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Juggling multiple social media channels on a daily basis is no easy feat; a good social media management tool is worth it’s weight in digital gold. Customers, fans, and the general public are all following your social media accounts 24/7, in real time and with high expectations. They expect to see a steady stream of creative posts, informative content, sincere and meaningful interactions and engagement, and immediate responses to a majority of their questions and comments.

A unified platform for managing all of these disparate social media channels is not just a coveted luxury anymore; it’s a necessity. Multiple companies have stepped in to fill this void, and each one offers a different user interface with different features and programming. As an agency, we have used Hootsuite, Yext, and, most recently, eClincher. Using eClincher as a case study, here are six social media management challenges we have solved by using a social media management tool.

  1. Manual publishing of social media content: Without a social media management platform, you essentially become responsible for manually cultivating and posting content to each of your social media channels on a daily and sometimes hourly basis. Efficiently leveraging your content across multiple social platforms becomes labor-intensive and cumbersome. eClincher, however, allows you to automatically and efficiently schedule content for posting to all of your social media channels. This publishing and scheduling tool includes auto-link verification, a tool to automatically shorten URLs, and the ability to preview a post before it gets published in its native environment. In addition, eClincher offers the Auto Post tool, designed to help you cycle or reuse your content without human intervention. Auto Post uses  queues when each queue contains specific content that get published on a daily basis with a pre-defined schedule. Uploading your posts can be done with Bulk Upload where you can quickly upload hundreds of posts to your queues.
  2. Engaging meaningfully with your audience: Followers who engage with your social media accounts all expect prompt, thoughtful, accurate responses—a daunting prospect for you to manage on a 24/7 basis. eClincher offers two important engagement tools to combat this challenge: live feeds of all social media activity from across all of your channels, as well as a universal inbox that aggregates messages, new followers, and notifications from all of your social accounts. The Unified Social Inbox is expertly designed to allow you to categorize and label every message, so you can, for example, keep track of all interactions with influencers, or all inquiries of a specific nature from potential customers. The Unified Social Inbox even comes with a search bar to easily find and retrieve archived messages at any time.
  3. Finding the content that matters to you: Social media is a big, overwhelming space, but if you know where to look, it also comes with tremendous potential to gain real-time insights into news and trends relevant to you. eClincher has developed curated content feeds that allow you to filter out all of the noise and focus on just the trends, hashtags, industry influencers, and keywords that matter to you. Using the Custom Search Feeds feature, you are able to input specific search terms and then—on an ongoing, real-time basis—gain a pulse on what’s happening in your corner of the world, who’s talking about it, and how it relates back to you.
  4. Having all platforms in one place: For a social media management platform to be useful, it needs to integrate with as many channels and complementary systems as possible. It also needs to be easy to use. eClincher offers integration with eight social media channels (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Blogger, and YouTube), and also is fully integrated with popular third-party services including RSS/Atom feeds, Feedly, Pocket, and Canva. Finally, eClincher is designed to work on tablets and smartphones.
  5. Trying to decipher convoluted analytics: If you’re on social media for a purpose other than just pure fun, you care about analytics. Indeed, the powerful insights gained through analytics are what justify the investment of time and resources into your social media channels. And no matter how you use social media to market and promote something, you are using these analytics to help you plan and execute an audience engagement strategy. Additionally, many supervisors and managers expect to see this data on a monthly or even weekly basis. eClincher was built to capture real-time analytics data from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Blogger, YouTube, and Instagram (coming soon) – and display everything on one intuitive and visually engaging dashboard that cuts out needless clutter and confusion. Users also get unlimited access to analytics reports for all of their social media channels, which dramatically streamlines the reporting process.
  6. Customizing the features that work for you: We all have different needs and wants in a social media management platform; some of us manage just a handful of social media accounts for a small business or a personal brand, while others maintain dozens of accounts across multiple brands and are constantly publishing, engaging, monitoring trends, and running analytics. eClincher has monthly plans that start at $15/month for users with up to five social media profiles. Pricing also is tailored to how many team members require access to the eClincher platform.

Managing social media channels does not have to be time-consuming, cumbersome, labor-intensive daily process that it is for so many of us. A social media management platform can take out a lot of the mundanity and guesswork that often accompanies running an organization’s online presence. A solid social media platform should enable you to publish seamlessly, engage meaningfully with your audience, keep you informed through curated content feeds, bring clarity to convoluted analytics, and offer optimized, customized solutions for every user. With this newfound knowledge, you should now be able to leverage the power of social media to your advantage.