Social media is a great place to find your audience. But there are a lot of social media tools out there—how do you know which one is which?
There’s a wide range of social media tools out there, and each one can be used in different ways depending on your specific needs. Let’s go over some popular tools and the most common ways that they’re used.
The most popular and often-used social media tool, Facebook has a wider reach than any other network. It has a huge user base, and it’s easy to share content across the platform, whether that content is created by you or by others.
Twitter is unique in that it allows users to communicate directly with each other, without having to start private conversations. This makes it an excellent choice for customer service teams who want to be able to quickly respond to customer concerns on the fly.
Different Types Of Social Media Tools
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
Honorable mentions (more social media tools)
Although we couldn’t cover all of our favorite social media tools in this episode, we wanted to share some more of our favorites!
AdRoll
IFTTT
Zapier
Iconosquare
Quuu
Brand24
Buffer Analyze
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website
Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.
Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!
—
About The Science of Social Media podcast
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 20,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.
types of media tools
Let’s be honest, social media is a jungle. Forget about the flood of apps, integrations, and add-ons, ust figuring which network you should invest in is overwhelming.
What if you could ask today’s influential online marketers one question: “What social media tool is your all-time, desert-island, can’t-live-without favorite?”
That’s what I did.
What follows are – by any list or metric – 50 big names in online marketing, content marketing, and e-commerce along with their top social-media tool and reason for loving it.
- Instagram
Ann Handley, chief content officer, MarketingProfs
“Instagram is my favorite social network because of its social storytelling simplicity. From fun personal accounts – like Small Chalk and Adam Padilla – to corporate brands, it connects more immediately and deeply with people than any other platform. I still haven’t forgiven them for introducing an algorithm. (Chronological was so much more in line with the ethos of the platform.) But I can’t quit you, Insta.”
An image showing a screenshot of Ann Handley’s Instagram account.
.@Instagram is my favorite social network because of its social #storytelling simplicity, says @annhandley via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Instagram Marketing: Social Media Experts Share Top Tips
- Twitter
Joe Pulizzi, founder, Content Marketing Institute
“I use social media as almost a pure response vehicle. And I won’t start any new social media app, platform, or tool until I’m 100% committed to it. My goal with Twitter is to keep in touch and communicate my appreciation to those people that support me. Once I built an audience on those platforms, my goals and execution changed.”
An image of Joe Pulizzi’s Killing Marketing Twitter account.
- Buffer
Joanna Wiebe, creator, Copyhackers
“Buffer. Three reasons. (1) You can install a browser widget that lets you Buffer any page or image you come across to be sent immediately or later. (2) Its Content Inbox: I can enter the URL of a favorite blog and Buffer instantly creates a huge list of tweets from that blog. (3) The company is transparent. I don’t expect every company to publish what they earn vs. what they pay people the way Buffer does, but it’s a warm-and-fuzzy approach to helping disconnected folks like moi see the humans behind a software company.”
An image showing Buffer’s website.
- BuzzSumo
Neil Patel, entrepreneur and influencer, NeilPatel.com
“With BuzzSumo you can see what is hot in your space on social media and what isn’t. From there you can craft ideas on the type of blog posts you should write to generate traffic and leads. The best part about BuzzSumo is it shows who has shared the content so you can reach out to those influencers and ask them to share your content as well.”
An image showing a screenshot of Most Shared blog posts via BuzzSumo.
Use @BuzzSumo so you can see what’s hot in your space on #SocialMedia & what isn’t, says @neilpatel via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Animoto
Mari Smith, Facebook marketing expert
“Native video is the top-reaching post type on Facebook and gets three times the engagement of link posts and two times that of photo posts. I love using Animoto’s gorgeous templates, themes, and stock music. Its marketing builder tool also makes it super-duper easy to add text overlays – vital for sound-off autoplay videos in the Facebook newsfeed because 80% of video ads on Facebook are watched with sound off.”
80% of video ads on #Facebook are watched with sound off. Use text overlays, says @MariSmith via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Video Marketing Strategy: What Marketers Need to Know
- Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer
Rand Fishkin, founder, SparkToro
“Next to BuzzSumo – and without sounding biased – my favorite tool is Moz’s Keyword Explorer brand mention feature. It’s great for setting up mention alerts as well as finding content to share socially through keyword notifications. The mention authority feature works directly with Moz’s page and domain authority metrics and helps sort through all the noise you normally get with catch-all monitoring tools.”
