A good social media marketing strategy is a must in today’s world. It doesn’t matter whether you have a large corporation, or run a mom and pop shop. The fact is that your customers are spending time on social media, so you need to be there too.
But that can take up a lot of your day, which is why you need the best social media marketing tools to help you save time and get the job done right.
Fortunately for you, we’ve tested out all of these tools to make sure they do what they say they will do. I’ll walk you through the pros and cons of each one, and also provide some handy screenshots as well.
So here are our top picks for the best social media marketing tools:
Best Social Media Marketing Tools 2017
SocialClout
SocialClout is a social media ROI (return on investment) optimizer, which aims to make sure all your posts on social media sites will effectively target your potential audiences. It is designed to calculate social media ROI as well as track customer’s engagement.
This tool allows you to see which demographics and touch points have the best engagement and which social media platforms convert the best, and at what times, allowing you to improve your targeting to match the market that wants you. SocialClout also integrates “social listening,” which includes analytics, sentiment, comparative analysis of the competition, and a lot more.
SocialClout enables you to get access to the most comprehensive database of social conversations, with real-time coverage. You have access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn. So, you will never miss out on any important conversation that is relevant to your brand.
It also allows you to search for keywords in various social media sites and provides you insightful marketing reports with their Social Media Analytics Reporting dashboard.
Social Metrics Pro
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Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that tracks your site’s social engagement across major social media platforms and provides you with analytics and report that will help you understand all the data gathered and how your brand is trending. It is very helpful for identifying the social media sites that you need to focus on and pay more attention to, and which platform naturally connects themselves to your content.
The control panel of Social Metrics Pro includes lots of great features, such their traffic-light analysis feature of your posts, which is very useful in identifying the posts that have more engagement. It will be highlighted in red when your post is underperforming and green when they are performing well, reaching the number of targeted audiences.
This plugin also powerful enough to track both posts and pages on any WordPress-based site to ensure that you are aware and have knowledge of how the sales page perform as well as the content of your site. The best part? All additional and updates to this plugin are free for a lifetime after your initial payment.
Hootsuite
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Hootsuite is a social media management dashboard that is both very convenient and powerful as it allows you to post the same content across multiple social media platforms at once. On top of that, you also have an option where you can schedule your post in advance and aggregate your content on a number of different social media platforms, so you will never miss a single day without promoting your brand.
Hootsuite also has analytics tools that will give you insightful reports of the overall performance of your site as well as all your posts on different social media. In addition, this tool also integrated an impressive feature that focuses on “sentiment,” which allows you to see how many of the comments are relevant to your brand. It also identifies the comments directed at your social media sites, whether it is positive, neutral, or negative.
This tool also has the capability to help you easily create campaigns, competitions and curated collections of user-generated content across different platforms. And lastly, it allows you to measure your team’s performance to improve their service.
IFTTT
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Everyone’s probably heard of IFTTT (If This…Then That), one of the most popular applications helpful not only for social media marketing but also for everyday use. IFTTT helps you find simple “applets” that allows you to create a single time-saving response to a preset condition. In other words, you can use this tool to create a sequence of a condition, functionalities, or programmable events.
Using IFTTT, you can create “recipes” that utilize multiple applets to describe more complex circumstances. For example, you get a positive tweet about your brand, you can re-tweet it, and if you get a negative tweet, you can auto-respond with a DM request. This simple task can help you boost your marketing by just programming their own automated tasks.
This tool also automatically syncs your profile images across social media platforms or post your Instagram photos as native images on Facebook, which is pretty cool.
IFTTT can really help you save a lot of time, but you just need to form a habit of using this app as it can be difficult to use at first.
Sprout Social
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Sprout Social focuses on customer relationship management (CRM) through different social media platforms, allowing you to quickly manage and respond to engagements. It functions as an all-in-one social media marketing tool to help you organize and manage your content effectively.
Sprout Social incorporates multilevel access that allows businesses to have teams of editors and writers, who have different access levels. It allows you to assign teams with directorial control and have lower level team members to log in to receive and update tasks.
This tool also offers detailed analytics platform that allows managers to keep on top of all the engagement and help them understand how their team and performance is doing. This will help the managers to respond quickly and effectively to comments and requests and eventually help them to nurture and foster the business.
