Tool Evaluation

How I decide what to buy or which tool to use – classic issue tree: "what tool should I get for X?" breaks down cleanly.

Rough description: what do you actually want (e.g. "a social media posting tool"). A little research usually turns up the actual market category or name for it.
What tools are there: the candidate list.
Criteria: what actually matters to you – cost, quality, a specific feature. Keep a core set of three to five max, plus secondary features. Too many criteria and the exercise stops being useful.
Weighting: how important is each criterion to you. Cost might matter a lot; a specific feature (e.g. scheduling across many channels) might matter more than price.
Weighted assessment: grade each candidate tool against the weighted criteria.
Recommendation: usually one tool, with a backup.

If you want to be more thorough, actually trial the top one to three candidates – most tools offer a free version or trial for a week or two. Start with the one you most recommend: if it's good, just go with it; if not, try the next. Even a rushed version of this (an hour, not a week) is worth doing – can you actually get it to work, can you do the thing you need to do. This is also where weak criteria or job stories show up: if you said you needed to export your data or get certain analytics, the trial is where you actually check that, rather than assuming.