Social media is a critical aspect of marketing and branding for companies in every industry. Whether you’re trying to raise awareness about your new product or simply connect with customers on a more personal level, social media is an essential tool that can help you reach your goals.
But it’s not always easy to find the right tools to make it all happen. That’s why we’ve done the research and put together this list of the best social media tools of 2015. No matter what it is you’re trying to accomplish, these tools will help you do it.
Table of Contents
Best Social Media Tools 2015
Top 6 Social Media Management Tools of 2015
While it can provide numerous benefits to your business and your brand, social media management is a complex process. You need to be able to carefully balance receiving and interpreting the signals your followers give you with the messages that you want them to receive and measuring how effective those messages were.
As your social following grows larger or more specialized, this process becomes exponentially difficult. That’s why we’re going to take a look at the top social media management tools of 2015.
Each tool listed here is already outstanding by itself for general social media management purposes. Rather than ranking each tool on a more generalized basis, we’re going to examine six powerful tools that perform best in certain situations.
Best Monitoring For Major Brands: Brandwatch
1. Best Monitoring For Major Brands: Brandwatch
Major brands tend to have problems identifying key messages and thoughts amongst followers because of the sheer volume of data that exists. Most tools are unable to deal with this data, and even fewer are unable to sort useful messages from noise.
Brandwatch is one of the top social media management tools for brands simply because it’s built to deal with large amounts of data.
It excels are:
- Gathering data from conversations using a custom-built data crawler.
- Cleaning data of spam, advertisements and other extraneous information.
- Analyzing and presenting data in a way that makes sense to humans.
- Exporting data for further analysis or presentations.
Best Social Media Publishing Tool
2. Best Social Media Publishing: Sprout Social
A common problem for businesses of all sizes concerns creating messages that are appealing and able to be tracked. The process itself tends to be complicated, which can lead to errors down the line.
Sprout Social takes the element of chance out of the picture. It allows you to easily publish your messages while intertwining the ability to create group, engagement and team reports for major social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
In a nutshell, here’s why Sprout Social excels at social media publishing:
- It offers detailed analytics that integrates with your social media messages.
- Saving drafts of your posts for later dates.
- Sprout Social has gentle learning curve, which makes it perfect for companies interested in building in-house social media teams from the ground up.
Best Curation of Content With Hashtags: Tagboard
3. Best Curation of Content With Hashtags: Tagboard
Understanding hashtags and how they relate to other content is a full-time job. It’s too easy for any member of your social media management team to interpret a tag incorrectly, which in turn could lead to social media blunders.
Tagboard offers an easy, succinct way to get the entire story of a hashtag. You no longer need to worry about jumbled interpretations potentially sabotaging your social media management when you use this tool.
You can also utilize it to publish your own messages on other social media websites, which in turn makes them far more effective.
Best Budget Metrics and Analytics: True Social Metrics
4. Best Budget Metrics and Analytics: True Social Metrics
Obtaining a simple understanding of your own brand and the competition is often a costly practice. Sometimes, it’s too costly for small businesses to employ.
True Social Metrics offers some of the most reasonable metrics and analytics for your social media management around. While it doesn’t have the most features, it is one of the best social media management tools for businesses on a very strict budget.
You can start using this service for as little as $20 a month, and you can save even more if you purchase packages in yearly plans.
Best Free Photo Editing: Pixlr
5. Best Free Photo Editing: Pixlr
Acquiring a full understand of complicated image editing software is often too much for any social media management team to have. That’s why knowing what tools can streamline the process is essential to making sure strong, branded images can be used.
Pixlr is not only a free option for image editing, but it’s also one of the easiest to use. It is a must-have social media tool if you plan to have parts of your team rebranding, editing or even just adding filters to your photos.
Best Stock Photo Resource: Big Stock Photo
6. Best Stock Photo Resource: Big Stock Photo
Photographs are an essential part of any social media management strategy. Without them, your followers will quickly grow unresponsive to the same text messages and the effectiveness of your social media strategy will suffer.
Big Stock Photo is one of the best places to acquire photos for you to use. Coupled with something one of the top social media management tools for photo editing like Pixlr, this allows you to significantly cut the costs associated with including media in your social media while making your messages even more effective.
social media tools for students
Connecting with each other comes to us more easily now that we can just tap away on a keyboard and chat with a person who lives over 3000 miles away. Finding information knows no boundaries with Google on every computer in the world.
As educators, this means access to more, faster, which is thrilling and mindboggling. However, it can also be frustrating and confusing with so much to choose from.
How do you know which platform is the best for your goals? Which social media organization has the best resources and community? Which one would help you communicate better with your students?
All of these questions flutter through our minds as our eyes wander through the gallons of information we search through. So, to simplify this daunting task for teachers, the following list consists of the best social media for teachers.
1. The Connected Educator
A great site for connecting with other educators is edConnectr. It gives educators several avenues with which to find other like-minded educators. A Visual Mapping Engine narrows down certain criteria allowing educators to save valuable time and energy.
2. Edmodo
Edmodo acts as a playground for teaching and learning with a place for posts, calendars, and general communication for teachers and students. Linking to students becomes simpler and more efficient as well as more effective when students enjoy the presentation of it. It makes it easy to share valuable apps with students.
3. TedEd
TedEd offers a variation of TED Talks with shorter, often-animated clips of subjects such as science, technology, social studies, literature, language, art, health, psychology, and business and economics. With communities and clubs, the site also makes it effortless for collaboration.
4. Google+
Besides great graphics and themes, Google+ takes teachers to their students with circles that make managing virtual communication an art. Students might need to know more about a particular lesson because they didn’t quite get it the first time. Pull them into a circle of their own with just the right tools to connect them to their path to understanding and learning.
