What are social media marketing tools? If you’re faced with defining this quickly, you can say they’re the tools and platforms that let you market your content to social media users. In reality, they’re much more than that.
Social media marketing tools are a set of tools and platforms that help businesses, brands, and people alike to develop their presence on social media channels so they can interact with their audience and promote the content they share. The right way to use them is to amplify your existing marketing efforts and help you find new customers.
Social media marketing tools help you: schedule, publish, monitor, and analyze the effectiveness of your social media posts; manage messages from followers; build, automate, and manage ads; identify influencers; track customer interactions with your brand on social media; and much more!
In this guide, we’ll talk about some of the best social media marketing tools in the industry today.
Can What Social Media Marketing Tools
Are you ready to level up your social game? If you want your social media marketing to be effective, you’ll need to invest in the right tools for the job. Tools that help you manage and optimize your posts.
Well, guess what.
Today’s your lucky day. We’re sharing 35 awesome tools that’ll transform your social media marketing skills.
Is Social Media Marketing That Important?
Absolutely! It’s been one of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies for some time. Social media lets you grow your visibility and brand awareness without having to pay for it.
However, when it comes time to scale your social media campaigns, you need something extra. You simply can’t dominate social media without some important marketing tools in your arsenal.
Good social media tools help you find more content to share. Use them to schedule posts at the perfect time, as well as measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. What’s more, they give actionable insights you can use to improve your social presence.
Ready to find out which social media marketing tools are best for your business? Let’s dive right in.
Table of Contents (Quick Links)
Lead Generation Tools
OptinMonster
RafflePress
Smash Balloon
Audiense
Tweepi
Buyer Persona Tools
Socedo
Socialbakers
Security Tools
ZeroFOX
LastPass
Analytical Tools
Followerwonk
Agora Pulse
CrowdBooster
Twitter Analytics
Facebook Analytics
Analisa.io
Content Creation Tools
Tailwind
Revive Old Posts
BuzzSumo
Tagboard
Graphics Tools
Visage
Canva
Animoto
Monitoring and Sharing Tools
Sprout Social
SocialOomph
Brand24
Content Curation Tools
Buffer
MeetEdgar
Hootsuite
IFTTT
Oktopost
Everypost
SocialFlow
News Filtering Tools
Feedly
Other Tools
Bitly
Influential
Lead Generation Tools
- OptinMonster
optinmonster is the best lead generator for social media
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation tool that lets you engage visitors at exactly the right moment. It has a drag-and-drop template for building visually stunning lightboxes, popups, and landing pages that capture leads. Everything from growing your mailing list to recovering abandoned carts can be solved using OptinMonster’s amazing set of tools.
Ready to hear something really cool? OptinMonster can now be part of your social media marketing campaign. Simply use the new ChatBot element to connect to ManyChat. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to share your best-performing optins over Facebook Messenger.
The ChatBot element requires a Growth Plan. Already an OptinMonster customer? Upgrade here! Otherwise, click here to get started with OptinMonster today.
That way, you can bring the optins to your leads. Not the other way around.
- RafflePress
rafflepress giveaway plugin
RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin for WordPress. With its drag-and-drop giveaway builder and viral giveaway templates, you can quickly create a fun online contest for your audience.
Where RafflePress comes in handy for social media marketing is with the verified bonus actions feature. This feature lets you reward users with extra contest entries for performing specific actions like:
Following you on Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
Viewing a Facebook post/video
Visiting your YouTube channel
Sharing your giveaway on social media
And much more
RafflePress is the perfect tool for boosting your social media following and engagement. Plus, it can also help you drive more traffic to your site, grow your email list, and even increase sales.
- Smash Balloon
smash ballon social media feeds plugin
With Smash Balloon, you can easily embed social media feeds anywhere on your WordPress website. It’s super easy to set up; simply install the plugin, connect your social media account, and in less than 30 seconds you can display a beautiful social media feed.
By displaying social media feeds on your site, you can turn your website visitors into social media followers. Plus, users can interact with your feeds, without having to leave your site.
Smash Balloon offers 5 different plugins:
Instagram Feed Pro
Custom Facebook Feed Pro
Custom Twitter Feeds Pro
Feeds for YouTube Pro
Social Wall Pro
The feeds are also highly customizable; you can decide which content to showcase, design the feed to match your brand, show or hide likes, comments, and shares, and more.
