Buffer vs Hootsuite vs MavSocial: 3 social media tools go head-to-head

Social media marketing has become a crucial factor which can contribute significantly towards the overall business growth rate. That’s why projecting a credible social presence is important for businesses to make a mark in today’s competitive market.

Entrepreneurs often find it a challenging task to promote their business on different social media channels effectively. When you’re running a business, finding enough time to manage your social media profiles may seem to be a daunting prospect. You can’t afford to spend all day curating tweets and Facebook posts.

Thankfully, there are several social media management tools that can be utilized to save hours of manual efforts. Here are three social media management tools to consolidate your promotional strategy across various social platforms.

Buffer

If you are looking for a social media management tool that is clean, simple and easy-to-navigate, then Buffer should be on top of your list. It offers all the elements to make your social media promotion more efficient and less time-consuming.

With Buffer, you can create and schedule posts on different social channels up to a week in advance. One exciting feature of Buffer is its ability to recommend the best posting times based on the engagement of your audience. Moreover, Buffer offers the option of automatic posting and allows you to select the frequency of your daily posts.

Buffer comes with an inbuilt analytics tab to get reports on the performance of your social media activities. Besides tracking the number of clicks, shares, retweets and mentions that your posts get, it also provides information about the reach of your posts. Buffer also brings you browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari to enable easy multi-platform scheduling while browsing.

To sum things up, Buffer not only automates your posting schedule on several social platforms, but also provides valuable insights about your social media engagements to improve your marketing strategy.

Pricing: Buffer has a free plan which is understandably limited in terms of features. It supports just one social profile for each platform, with the ability to schedule ten posts per profile. If you are looking to unlock more features, then you need to enroll for a paid plan. Paid version of Buffer is available at a starting price of US$10 a month.

HootSuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools out there in the market. It is used by millions of people around the world to promote their business on different social media platforms in an efficient manner.

HootSuite brings a powerful set of features to efficiently manage your social media engagements. It is best known for its extensive social listening dashboard which allows you to manage over 25 social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest.

You can customize your dashboard to display your preferred social channels and schedule your posts across multiple platforms. HootSuite’s Bulk Scheduler allows you to schedule as many as 350 posts at a time. Similar to Buffer, HootSuite too has an auto-scheduler, which can be used to determine the best time to post your content.

Another feature of HootSuite is the analytics dashboard. It allows you to easily track the performance of your marketing campaigns and growth of your social media community. It can also provide valuable insights about influencers, keywords, and trends in real-time. HootSuite brings you a team management interface which can be pretty useful to distribute tasks among multiple members.

Pricing: Hootsuite’s free plan offers you the ability to manage up to three social media profiles. To get access to all the features, you need to invest in a paid plan that starts from US$9.99 per month.

MavSocial

MavSocial is a simple yet powerful platform to optimize your social media management activities. It offers a variety of interesting features that can significantly improve the efficiency of your social campaigns. One of the most impressive features of MavSocial is its ability to simplify visual content management. It allows you to store, organize and share all your multimedia content in one place.

MavSocial’s Content Calendar provides you full control over scheduling your posts across various social media platforms. It is also capable of making smart scheduling decisions on your behalf.

It brings you an exciting feature in the form of Social Inbox. MavSocial’s Social Inbox is designed to offer you a consolidated view of all social media engagements, so that you can monitor and interact with your followers across different social channels from a single interface. Last but not the least, MavSocial’s interactive Reporting Dashboard with a wide range of metrics can provide you analytical insights on the performance of your social campaigns.

Pricing: MavSocial offers a free plan to manage your activities on Facebook and Twitter. It allows you to publish up to ten posts per network on a day-to-day basis. MavSocial’s Pro plan costs US$59 per month and it is scalable up to ten users and 50 social profiles.