Massplanner was a convenient tool for people managing social media accounts on platforms including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Google+. These platforms host hundreds of millions if not billions of users, which means that they are opportune digital landscapes for marketing a business and amassing an audience. However, accomplishing these goals is more complicated than it seems, and each platform has its own rules and patterns that marketers had to learn to navigate.
That’s why a tool like Massplanner was so useful. Instead of executing every task manually, Massplanner allowed users to manage multiple profiles from one centralized location and automate the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of running a social media campaign (such as all those pesky things you do for attention, such as liking and commenting on other users’ posts). Massplanner was shut down for violating Instagram’s terms of service—but fortunately, there are several other alternatives that can help you achieve your ends.
1. YoViral
YoViral can help you connect with real, engaged followers who will like your posts and watch your videos—and again, either immediately or over time. If you purchase one of YoViral’s monthly plans, the service detects whenever you publish something new to Instagram and delivers likes within 30 seconds.
Expanding your online presence is extremely difficult to do manually, especially when you have so many other things on your plate (marketing is only one aspect of managing a business), so why not leverage a bit of help when it comes to spreading your name around?
YoViral’s order process is easy, too: with only your username and a few clicks about your payment information and which plan you want to order, you’ll see results as soon as you specify.
2. ViralRace
Many social media services on the market allow you to purchase fake followers to create the illusion of social proof. Social proof is the idea that if real people find your profile and see how many followers you have, they will assume that your high follower account indicates that you are worth following, and therefore, they will jump on board. This practice is unethical because it’s dishonest; you are tricking people into thinking you are more popular than you are.
ViralRace does not sell fake followers, though. Instead, the company pushes your content to real, active Instagram users who are more likely to be interested in your account based on who else they follow and interests they express.
When your posts attract more attention, they are more accessible on the Discover page, which drives even more traffic to your profile. ViralRace allows you to select whether you want your results gradually or instantly.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a widely used resource and an excellent substitute for Massplanner. It works across multiple social media sites so that you can manage all of your accounts from one convenient and well-organized dashboard. You don’t want to constantly switch between these accounts in order to update them with fresh content and interact with customers—you want to see everything that needs your attention in one place.
With Hootsuite, you can respond to comments on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and more. Social media is a convenient tool for handling customer service (many customers would rather approach you through social sites than via email and phone), so you can step up your game and answer as many questions as possible. Doing so also helps you eliminate the risks that come from cross-communication; you don’t want to repeat yourself to the same person or appear disorganized.
Hootsuite also boasts a convenient scheduling tool. Say you created an excellent piece of content to publish on Instagram, image and caption included. It took you all morning. However, it’s not in your best interests to post it immediately because your audience is not home from work or school yet, and therefore it will be buried under freshly-uploaded content from other accounts they follow.
So, you have to wait to log on and press the “post” button at the right moment. Instead of dealing with this inconvenience, Hootsuite allows you to create content and schedule it ahead of time so that it will automatically upload when you want it to.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another commonly used platform that makes it easy to schedule post ahead of time and monitor multiple accounts from one location. As excellent as your communication may be, though, return on investment in social media marketing is difficult to measure. How can you tell which efforts are working?
Much of it depends on what metric you care most about: increasing followers, follower engagement, conversions, and sales, etc. It’s also challenging to know how to improve your social media strategy if you cannot properly examine what actions are achieving your goals and which ones are counterproductive.
This is where reports and analytics come in, which Sprout Social is known for. With easy-to-read charts and graphs, Sprout Social can give you insight you’ve never had before into which posts have the furthest reach, what times of day are best to publish at, and what kinds of people belong to your audience.
When you know what kind of content performs the best, you can continue creating more of it instead of operating based on trial-and-error. Why not save yourself the trouble of creating ineffective content and optimize your social media strategy? The better you know your audience, the better you can cater to them.
5. Later
Like Sprout Social, Later is an Instagram partner, which means auto-publishing from their app is completely safe. Later also offers scheduling capabilities and in-depth campaign performance analytics. According to their website, you could plan an entire week’s worth of Instagram content within 20 minutes, which frees up your time to focus on other aspects of your business.