An image showing a screenshot showing the results of Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer Mention Authority Feature.
- Tweeps Map
Brian D. Evans, founder, Influencive
“The problem with a lot of marketing these days is that it’s not laser targeted and is far too broad. I use Tweeps Map because it gives me a visual representation of where my followers are geographically. I can then run targeting to followers from specific areas and make sure that the content is relevant and valuable for those followers.”
An image showing a map of Brian Evans followers using the Tweet Maps tool.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Data-Driven Creative: How to Use Twitter Data to Inform Your Marketing
- Sumo
Jeff Bullas, CEO, JeffBullas.com
“Sumo is a hybrid tool that’s a bit like a Swiss Army knife. It’s helped me thrive and survive in the wilds of the digital world by creating social-sharing buttons – onsite, SMS, Flipboard, and WhatsApp – and tracking my social counts on blog posts. The feature I really love is its Welcome Mat: a pop-up that captures emails. In less than 12 months, it’s collected over 40,000 email subscribers.”
I love @SumoMe’s Welcome Mat pop-up feature that captures emails, says @jeffbullas via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Tailwind
Candice Galek, founder, Karma Honey Project
“Tailwind has been a lifesaver over the years, allowing my team to work more quickly and efficiently when posting to Pinterest. It’s a scheduling app on steroids, helping you to choose not only when to post for maximum engagement but also what might go viral thanks to their pixel-matching technology and image recognition capabilities. You can seamlessly measure pin virality and repost that content to continue to grow your following on the platform.
Don’t sleep on Pinterest. Their introverted user base is keen on consuming online content, and Tailwind helps you to get it in front of more potential customers faster.”
Don’t sleep on #Pinterest. Their introverted user base is keen on consuming online #content, and @tailwindapp helps you get it in front of more potentials customers faster, says @bikinigeek via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Elevate
Jason Miller, head of brand, ActiveCampaign
“I like to keep things simple and streamlined: Less is more. The tool I use religiously is Elevate: LinkedIn’s employee advocacy tool. I use it to share, organize, and measure all the content I post across my main three social accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I share daily from Elevate and track engagements.”
elevate-tool
- Twitter Promote Mode
Brian Clark, founder, Copyblogger
“Now that the days of organic social media distribution for content marketing are long in the rear view, the most valuable social media tools are the advertising features of the platforms themselves. Facebook (and Instagram), of course, but also Twitter given its high-profile resurgence. We’re testing Twitter Promote Mode, which for a recurring monthly fee promises to give constant broader reach – just like the good old days.”
An image showing a screenshot of Twitter Promote Mode.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: A Quick-Start Guide to Paid Content Promotion
- Facebook Audience Insights
Larry Kim, founder, MobileMonkey
“I’m big into audiences: figuring out what are the interests, behaviors, and demographics of your target customers. For this, I use Facebook Audience Insights because it tells you just about everything you’d want to know: job titles, education level, lifestyle, location, household information, purchasing behavior, and much more.
“By better understanding who your target audience is, you can more accurately create content that they’re likely to engage with.”
An image showing a screenshot of Facebook Audience Insights that shows you job titles, education level, lifestyle, location, household information, and purchasing behavior.
Use #Facebook Audience Insights to better understand who your target audience is, says @larrykim via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Sprout Social
Reilly Roberts, marketing manager, Common Thread Collective
“Every marketer has their own approach and needs from a social media tool. Regardless of the tools’ unique features, the one need we all have in common is tracking the performance of the content we’re sharing. Not only does Sprout Social measure performance indicators like engagement and clicks, most importantly, it offers UTM tracking.
“The ease of Sprout’s UTM Tracker allows my social efforts to be aligned with efforts to optimize and drive traffic, as measured by Google Analytics.”
An image of Sprout Social’s UTM Tracker.
Note: This article’s author works at Common Thread Collective.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Create 5 Custom Metrics in Google Analytics [Infographic]
- Kicksta (formerly Kickstagram)
Cammi Pham, partner, ThinkRenegade
“With the new Instagram algorithm change, consistently posting at the right time has become even more important. Kicksta makes it easier to upload, process photos, schedule, and add hashtags to the first comment from desktop. For hashtags, I use 80% fixed and 20% tailored. This gives my team more time to focus on real-time engagement, which is life or death on social.”