Tagboard
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Tagboard is a specialist social listening tool and is very useful for those people who are looking for deep insights, especially for research, development, innovation, and more.
This tool allows you to input any keywords or topic areas to get a collective set of prioritized insights and important takeaways. This type of data gathering helps you understand how the topic relevant to your brand or campaign is being discussed socially.
Tagboard is built as a hashtag-based search engine, allowing you to see all mentions and content related to your brand or service across different major social media platforms. You just have to register your hashtag to Tagboard and then you will see what social media users are saying using your hashtag and how they discuss your brand and services. On top of that, you can also track your brand and product mentions.
In addition, Tagboard provides insights on how your brand is discussed, helping you to come up with new ideas on the topics to bring in more engagement.
Bitly
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Pasting a URL along with your Twitter updates can really help you boost a market. Your target audiences can quickly access your site using the URL you provided. However, URLs can get really long, and with Twitter’s 140-characters limitation, it may not be optimal.
Bitly is one of the original link shorteners used to shorten any long URL to fit perfectly across every social media platform, including Twitter. Bitly does the job right without eating up space and character count. It will also give you an option to custom-shorten a URL, so you can create a link that will still effectively reflect the content of your page.
Using Bitly, you will get an overview of all the links you have shared as well as the full history of the line’s performance, such as the number of users who click through and the number of users who view the page longer. If you also use the Bitly link, it will allow you to track analytics for one post using one source.
Buffer
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Buffer is one of the most popular social media marketing tools currently on the market. And in fact, without a doubt one of the most sought-after social media marketing tool by experts. It is very easy to use and a powerful tool.
Buffer allows you to schedule your social media posts with whatever platform you use and distribute it across all different social media sites. It includes a multimedia extension that helps you optimize images and video for different platforms. It also incorporates simple analytics that can make all the data easy to understand.
This tool offers multiple-account syncing across different networks. With this you can easily share content to different social media platforms from one central dashboard. It also enables you to monitor posts that did or did not do well. If the posts did well, Buffer will provide you insights and reports before publishing your next posts.
In addition, Buffer also has a Chrome extension to help you share and schedule your posts or content you found online. The extension also allows you to upload items in bulk, which is great if you intended to schedule or produce your posts in batch.
MeetEdgar
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MeetEdgar is a virtual social media assistant, and a perfect tool for those sites who do not have enough content for their social media marketing campaign. MeetEdgar simply recycles your old posts and publishes it at the best times. The older the post, the higher chances of MeetEdgar publishing it first. However, MeetEdgar also allows you schedule new posts.
This tool analyses audience engagement on the specific post to determine when is the best time to republish the post to most likely to get responses from your audience. Once the old post has been published, MeetEdgar will then organize and arrange the post and eventually send it back to the queue to create an ample space between reposts. This will result in an endless supply of social media posts that shares and reshares itself continuously, without you exerting any effort.
MeetEdgar also gives you an option where you can categorize different types of content for different audiences, so you can target them independently with the right content. This will increase the chance of higher audience engagement.
Oktopost
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Oktopost is a social media management tool designed primarily for business-to-business (B2B) companies. This tool helps the business by managing large teams and allowing unified global campaigns for large scale businesses as well as small business with an ambitious reach. Oktopost packs with amazing tools for scheduling, measuring, curating, and social listening.
It incorporates the following.
- Social Publishing, to manage and streamline the day-to-day activities of B2B social media;
- Social Analytics to provide you with insightful reports on how social media impacts your sales funnel, from lead generation to prospect nurturing;
- Content Curation, to help you grow your social footprint and keep your streams fresh with shareable content;
- Social Listening and Engagement, so you will never miss any discussions on social media; and
- Social Advocacy, to amplify your social reach.
best marketing social media platforms
1. Facebook
Facebook has more than 2.27 billion active monthly users, which makes it your number one choice. With the Facebook Ads Manager, you can create ads that target users based on factors such as age, location, gender, relationship status, level of education, interests, job title, purchase behaviour, device usage, etc.
