPI.
• An intelligent permissions system that ensures there is a separation of client data.

Now that we know what we’re looking for let’s look at some of the best social media management tools out there.

The One Tool That the Best Online Marketing Firms Use

SproutSocial is one of the most versatile tools out there when it comes to social media management.

It allows for multi-client use and has capabilities for publishing, social media monitoring, analytics, reporting, and engagement.

As an online marketing firm, you’ll be able to engage with comments and monitor content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. You’ll also be able to measure the activity on your paid posts for Facebook and Instagram.

The built-in editor allows you to edit text and images, while the ‘send optimization tool’ can intelligently tell you the best time to schedule your posts for maximum engagement.

Managing, scheduling, and publishing posts across multiple social media accounts, networks, and campaign tags is a breeze with SproutSocial. It’s deep integration with Google Analytics also gives you rich insights into which social channels are driving the most traffic.

That’s not all. With SproutSocial you can measure your campaign performance, do sentiment analysis, highlight influencers, and get reports in a white-label PDF format for easy distribution.

BuzzSumo for Optimal Content on Social Media

Beyond just managing and scheduling posts, your client also expects from you high-quality content that is purpose-built for each social platform.

BuzzSumo is your go-to tool for just that. It’s great for making sense of social media, content, and SEO. It has one of the most intuitive UX, which makes for quicker access to insights.

BuzzSumo can help you find trends before they arise and also discover new and popular content on the web. Put in a topic or keyword and BuzzSumo will fetch you a list of popular posts that are trending in a particular category.

It can also highlight influencers that you’d want to target for a specific keyword. This is a great way to research the content that you should build that catches the eyes of an influencer or their followers.

Keep an Eye on Your Competitors With Rival IQ

Competitor analysis is a core part of effective social media management. Rival IQ offers deep analytics on your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts to reveal which posts are high performing.

It analyzes your competitor’s post as well and can even alert you if one of your competitor’s posts are seeing significant engagement. This extends to both paid as well as unpaid posts.

Rival IQ helps with content discovery as well. It can create a list of popular hashtags for your industry and also a report on the hashtags your competitors are using and their performance.

All of this data is consolidated in a way that makes it easy to compare your client’s and your competitor’s performance. These reports are automated, saving you precious time!

Just like SproutSocial, Rival IQ also integrates with Google Analytics to give you insights into your website traffic.

The right social media management tool for online marketing firms is different for each firm. The right tool should allow for flexibility, easy collaboration, and be able to manage complex workflows. Try out different tools to see which one fits your marketing team!