5. Facebook
The great part about Facebook is that everyone is on it. Students love connecting with their friends and family with Facebook so telling them to check out the page where you post only makes sense. However, it’s very important to stay professional and have a separate personal account.
6. Twitter
The best way to use Twitter for teaching is as a reminder to students that they need to complete an assignment for a particular due date or that they have an exam coming up soon so study this or that. Sometimes teachers even use it for inspiration by sending a famous quote.
7. Instagram
Students love Instagram for so many reasons but mainly for the photos and effects available to them. Teachers can create assignments that tap into the need to Instagram such as photo essays where students take photos, upload, and add captions or students can even create campaigns for certain organizations or just for a lesson.
8. Vimeo
If you want to share videos on Facebook or Twitter, use Vimeo. But, there’s a whole lot more teachers can use it for such as uploading and storing video then utilizing it as a tool to teach students more about creating video. Vimeo teaches for you at Vimeo Video School with lessons and tutorials.
9. WordPress
With so many themes to choose from, WordPress has become a popular way for teachers to set up a web of communication and lessons with their students. Chalkboard is an educational theme that prepares students for learning and helps teachers outline goals and objectives while still providing great visuals. Teachers can also use it to inspire students to write more by having them create their own blogs and meet the WordPress Challenges.
10. Blogger
Like WordPress, Blogger connects teachers to students using unique themes as well as diary-style writing. With access to teachers’ posted links, lessons, and thoughts students become more successful and comfortable with the teacher when learning online.
11. Skype
Using Skype means connecting with anyone, anywhere, at any time. This means students not only connect with teachers but teachers encourage students to broaden their view of the world. Set up virtual connections by contacting other teachers then connect the students to each other. Also, Skype has a whole portal dedicated to educators who can use it to teach various lessons already set up by the Skype team.
12. Pinterest
The celebrated platform for pinning favorite pix can be a great teaching and learning tool. It also encourages quick collaboration between teachers on all sorts of subjects and interests. Teachers can set up a Pinterest page for one particular class or a series of classes with Pins that focus on themes or subtopics important to the lesson at hand.
13. YouTube
Educators of any level can click on the education category within YouTube and find several subcategories such as university, science, business, and engineering. YouTube even has a special section dedicated to teachers and how to teach with it. But, even if teachers never visited that section, they could teach using all the great videos available according to subjects or searches.
14. TeacherTube
If YouTube doesn’t make the cut, try TeacherTube. It’s dedicated to all sorts of education, from the basics to more complicated work. Interestingly, the tabs for docs and audio are some of the more useful resources within it. However, it’s the idea of TeacherTube and it’s tools that make it so useful because teachers can use it to communicate with students and there’s no question that this is within an educational format.
15. Academia.edu
For academics whose main goal is to share research papers, Academia.edu draws a crowd of over five million visitors. Academics can monitor the effect of their research and keep tabs on the research of the other academics that they follow. It’s a great tool for anyone needing data and information on various subjects and interests.
16. LinkedIn
While acting as a professional social forum for employers to connect with applicants or search for potential employees, LinkedIn is used for so much more than that. Having students post professional resumes there and then contacting them about the job market and the business world around them keeps them in touch with reality and the endless possibilities through a targeted education.
17. LabRoots
Access millions of documents and hundreds of scientific news feeds by using LabRoots, a social networking site catering to scientists, engineers and technical professionals. Besides the plethora of information, it helps stay connected with colleagues and peers. Pulling students into the mix gives them a cutting edge feel and insight into precious tools and information.
18. ResearchGate
Ijad Madisch founded ResearchGate, which is similar to LabRoots bringing scientists together for collaboration. The difference really lies with the mission and the creators who are scientists working to give visibility to the dedicated researchers all over the world.
19. LabforCulture.org
Not a science lab, LabforCulture.org provides a place for artists to start blogs or an art group as well as connect and share information. Mostly made of Europeans, LabforCulture.org also highlights art news, events and exhibitions and helps artists find jobs and learn more about funding their projects. Teachers can use this for motivation and to help students get a feel for other artists’ work.
20. CultureInside
Focusing on the gallery concept, CultureInside creates space for online galleries and actual galleries. It might just be an artist’s dream if used correctly. With the guidance of a teacher, students can profit from their creativity as well. There’s also a feature called lightbox, which connects artists and helps promote artwork in other artists’ lightboxes.
21. GogoYoko
GogoYoko began as a solution to the problem many musicians and artists have. They don’t make the money they deserve. Sharing and streaming music through GogoYoko keeps users listening and needing more, so teachers can use it to do the same. On top of that, GogoYoko helps musicians and artists sell and promote their music.
22. Sgrouples
If there’s concern about privacy, Sgrouples promotes itself as a networking site that allows users to have ultimate control over who belongs to what group. It’s supposed to reflect how we click together with our “small” group. More importantly, the site doesn’t share anyone’s information, so staying private really means anything shared, remains in that group.
23. DailyMotion
A French video sharing site, DailyMotion adds an edge to social media by presenting users with a “news” feed of the latest videos. Teachers can use it for themselves in order to keep up-to-date on bizarre and informative social networking but also for posting their own videos or sharing some of the unique videos available through DailyMotion.
24. RebelMouse
The New York Times, Mashable, Wired, and Time magazine among others tout RebelMouse as the best tool for organizing all the social media networks any one individual uses. While also used by publishers or larger organizations, RebelMouse brings the many networks together for one person and creates a presence that fits a teacher’s agenda.
25. HootSuite
Another powerful social networking manager, HootSuite makes it easier to access various forms of social media and analyze how valuable the use of one media is over another. Sometimes getting caught up in the social media craze can be overwhelming so using HootSuite helps make sense all the media at the same time.
Conclusion
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