Announcing the Top Rated Social Media Marketing Tools for 2019

Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Social Media Marketing Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

Here are the winners:

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media management suite that includes many social marketing features: Message and activity aggregation dashboard that allows marketers to comment, post and reply to messages publicly or privately, an AI assistant to suppress noise, and a collaboration inbox that enables  a team of marketers to respond quickly and effectively to customer complaints across social channels.

Agorapulse’s analytics allow marketers to identify high performing content and posts, and what type of topics or replies encourage the most shares, replies, likes. The platform also provides a marketing calendar for posting and sharing content, a social posting approval workflow, and themes that social content can be organized into and analyzed to see which theme boosts audience engagement the most. 

On TrustRadius, a large majority of Agorapulse users i (77%) are employed at small companies. Reviewers praise Agorapulse’s exceptional publishing calendar, with its content preview feature and the ability to manage an extended publishing schedule, its advanced reporting capabilities, and interactive dashboard from which marketers can reply to any and all posts with ease.

“Agorapulse provides our Marketing Department a terrific platform to schedule all our social media content. Its intuitive interface allows us to create and preview a post from scratch which we can then either send instantly or schedule later across multiple platforms all at once. With tools like the URL Tracker, we are able to implement our own campaign details and subsequently monitor a post’s progress… The time that has been saved using the features highlighted previously has been great. This allows us to pay more attention to other aspects of the business.”

– Joe Douglas | Senior Communications Officer | Wine and Spirits Company

Buffer

Buffer is a social media management suite that supports social media publishing, social responding with a team inbox for collaboration, and an analytics tool for measuring audience engagement with social media campaigns and content. The analytics tool provides overall and post-specific metrics for engagement and hashtag performance, as well as insights about how well posts perform among specific audience demographic segments. 

From Buffer’s publishing dashboard, content teams can build a content schedule for distribution to a wide range of social media platforms. Buffer supports collaborative drafting and publishing of social content with a post drafting process and approval workflow with feedback sharing for team members. 

The majority (60%) of Buffer users on TrustRadius are from small businesses. Reviewers enjoy Buffer’s post scheduling functionality, ability to automatically publish posts across multiple social channels, and its reach and engagement analytics.

“We use Buffer to manage our social media channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We plan out our content calendar of posts a month in advance, and we utilize Buffer to upload all that content and schedule various dates and times throughout the month to be posted… [Buffer] allows us to collaborate on posts, review and approve content through various user permission levels.. It also allows us to review each channel’s analytics to see how the content we are posting is performing… It is a lifesaver when it comes to managing different social media channels for various departments in one place. The approval process is exactly what we’re looking for.”

–Verified User | Manager in Marketing | Higher Education Company

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform which offers social tools for marketers, including social media campaign planning and publishing, campaign monitoring and social response management, as well as competitor analytics and customizable reports. Sprout Analytics, part of the Sprout Social suite, provides detailed analysis to understand which channels, posts, teams, and individuals are responsible for greatest engagement, and provides insight into brand-relevant trends and activity across social channels. 

On TrustRadius, a majority (66%) of Sprout Social users are from either small or midsize businesses. Sprout Social’s reviewers generally praise its social media post scheduling tool for its ease of use and reliability, its team inbox and collaboration workflow, and its robust brand monitoring, analytics and comprehensive reporting available across the full spectrum of social media platforms.

“I have used Sprout Social for multiple companies and always just within the marketing organization, and of course, on behalf of executive leadership. It’s an awesome tool that enables your business to thoughtfully schedule posts for all platforms, monitor comments, collaborate with others on your team with a really solid editorial calendar. It’s also super cool that you can schedule Instagram posts and stories! The calendar features rocks.”

Sylvia Flores | Chief Creative Officer | Marketing and Advertising Company

Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Social Media Marketing Tools Award!

What is Social Media Marketing Software?

Social media marketing software encompasses a variety of  tools marketers can use to increase presence on social media and engage their audience. These tools may provide contesting and sweepstakes, hashtag campaigns, social listening & monitoring, social media curation, a brand search tool, or a social aggregator to track mentions and activity. Robust social media marketing suites excel at centralizing management of social marketing campaigns and provide a publishing calendar and approval workflow that meets marketers’  needs. 

The ability to manage multiple social accounts for each of their clients is especially important for marketing agencies, and any social media marketing tool they are considering should have this functionality. Many social media marketing suites also include social marketing analytics capabilities that allow marketers to track engagement with social campaigns, and see which types of content performs best on different social channels. 

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Social Media Marketing Tools list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap as of June 3rd, 2019. To qualify for the Social Media Marketing Tools Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.