How to Choose Your Social Media Marketing Platform: HootSuite, Buffer or Oktopost?

Social media is all about relationships and engagement, and the best way to engage with people on social networks is by directly being active on those networks. However, managing multiple social media marketing channels can be very time consuming, which is why many marketing managers choose to use the help of a social media management platform.

Part of my job as the head of marketing for Roojoom is to manage our social media marketing. In an attempt to scale up our social media efforts, I’ve tried several of these platforms, and now use two of them on a daily basis. They say there’s nothing better than learning from one’s experience (except learning from your own!) – so here are the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

This post walks you through:

• Why do you need a social media marketing platform?
• Key features of 3 social media marketing tools
• Tips for using each platform to maximize social engagement

So, why do you need a social media marketing platform anyway?

If you are a marketing professional, you need at least one social media marketing platform.
When I first started working for Roojoom, I was only aware of HootSuite. I had not used it before, but now that I was managing both my personal social media networks and Roojoom’s, I knew it would be easier to use a tool that aggregates all the information in one place.

At first I tried managing all of my social activity via HootSuite but I didn’t like it because it made me feel disconnected from what was going on in the groups I was active in. Now I use HootSuite for scheduling posts to Twitter and to Roojoom’s pages on Linkedin, Facebook and Google+. For my personal accounts and group discussions I still use the “old fashioned way” of manually posting so that I really feel a part of the conversations in real time.

So if I do most of the work manually anyway, why use HootSuite? I mostly use HootSuite to listen and engage in relevant conversations. I watch for mentions of me or my company, keywords that interest me so I can get involved in relevant discussions, and to learn if someone shared my content so I can thank them and engage in a conversation about it. This is the essence of why you need a social media marketing platform: to listen.

* Hootsuite Tip: Did you know that you can filter any HootSuite stream by keywords or Klout score? This gives you the ability to quickly go over an active stream and find out what influencers have to say about keywords you are most interested in.

Here is how:

1) Click the small arrow at the top of your stream and choose “filter by…”



2) From the drop down menu choose Klout Score and move the cursor to only see posts from people with a certain Klout Score.

HootSuite vs. Buffer vs. Oktopost: My Personal Journey

While HootSuite offers a wide set of features, it is also a complex platform and it takes time to get used to all the different features it offers. Sometimes all you want to do is take a piece of content and schedule it to go out on social media at a specific time frame that you know your audience is listening.

Buffer is the ultimate go-to tool for this purpose: it is simple to use for scheduling content to be pushed out on social media at pre-determined time slots.

Many marketers rely on Buffer to manage their entire social media distribution. Also, I really like Buffer’s blog as it has great insights and tips to maximize results from social media. For these reasons, I decided to try out Buffer for a few months. Conclusion? While adding posts to queues is nice to have, without the listening and monitoring it wasn’t enough for me.

Then I discovered Oktopost. Disclaimer: Oktopost is an Israeli startup and since beginning to use it I’ve now met their team on several occasions, and even spoke at the Mashable Social Media day they were hosting. But be sure that whatever I say here is my objective opinion on their service.

When I first tried Oktopost I wasn’t impressed. It felt like a faded version of HootSuite with fewer features. However, it was my personal connection with the team that pushed me to investigate it further. And it proved worthy of my time: I discovered a great tool to increase and measure my social media ROI.

Today, I manage most of Roojoom’s social media marketing with Oktopost. It is a sophisticated tool that is built to launch social media campaigns in a powerful way. Since you might not know it yet, I will go over the main features that I use:

1. Campaigns

One of my favorite things about Oktopost is that it makes you treat the promotion of content on social media as individual “campaigns.” You can create different campaigns for every type of content, which then makes it easier to measure it’s ROI as you see the results of each campaign separately and compare them against each other.

Here is a screen shot of my Oktopost calendar, each color marks a different campaign:

2. The Auto-Poster

When launching an Oktopost campaign, you will see a tempting red button on the left hand corner that says “New Post” – don’t click on it. Instead:

1)    Go to message assets
2)    Add different messages for each social media network
3)    Then go to auto-poster, choose the network, the profiles and the time span and let the auto poster schedule the posts and tweets for you. This is a great way to promote the same piece of content onto different groups and networks without being spammy.

3. Queues

This is the “Buffer” version of Oktopost. Instead of adding content into a specific campaign, you can add it to a queue. This is especially helpful for content curation – add the Oktopost bookmark button to your browser and add interesting content into the relevant queue.

To set up this feature, you will first need to define how many times a day you want to post from each profile and what are the times slots for each. To do this, go to your profiles where you can set the “queue settings” of each one of your profiles.

Advanced features: Oktopost also has social listening features, although not as sophisticated as Hootsuite’s. It also lets you track conversions from each and every post by adding a pixel to your website.

Conclusion

To sum up, if you are looking for a simple tool to schedule social media posts, use Buffer. It’s very convenient and doesn’t require any set up or learning curve.

Looking for a more in depth tool that will allow you to listen to your social community, engage in conversations and analyze results? Use Hootsuite.

However, if you are looking for something that has a little of both, and also lets you build social media marketing campaigns and track conversions, try Oktopost for a one stop shop for your social media marketing.

Source
http://www.steamfeed.com/hootsuite-vs-buffer-vs-oktopost-choose-social-media-marketing-platform/