Real-time engagement is life or death on #social, says @cammipham via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- TikTok
Shanelle Mullin, experimentation & analysis lead, Shopify
“Historically, marketers have been hesitant to jump on short-form video platforms, despite social media as an industry consistently moving in that direction (see Snapchat, Instagram Stories, Fleets, Reels, Shorts, etc.) Before TikTok, there was Vine, Dubsmash, Musical.ly, Triller, etc. Currently, forecasts predict TikTok will top 1.2B monthly active users (MAU) in 2021, putting it among Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, YouTube, and WeChat. After TikTok, there will be another platform focused on short-term video.
“Whether it’s running influencer campaigns with TikTok celebrities, using TikTok for Business to run paid ads, or building an organic branded audience, marketers would be wise to have a presence on this platform in 2021 and beyond. It’s not just for Gen Zers who love to dance; the rest of us are just better at hiding our (over)usage. Besides, the short-form video content you create for TikTok can always be distributed across checks notes almost every other major social media platform.”
Whether it’s running influencer campaigns with celebrities, paid ads, or building an organic branded audience, marketers would be wise to have a presence on #TikTok in 2021 and beyond, says @shanelle_mullin via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Venngage
Ross Simmonds, digital strategist, RossSimmonds.com
“My favorite tool is Venngage. As someone who really likes experimenting with the potential of visual content and visual communication, having access to an infographics tool that is so easy to use speeds up my visual output. Whether you are creating graphics for social, SlideShare, or a presentation, Venngage is super versatile and intuitive.”
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 Ideas to Spark Great Infographics
- IFTTT
Pam Moore, CEO and founder, Marketing Nutz
“I love using If This Then That (IFTTT) to enable native posting of images on Twitter that are originally posted to Instagram. You can set specific criteria by using hashtags or set it to post to Twitter automatically by default. IFTTT also offers a nearly limitless supply of social and cross-platform ‘recipes.’”
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 17 IFTTT Recipes to Help Every Content Marketer Work Better
- Rival IQ
Jay Baer, founder, Convince & Convert
“Rival IQ is a terrific tool to compare your own social media engagement rate and top-performing content versus your competitors’. Insightful and easy to use, it includes automated, custom reporting. One click and BAM – you have a PDF or PowerPoint deck with all the information you need to make better social media decisions. We use it daily.”
An image showing a screenshot of Facebook Post Engagement Rate by week from Rival IQ.
Use @RivalIQ to compare your own #SocialMedia engagement & top #content vs competitors’, says @jaybaer via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Yotpo
Griffin Thall, co-founder, Pura Vida Bracelets
“Instagram has always been Pura Vida’s dominant channel. We’re the No. 1, most-engaged jewelry brand there and that has everything to do with our influencers, micro-influencers, aesthetics, and — above all — our amazing community.
“But if I had to pick one tool, it’d be Yotpo. We have over 319,000 five-star reviews and that kind of social proof drives conversions like nothing else. Still, it’s Yotpo’s social integrations — things like easily sourcing, finding, publishing, sharing, and presenting user-generated content — and doing all that natively that makes it so irreplaceable.”
A screenshot of the Yotpo user interface showing Pure Vida Bracelets lifetime total of 5 star reviews: 394,875.
Image source
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 6 Ways to Use Reviews in Your Content and Pitfalls to Avoid
- Followerwonk
Michael Brenner, CEO, Marketing Insider Group
“Twitter remains my primary social media platform. But alone, Twitter’s unmanageable. That’s why I use Followerwonk to understand who my audience is, when they are most likely to engage, and to find followers who overlap with similar social profiles and influencers. Its analyze feature – which integrates with Buffer – tells you exactly when to post your most important updates for exposure.”
An image showing a screenshot showing the most active results for Michael Brenner’s followers by Followerwonk.
.@Followerwonk tells you exactly when to post your most important updates on #Twitter, says @BrennerMichael via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- CoSchedule
Andy Crestodina, co-founder and director, Orbit Media
“This one is going to drive more traffic in less time than all your other tools combined. It’s like Buffer, but it never runs dry. Posts scheduled in CoSchedule can stay in rotation. Once you’ve vetted your best stuff based on historical data, set up CoSchedule to share on your network(s) of choice at least a few times per day. You just saved yourself six to eight hours per month at least.”