Facebook also allows you to create Custom Audiences from the list of phone numbers or email addresses that you’ve collected to reach the current customers. You can also use Facebook Pixel to target the customers who have visited your website. A Facebook business page is a must for each company, but ensure that you update your page regularly.
2. Twitter
Twitter has an average of 186 million daily active users.
It is a fast-paced platform, and many users visit it to get new information. It makes it a good marketing platform for companies that publish original content regularly. Twitter also makes it easy for its users to share links to new blog posts and pages, and if you do it regularly, you will send users directly to your new content. If you develop the habit of sharing useful and informative content from other sources, you will create your reputation as an authority in your industry.
3. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is known as the primary social networking site for professionals.
You can use it to update your customers on your business, recruit new team members, and connect with industry partners. Since it’s a professional network, it makes the best choice for B2B social media marketing. Forbes ranks it as the best platform for generating leads, and it accounts for 46% of the social media traffic that generates on company websites for B2B firms.
4. Instagram
Instagram is owned by Facebook, and it boasts of more than a million monthly active users. It has similar advertising options as Facebook.
Instagram is a visual platform that allows you to showcase the personality of your business. It is not a text-heavy platform, and it doesn’t allow links within posts. The good thing is that you have access to several tools that you can use to improve the creative experience of your audience. Instagram is the best platform for your business if you need to reach your customers through photos and videos. You can post photos of your products in use and ask your followers to do the same.
Instagram hashtags are also a great way for marketers to reach a wider audience, and this audience can be expanded further, through the Instagram stories or Instagram Live Video feature. Instagram also provides advertising options for businesses, which are accessible through Facebook.
5. YouTube
YouTube has over 2 billion registered users. It is the best social media platform for highlighting the company culture and creating tutorials and demonstrations.
If your company is capable of creating its content, YouTube can be a great platform for connecting to users. Apart from the views that you get directly on the platform, you can also use YouTube to host videos to be embedded to your site. Visual content is an effective way of engaging site visitors. It gives you a reason to create an account on YouTube.
6. Pinterest
Pinterest has over 400 million monthly active users, and it’s a social media platform for sharing products.
If you have an eCommerce business, Pinterest is a MUST for you. 87% of pinners have purchased an item because of Pinterest. You can upload individual photos alongside short descriptions and links to the product page. Pinterest also has a built-in shopping feature that makes it easier for businesses to promote their products on their site.
The marketer can use rich pins to give context to a product, article, recipe, and app pins, and use their advertising options to reach more users. It gives marketers an easy way of directing traffic to their product pages and connecting with potential customers.
7. Reddit
Reddit has more than 430 million monthly active users.
It is a good platform for audience or content reach and interacting with niche audiences. Reddit provides users with similar interests with a platform where they can share ideas. The users can share links, content, or ask questions on topic groups known as subreddits. The good thing is that there are subreddits for nearly any topic.
Marketers can use Reddit as a research tool to know what their audience is talking about and then create content based on that. Other than research, Reddit provides its users with advertising options to help them get their businesses in front of interested users.
8. Snapchat
Snapchat has more than 238 million daily active users.
It is a good platform for sending real-time updates and promoting events. Snapchat allows its users to post photos and videos that remain active on the platform for 24 hours. It makes it good for businesses that need to promote timely events, like product launches or a conference.
It also allows marketers to create custom, branded geotags to promote events in particular locations during a particular period. Snapchat is a well-known platform for an audience that skews younger, making it the best platform to target college students.
9. Tumblr
Tumblr is a microblogging platform that does not perfectly fit in the list of social media platforms, but it’s a site to help you reach a target audience aged between 16 and 34 years.
It has 507.2 million registered blogs. Tumblr has the youngest demographic of all social media sites, and its users are very active. However, if you’re not familiar with the platform, it can be challenging for you to market your brand on it.
10. TikTok
TikTok social media platform has more than 689 million monthly active users from across the globe.
It is a good platform to help you give users a peek behind your business scenes and take part in viral trends. It allows its users to share short videos for various purposes. These short videos can be of viral dances, quick tutorials, and comedic kits. Other than sharing videos about your business, you can also use TikTok’s advertising features to promote your business.
Conclusion
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