10 Best Social Media Management Tools

As the social media landscape continues to shift, promoting your events on social media, be it a tour or a merch sale, has grown increasingly difficult, particularly where organic reach is concerned. Here we look at ten of the best social media management tools that can help you up your promotional game.

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Guest post by Alyssa Torres of Eventbrite

If it feels like marketing your events on social media keeps getting harder, you’re not imagining things — it has, especially for organic reach.

The cause? Social media platforms are increasingly sensitive about brands’ engagement rates, which means if your followers aren’t liking or commenting on your content, it can seriously harm your ability to show up in their feeds in the future. If you want to hold onto or even grow your reach, you need to feed your followers a steady stream of great content regularly.

Luckily, there’s a plethora of useful social media management tools out there to help you automate the most labor-intensive parts of the process, so you don’t have to share content to each platform in real time.

Here are the ten best social media management tools for events.

Social media management tool #1: The publisher: Buffer

Buffer allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts from one web or mobile dashboard. The platform-specific scheduling calendar suggests time slots that are optimized for your audience’s activity on each platform, but these times can be customized if you prefer to post at particular times.

Notable features:

• A web browser extension you can install for easy one-click content sharing
• At-a-glance engagement stats you can easily email to others on your team
• Flexible team member functionality so you can assign varying levels of access to each linked account

Social media management tool #2: The recycler: Edgar

Despite their ephemeral nature, events tend to produce a lot of evergreen content — things you can post again and again, without a dated or repetitive feel. Edgar is a tool that automates the reposting of your evergreen content across multiple platforms, to make sure no one misses it.

Notable features:

• Ability to set expiration dates for content (perfect for time-based ticket sales), stop and start the feed at will, or reshuffle to bump a pivotal or time-sensitive item to the top
• Ability to organize posts by category and set different publishing times for each bucket of content on each platform
• Time-saving features like a browser extension so you can add content to Edgar right from your site, built-in URL shorteners, and RSS feed imports

Social media management tool #3: The overall manager: Hootsuite

In addition to bulk scheduling functionality, Hootsuite (one of the most well known and widely used content publishing tools) includes features that let you engage with your audience. Plus, if you use Eventbrite, you can manage and view metrics from your Hootsuite account directly from your Eventbrite dashboard.

Notable features:

• Listening and engagement tools so you can respond to posts without leaving your Hootsuite dashboard
• In-depth reporting to help you gauge how your content performs before, during, and after an event
• The ability to monitor multiple feeds and multiple users

Social media management tool #4: The giveaway manager: Rafflecopter

There are many giveaway platforms for social media, but Rafflecopter goes above and beyond, allowing you to incentivize actions beyond just entering the giveaway, so you can get more out of each promotion.

Notable features:

• Customizable entry methods so you can incentivize the specific actions you want your audience to take to win tickets
• One-click integrations so you can easily share your promotions to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest
• Easy-to-place code (no engineers required!) if you want to host the giveaway on your website

Social media management tool #5: The direct messenger: SocialOomph

An easy way to engage followers on Twitter is to send them a direct message (DM), a quick note of thanks or even a take away, like “There are still tickets left for our event! Get a discount here.” SocialOomph direct messages every new follower for you, so you don’t have to.

Notable features:

• The option to manually approve which new followers you send your DM to
• Automated keyword searches, so SocialOomph can surface relevant accounts for you to follow (which encourages a follow-back)
• Standard scheduling and publishing capabilities across platforms, so you can automatically send ticket discounts out on a regular basis

Social media management tool #6: The essential promo page: Facebook Events

Facebook Events is a free tool offered by Facebook to share or advertise your event within the platform. Every time someone clicks “Interested” or “Going” on your Facebook Event, it gets shared in their friends’ news feeds, making the platform a great way to promote your event by word-of-mouth.

Notable features:

• Location tags that enable users to find your event when searching for activities near them
• Date and time fields which help Facebook’s algorithm surface your event in users’ feeds at the right time
• Automatic promotion of your event in the news feeds of engaged users’ friends, and the ability for users to send events directly to friends to rally the troops

Social media management tool #7: The ad manager: Boostable

Boostable manages your Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns for you, including ad creation, budget, targeting (including retargeting options), and optimization.To get started, all you need to know is what you want to advertise and how much you want to spend.

Notable features:

• A robust campaign dashboard that shows you how your ads are performing
• Weekly email updates that summarize performance
• AUtomatically crafted target audience lists of event-goers

Social media management tool #8: The brand advocate identifier: SocialRank

SocialRank can help you pinpoint potential brand advocates from within your existing audience of followers on Twitter and Instagram. It also helps you sort your followers, cross-checking them against the followers of similar events, surfacing relevant accounts for you to target.

Notable features:

• Ability to send targeted Twitter DMs to groups of people based on filtering capabilities
• Ability to search through followers of other accounts, so you can target people who are following other events like yours
• An export function to CSV or PDF, so you can use the lists you gather in other applications, including paid social campaigns

Social media management tool #9: The competition squasher: Socialbakers

Socialbakers empowers you to understand how your event’s social presence stacks up against other similar events. By measuring and analyzing your social performance against your competitors, you can understand what they’re doing well and how to improve your strategy.

Notable features:

• Ability to analyze performance across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube
• Functionality to track both native metrics and ad metrics
• Detailed competitive analysis, including granular insights

Social media management tool #10: The task automator: Zapier

Zapier moves information between your web apps automatically, allowing you to create a triggered reaction known as a “zap.” So what does that look like for automating social media? You could create a zap for posting YouTube videos to Facebook, tweeting new RSS feed items, sharing WordPress posts to LinkedIn, or posting to multiple Facebook pages.

Notable features:

• Set up zaps without developer help for do-it-yourself automation
• Use team accounts to collaborate and share unlimited workflows
• Integrated with all major social media applications, as well as managers like Hootsuite

For an in-depth list of all the most useful social media management tools, including pricing, download the full eBook: The Best Social Media Tools for Sophisticated Marketers.

Alyssa is an channel marketer at Eventbrite who loves thinking about the problems that organizers face in growing their events. In a past life, she organized the Sapphire Ball and other galas for her college community. She’s a California native who loves avocados, nacho cheese, and judging Bachelorette brackets.