Winning on social media today has become a tactical play - one that requires an entire room of experts. The amount of social media related professions has grown and as brands continue making serious monetary investments in social the issue of soaring costs and resources becomes the bottleneck for brands that want to reach their audiences on the News Feed and scale their marketing.

Employing machine learning to make strategic investments has resolved guesswork from the day-to-day for many marketers. The advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) certainly made it easier for marketers to pinpoint what content is truly engaging their audiences. It helped them return more value from their social media investments through efficiency. In the next year, we should see automation take over other integral parts of social media, especially in the area of audience segmentation and building of accurate audience personas for brands.

With help from a social media management platform, you can let your voice be heard and your brand be seen.

The best social media management tools are the ones that meet your needs and help you achieve your goals. Here are 25 top ones to consider.

Learn how Hootsuite stacks up to the competition

According to Forrester, "Hootsuite's revamped capabilities officially cement its enterprise status." Read the report to better evaluate enterprise social media solutions and to see where our industry is headed.

What happened to social relationship platforms (SRPs)? Given the breadth and impact of social marketing initiatives addressing all six phases of our customer lifecycle across the enterprise, we now refer to these technologies as social media management solutions. 
 
Which SMMS capabilities bring together marketing and other business units? Given the increase in global incidents and even brand missteps, it is essential to have a process and technology that allows you to suspend previously scheduled posts for both customer sensitivity and brand equity reasons. 
 
As a marketer, what considerations should I include in my SMMS research? Don’t start researching providers until you have a list of requirements and specific objectives. 
 
Clients can read The Forrester Wave™: Social Media Management Solutions, Q2 2017 to learn more about the 10 leading vendors in the SMMS space.

The process of looping your social media posts, for free, is extremely easy. For the purpose, all you need to do is:

• Provide Information on your Free IFTTT Account 
• Create a free Buffer Account for updating content on Google+ or Facebook Groups
• Create a new Google Account or use existing account, for the purpose of using Google Calendar
• Download .csv Auto Post Template (editable in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets) for easy managing of your posts

1. PromoRepublic

2. Social Flow

3. MeetEdgar

4. Tagboard

5. BuzzSumo

6. Tailwind

7. Agora Pulse

8. Visage

9. Tweepi

10. Socedo

Social media ad spending continues to grow in the US, with eMarketer forecasting the format will make up more than 20% of digital ad spending by 2017. Yet even as marketers’ social media budgets increase, many are still struggling to make sense of its overall impact on their business.

Every social media manager has his or her own preferred tool, but it's usually one of these five. This infographic is based on detailed customer reviews.

While fairly simple to understand as a concept, finding your actual buyer persona(s) can be a daunting task. You need to figure out which questions are most important to define your buyers. Some questions might include:

What pain point does our product solve for our customers?
What size business is our customer?
What industry do they represent?
What is their title within the organization?
How do they measure success?
When are they most likely to be looking for your products?
Who are they in their free time?
What social media networks do they prefer?

So which B2B industries excel on social media? Here are just a few of the key takeaways:

• Biotech, engineering, and financial services brands are in the social media sweet spot. 
• Machinery manufacturers are adept at growing their audiences. 
• Biotech brands know how to engage audiences. 
• Are software brands in a social media bubble? 

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