- Audiense
social media campaign tools – audisense
Audiense is a social intelligence tool that allows you to discover new target audiences and segment them. Most importantly, it helps you understand your audience by telling you how they tick. Then, Audiense uses tracking and reports to help you optimize your audience engagement. Think of it as a tool for building relationships with customers.
- Tweepi
social media marketing tools – tweepi
Tweepi is a Twitter tool that helps you get more followers. First, it finds relevant users interested in your topic. Then you can engage those users by mentioning them in tweets, adding them to a list, or following them.
Buyer Persona Tools
- Socedo
best social media marketing tools – socedo
Socedo automatically discovers the people on social media who fit your buyer persona. They do this by looking at real-time social behavior then categorizing individuals based on that data. Once you have your audience, you can divide followers into multiple segments. That way, you can make sure only the relevant segments get your content and promotions.
- Socialbakers
social marketing tools – socialbakers
Socialbakers is a suite of tools for making decisions based on your followers’ data. You can measure your performance versus competitors, then use those insights to improve your content.
This information is valuable when monetizing your campaigns. You can use it to budget more effectively, while also boosting customer acquisition, retention, and growth.
Security Tools
- ZeroFOX
best social media security tools – ZeroFox
ZeroFOX is a security tool that works with all popular social media platforms, as well as Slack, Google Play, and Apple’s App Store. It identifies and protects brands against hackers looking to take control of social media accounts.
But that’s not all. The platform also works to protect its clients’ social media reputations. They do this by removing offensive and intentionally disruptive content, eliminating impersonation profiles, and protecting followers against scammers. Think of ZeroFOX as a massive public relations tool that also has security features.
- LastPass
social media security tools – lastpass
LastPass isn’t designed specifically for social media, but it’s still a useful tool to have. That’s because LastPass saves your passwords in its encrypted password vault. Use it to create ultra-strong passwords for social media. We’re talking passwords with upper and lowercase letters, numbers, punctuation, and other random characters.
You unlock LastPass’ password vault using a master password. Once logged in, the app will automatically enter your login details every time you try to log into a social media site.
The benefit of using LastPass is that you only have to keep up with one password, the LastPass one. Meanwhile, you can create multiple strong passwords for all your social media sites.
Analytical Tools
- Followerwonk
best social media tools – followerwonk
Followerwonk is a tool exclusively for use with Twitter. It’s also one of the most in-depth and useful tools on this list. Followerwonk will help you analyze and optimize your Twitter audience. It does this by suggesting people for you to follow, ultimately helping you grow your base. If Twitter is part of your social media marketing campaign, this tool is a must-have.
- Agora Pulse
best social media marketing tools – agorapulse
Agora Pulse is a simple and affordable solution to social media management. It has all the basic scheduling and analytics features, and you can also run contests, quizzes, and promotions. It even allows you to see how your social media marketing campaign stacks up against your competitors. Want to give it a try? Take advantage of their free trial and see how you like it.
- CrowdBooster
social media optimization tools – crowdbooster
CrowdBooster delivers real-time data that you can access quickly. You can create reports measuring your key performance metrics, and even export them via graphs and tables. This information helps you adapt to your audience more effectively. It gives you suggestions for who to engage and how you can improve content.
- Twitter Analytics
social media management tools – twitter analytics
Twitter Analytics is a free tool that lets you measure the performance of your Twitter marketing campaign. Want to know if your tweets are getting enough likes, comments, and retweets? Twitter Analytics’ reports give you all that information and more. That way, you can look at how people interact with your content and adjust your campaign accordingly.
Related Content: How to Make Money on Twitter: 9 Twitter Monetization Tips
- Facebook Analytics
social media tools free – Facebook analytics
Overall, Facebook Analytics works the same way as Twitter’s analytics tool. It looks at your content and how readers have interacted with it. Pretty simple stuff, right?
Yes and no. While both platforms serve the same purpose, Facebook’s reports are much more comprehensive than Twitter’s. Facebook Analytics doesn’t just show you how many people interacted with your content. It shows you who interacted with it and where.
Of course, this shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise. Facebook has more features than Twitter. Naturally, there’s more information to track.