A successful Instagram campaign requires more than publishing at the right times and connecting with followers, though. Your content needs to be good, otherwise, why are people supposed to stick around? What you publish on your feed needs to provide people with value. Later doesn’t help you create content—there is no substitute for your own creativity—but it does make the organization and publishing process much smoother. You can import videos and photos from other digital places, locate and organize your content quickly, and alternate between accounts if you have (or manage) more than one.
In addition, Later offers a preview feature so that you can see what your Instagram feed will look like after you post an image, which is what other people will see when they visit your profile. This feature allows you to determine your account’s aesthetic without guesswork. In addition, not all content you post needs to be original as long as you give credit to the original creator.
Later enables you to collect user-generated content and repost it (as long as you have their permission, of course), which makes your followers feel noticed and keeps your feed fresh.
6. Popsters
You know that your content needs to be good—but how do you make it good? You’ve undoubtedly seen a post on Instagram that reached thousands of people and wondered how the publisher accomplished it. There is no formula, so it helps to know what your audience likes to see—as well as what your competitors are doing.
With Popsters, you can compare the efficiency of posts belonging to any page that you are interested in. You can analyze what kind of posts attract your niche audience and sort them based on popularity, engagement levels, dates, length, and other factors. What is it about these posts that works?
And better yet, how can you emulate it? While you should never, under any circumstances, copy someone else’s work, you can imitate their strategy. Understanding what makes a successful post successful allows you to implement the same elements in your own material so that you can reach more people and inspire more interaction with your followers. You can also export data into any file type you want, such as PDF, PNG, CSV, and more.
7. Crowdfire
As mentioned previously, not all content that you publish on your feed needs to be original. In fact, it’s in your best interests to share things from other sources. Perhaps someone wrote an article that you want to link to or an image you want to share that your followers will be interested in.
Doing so keeps your feed active with a consistent stream of material, but it also gets you noticed by the person who made it, who may be a significant figure in your field with an existing audience you can tap into. Sharing other content makes you a part of your industry’s conversation and helps you establish your brand as an authority.
Crowdfire enables you to automatically find images and articles that your audience is likely to find compelling and share them (which is convenient for when you are running out of ideas, and your followers might appreciate a little variety). You can also tailor posts for each social network, including Instagram, so that you do not have to manually create separate posts for every platform. Crowdfire is an excellent resource for scheduling posts and content curation.
8. SocialPilot
Social Pilot is particularly advantageous for businesses. If you have a brand you are trying to make popular on social media in order to reach new customers and increase sales, then you need tools that other brand owners may not, such as Google My Business analytics.
Whether you are working for a small business, an agency, or an enterprise, Social Pilot offers insightful analytics, calendar, bulk scheduling, and RSS feed automation features that can help you be part of the conversation on social media sites.
Social Pilot is also suited for businesses because it includes team collaboration capabilities. If you work with multiple people to handle social media campaigns, then it is important for everyone to have input and be on the same page before you take each step. Social Pilot streamlines the communication process.
Plus, it also offers client management tools if you manage social media accounts on behalf of other businesses. Social Pilot is easy to use and is on the more affordable side.
9. All Hashtag
Images and captions are not all there is to the Instagram game—hashtags are vital. Hashtags are how people find the content they want to see, how to make sure their own content gets seen, and people with related interests find each other to discuss them.
Using hashtags to your advantage, though, is still complicated. How many should you include? Which hashtags are best for you to explore in order to connect with other people? Should you use your own branded hashtag? The rules are loose, but it’s often said that eight to twelve hashtags is sufficient, while anything more or less could work against you (again, this is not something proven).
To find the best hashtags that will be most advantageous for your brand, All Hashtag can help you generate phrases to use, analyze the performances of existing ones, and select which hashtags are the most strategic for drawing attention. The popularity of distinct hashtags changes over time, too, so it pays to have a tool that can help you stay on top of a shifting landscape.
Accomplishing marketing goals on social media is complicated. Resources like Massplanner make the process easier, but if they find themselves shut down, then it’s convenient that marketers and brand owners have other options to turn to. Which social media tools do you think are right for your purposes?
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