And if you run a Facebook group, don’t forget to check that analytics data as well.
- Analisa.io
social media marketing tools free – Analisa.io
Ready to growth hack your marketing campaign on Instagram? You can with Analisa.io.
Analisa.io gives you a range of marketing tools for monitoring profiles and hashtags. You can use it to:
Snoop on your competitors.
Monitor campaign performance.
Tweak profile engagement.
Connect with influencers.
Ready for the good news? Analisa.io’s basic campaign research tools are 100% free. Not bad, considering they offer more data than Instagram’s own marketing tool, Insights.
Of course, there’s also a premium subscription starting at $59.35 a month. It gives you even more tools for connecting with influencers and researching markets. It’s great for serious brands that want to overhaul their Instagram strategy.
Content Creation Tools
- Tailwind
social marketing tools – tailwind
Tailwind is a tool for creating content on Pinterest and Instagram. Use it with Pinterest to pin to multiple boards at once, bulk upload, and schedule posts. It comes with a drag-and-drop calendar that makes scheduling content easier than ever.
If you want to give it a spin, you can try it out for free.
- Revive Old Posts
revive old posts by revive social
Revive Old Posts lets you automatically share old posts to your social media accounts. This gives your users the chance to discover and engage with popular content from your site. Plus, it helps you keep your social media accounts active.
You can quickly and easily share posts, pages, media, and custom post types to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. And, Revive Old Posts adds hashtags from tags or categories automatically by fetching them from your post’s categories, tags, and even custom fields.
- BuzzSumo
social media marketing tools – buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is one of the best tools we’ve found for discovering new and popular content on the web. With it, you can plug in a topic or a selection of keywords. From there, you’ll receive a breakdown of popular trending posts in those categories.
Want to see how content goes viral? BuzzSumo also gives you a list of influencers who share keyword-related content. Use this to research ideas for your content marketing campaign and to connect with top influencers in your industry.
Recommended Resource: Do social media shares count the same as backlinks? Google says no, but are they telling the whole story? Find out the truth in our guide to Social Media and SEO: Do Social Shares Really Matter for Ranking?
- Tagboard
social media optimization tools- tagboard
Tagboard is a listening tool for researching social media content. All you have to do is plug in a term, topic, or hashtag, and you’ll see how that topic is discussed online. It’s an advanced way to monitor things like brand and product mentions, and how they relate to your marketing strategy. Moreover, you can use it for ideas when coming up with engaging content, especially as trends develop.
Graphics Tools
- Visage
best social media tools – visage
Every social media campaign needs optimized images. Visage is a tool that helps companies design social media graphics that are perfectly optimized for each platform. Visage’s graphics templates make it easy to manage your brand’s style and tone. That way, you can ensure consistency across all social platforms. And the editable designs allow you to collaborate with your team to update and remix graphics, with restrictions set by role.
- Canva
best social media marketing tools 2019 – canva
Add Canva to the list of awesome free social media tools every marketer needs. It lets you create stunning images for your campaigns. Use it to jazz up your content so that more people like and share your posts.
Best of all, you don’t have to be a graphic designer to use Canva. It comes with loads of ready-made templates and cool graphics you can use. This means you can create an attention-grabbing featured photo in minutes.
Looking for a little more than a drag-and-drop editor? Canva for Work has loads of premium collaboration tools, and it only costs $12.95 a month.
- Animoto
awesome social media tools – animoto
Animoto is a tool that makes professional-quality videos for marketers on social media. As such, it’s great for creating viral or engaging content. It comes with storyboard templates and a drag-and-drop design that simple and easy to use. You don’t have to use the templates, of course. If you want to get creative, use Animoto’s blank canvas and create a marketing video from scratch.
Tools to Use: 11 Best Instagram Video Editing Tools Compared (Free and Paid)
Monitor and Sharing Tools
- Sprout Social
social marketing tools – sproutsocial
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media marketing tool to help managers better control their efforts. It features multi-level access which makes it easy for managers to coordinate and delegate tasks to team members.
Sprout Social also comes with full post scheduling capabilities, a detailed analytics platform, and even a social listening tool. All of this is helpful for optimizing content and understanding how different demographics interact on social media.
- SocialOomph
social media campaign tools – socialoomph
When you first look at SocialOomph, it may seem simpler than some of the other apps on this list. But its SocialOomph’s functionality that makes it a keeper. That’s because SocialOomph makes it easy to upload multiple posts at once, then schedule when each post gets published. You have full control over when and where your content goes live, and you can even manage multiple platforms at once.
But wait, there’s more. SocialOomph also offers intuitive follower analysis features and tools for improving audience engagement. Not too shabby, right?
- Brand24
best social media tools – brand24
Brand24 gives you insight into what people are saying online about your brand. With this tool, you have instant access to mentions of your brand anywhere on the web, including on social media and popular publishers. You can also identify the people with the most social influence, and segment your mentions by positive, negative, or neutral mentions.
social media tools examples
Marketers are faced with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. From social media marketing to customer experience and advertising, it can be a challenge to stay on top of everything.
Luckily for us, there are a plethora of great social media tools on the market to help you succeed in your role and stay productive.
Tools for content curation, discovery, scheduling, publishing, analytics, and more can be used to enhance your effectiveness.
This week on The Science of Social Media, we’re exploring the top 10 social media tools brands are using to succeed in 2019. Utilizing these tools in your daily workflows will help improve results across the board.
Let’s dive in!
The 10 top social media tools to try in 2019
Here are some of the most-used social media tools used by some of the world’s top brands:
1: BuzzSumo
2: Google Trends
3: Buffer Publish
4: Canva
5: Unsplash
6: Animoto
7: Feedly
8: Buffer Reply
9: Native Analytics
10: Todoist
Honorable Mentions
- BuzzSumo
Social Media Tools: BuzzSumo
Website: https://buzzsumo.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $79/month
Details:
BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you find the most shared content and trending influencers. You can use it to analyze which content performs best for any topic and all you need to do to get started is to search for a topic or a domain.
Through BuzzSumo you’re able all gather a better understanding of your impact on social media and develop smarter content strategies by seeing which of your own pages were engaged with the most. BuzzSumo will break the results down by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit shares.
This provides the added benefit of being able to see which articles are performing well across the web without having to constantly monitor multiple social channels.
Similar tools: Ahrefs, Meltwater, Mention
- Google Trends
Social Media Tools: Google Trends
Website: https://trends.google.com/trends/
Pricing: Free
Details:
Google Trends is a completely free tool that Google created to help anyone search for trending topics online.
Brands use it to monitor notable things that are happening in the world. Many professionals use this as a way to discover and share information related to what’s most popular right now.
You can also use Google Trends to monitor keywords to see if they are trending and how their current volume compares to previous months and years. You can then use this information to inform your content and social media marketing strategy.
Similar tools: Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, WordStream
- Buffer Publish
Social Media Tools: Buffer
Website: https://buffer.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $15/month)
Details:
Buffer is a suite of brand building tools designed to make it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule social media posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place.
For example, Buffer Publish allows you to set up a schedule for your social media profiles, and after you add content to your Buffer queue, it will publish at the times you’ve designated.
In addition to our web application, we also have both Android and iOS apps as well as a fantastic Chrome Extension that’s great for Buffering while you’re browsing the web or on the go.
Similar tools: Hootsuite, Falcon.io, Sprout Social
- Canva
Social Media Tools: Canva
Website: https://www.canva.com/
Pricing: Free (Canva for Work starts at $12.95/month)
Details:
Another fantastic tool that absolutely every brand or business online should know about is Canva.
Many times social media managers and marketers need to be able to create beautiful images without a designer. It’s what makes up part of a great social media strategy.
Canva is the tool so many marketers rely on for making great-looking social media images quickly. You can use the ready-made templates, icons, and illustrations to make your images look professional without having to do much of the actual design work.
Canva has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface plus a massive library of over two million graphic elements.
Similar tools: Crello, Buffer Stories Creator, Bannersnack
- Unsplash
Social Media Tools: Unsplash
Website: https://unsplash.com/
Pricing: Free
Details:
One of our favorite tools in the design, photography, and video space is Unsplash. Unsplash is a massive library of free professional photos you can use — free!
Unsplash photos are really popular with many social media marketers because they can help give your content a professional, polished look.
And there are so many Unsplash collections to explore. We recommend finding a couple of creators whose photos you really enjoy and following them so you can always find their latest work.
Similar tools: Pexels, Storyblocks, Videvo
- Animoto
Social Media Tools: Animoto
Website: https://animoto.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $5/month
Details:
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Animoto is one of our go-to social media tools for quickly creating stunning marketing videos.
Their video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional content in just a few minutes. They describe it as “fast and shockingly simple,” – and we would agree with that.
There are so many benefits to being able to quickly create engaging marketing videos. Video is a content format that we know a lot of people struggle with, but Animoto helps to bridge that gap.
We’ve used it to create quick recaps of recent blog posts for social media, videos promoting a big announcement, and videos around product launches.
Using Animoto, there are plenty of opportunities for you to add value to your audiences’ lives.
Similar tools: PowToon, Adobe Spark, Crello
- Feedly
Social Media Tools: Feedly
Website: https://feedly.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $5.41/month)
Details:
Our next tool is Feedly. Feedly is great for so many things. Maybe you work with influencers and want to follow their blogs, or you need to keep up on industry news, or any other reasons that you might visit several websites. Instead, you can add all those RSS feeds to Feedly and see them there. A huge time saver.
Feedly is also great for content ideation. You can add several of the blogs, writers, and publishers whose content you like to one feed and see them in one glimpse.
It even has a Buffer Publish integration so you can schedule your content to go out right from the Feedly dashboard.
We also want to give Flipboard a quick shoutout here, too. While it’s not an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you can follow topics on Flipboard and it curates the world’s news stories to help you stay informed.
We’ve used Feedly to follow specific influencers and industry news, and Flipboard to keep up to date with bigger stories.
Similar tools: Flipboard, Quora, Pocket
- Buffer Reply
Social Media Tools: Reply
Website: https://buffer.com/reply/
Pricing: Plans start at $50/month
Details:
This next tool is one of our very own at Buffer: Reply. I think we’ve mentioned it a few times on the show but we’ve never gone too deep.
Buffer Reply makes social media engagement easy for marketing and support teams who need to respond to social conversations. It’s all in one inbox.
What’s great is that through Reply you can see social conversations across social networks:
On Twitter, you can see public tweets that @ mention your handle, direct messages, and any searches you have set up for keywords or hashtags.
On Facebook, you can see comments on your Facebook Page posts and ads, visitor posts, private messages, and reviews.
And for Instagram business profiles, you can see comments on your posts and ads as well.
It’s a single inbox where you can see all of these conversations happening. It’s a huge time saver. In our case, our customer support team and social media manager, Bonnie, spend a lot of time in Reply every day, and we know that when someone reaches out, they would be getting an answer from us.
Similar tools: Hootsuite, Mention, Sprout Social
- Native Analytics
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention native analytics for each social platform, which is completely free.
(If you prefer something more advanced, we would love for you to try Buffer Analyze, our social media analytics and reporting tool!)
Let’s quickly go over the top three, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Facebooks Analytics
Facebook Analytics
Under the Insights tab on your Facebook Page, there is just so much information. Everything you ever wanted to know about your engagement, number of likes and followers, how your posts are doing, and, of course, Facebook’s Pages to Watch which lets you compare the performance of your Page and posts with similar Pages on Facebook.
You also get insights for Facebook Groups so if you run a Group definitely check those out.
Instagram Analytics
Instagram Analytics
With Instagram Insights, you can see activity around how frequently users interact with your posts, see how your posts are performing over time, and find out where your audience is from as well as their age range, gender, and when they are online.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics
Starting with Twitter, their analytics can reveal a lot of valuable data about your audience, how well you’re engaging your following, and what your top-performing content is.
All you have to do is go to analytics.twitter.com to log in and start learning more about your audience and their interests.
- Todoist
Social Media Tools: Todoist
Website: https://todoist.com/
Pricing: Free (plans start at $3/month)
Details:
The last tool we want to mention today is related to your productivity as someone managing social media: Todoist.
Specifically, within Todoist, I have created a free Social Media Calendar by Buffer that you can use to make sure that your brand and business are posting to important social accounts on a regular basis.
This type of calendar is important because, by consistently posting great content, you’ll be able to grow your audience, increase engagement, and build a community online.
This sample social media calendar is based on real content and scheduling times from Buffer’s own social media accounts.
Similar tools: Wunderlist, Trello, Any.Do
Conclusion
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