An image showing a screenshot of CoSchedule dashboard.
.@MeetEdgar is going to drive more traffic in less time than all your other tools combined, says @crestodina via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- WordSwag
Rachel Pedersen, social media strategist
“Ever wish you had a 24/7 graphic designer to turn your social media ideas into gorgeous graphics? Then you will love WordSwag. It is a mobile application that turns your ideas, quotes, and content into attractive graphics that can be shared on Facebook, Instagram, and anywhere. In less than five minutes, you have a high quality and visually appealing graphic that will make your followers think you have a graphic designer on call.”
An image showing an Instagram account that uses Wordswag tool.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Tips From CMI’s Most Popular Visual Content Articles
- Quuu
Shane Barker, digital strategist, ShaneBarker.com
“Quuu is a hand-curated and content-promotion platform. I use the promotion side to distribute everything. Each article is reviewed by a real person before it is approved because the goal is to promote only the highest quality content. Once the article gets the green light, Quuu adds it to its huge distribution network, which is cool, as I can then see the amount of shares and clicks for each article.”
An image showing the amount of shares and clicks for each article using Quuu.
- Oktopost
Murray Newlands, co-founder, Due.com
“Most B2B companies on social media are missing a huge opportunity. Staff, customers, and clients won’t post positive comments unless they love you. Beyond that, you have to get proactive and make sharing easy. Oktopost’s amplify and collaborate features are built to do exactly that: internally and externally. But love has to be the foundation.”
An image showing the social dashboard for Oktopost.
- Ahrefs
Josh Steimle, published author
“By connecting Ahrefs to Google Search Console and with some simple configuring, I can monitor my own website as well as those of competitors to get ideas for new keywords I can use for blogging, YouTube videos, and social media posts.
I especially like the “Search suggestions” feature in the Keyword Explorer section because it makes it easy to find keywords and see the data I want. Ahrefs gives each keyword a difficulty score, shows me local and global search volume, and expected clicks.
While we tend to think of SEO as a Google+ website game, I also use this for LinkedIn, my favorite social media platform. By collecting keywords in the Rank Tracker section of Ahrefs, I can monitor which keywords have the most volume and include those words in my LinkedIn posts, using web search popularity as a hint as to what may also be popular on LinkedIn, or at least popular relative to other relevant keywords I’m targeting.”
An image showing a screenshot of Ahrefs Search suggestions feature.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 7 Free Keyword Research Tools for Content Marketers
- Facebook Messenger
Sujan Patel, co-founder, Mailshake
“Social media is becoming more personal and customers are actually talking to companies. I’m not talking about comments or high-level conversations. I’m talking about customers ready to make a transaction. That’s why I love Facebook Messenger. Facebook has done a great job empowering business owners to communicate directly with their customers and, with the introduction of bots, Messenger is going to have a big impact in the coming years.”
An image showing how Facebook Messenger communicates with customers. It shows the order confirmation and status of a customer’s shipment to delivery.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Don’t Fear Chatbots If You Have a Rich Content Strategy
- Shield – LinkedIn Analytics
Johnathan Dane, founder, KlientBoost
“There’s a new social media tool I’m in love with. It helps me and my leadership team see our organic LinkedIn growth in terms of engagement, reach, and followers. Shield helps you see side-by-side comparisons of which posts gave you the best metrics you care about.
But it’s not just that.
We pair this with targeting dream clients we’d like to work with by sending custom connection requests to get them into our LinkedIn sphere of influence (multiple KlientBoost people will send connection requests over time) so we can see impressions from people we truly care about seeing our content.
Over time it feels like we’ve developed this “LinkedIn Mafia,” and I’m unsure if I should be sharing this strategy with you guys.”
- Brand24
John Rampton, CEO and co-founder, Due
“I really like Brand24’s dashboard to see every person who mentioned my brand on social media. I can then go and respond individually. This enables my brand to be on top of the good, the bad, and the amazing customers that are sharing feedback. You can even monitor your competition and take advantage of the potential customers out there that need your help.”
An image showing Brand24’s dashboard to see every person who mentioned my brand on social media.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 3 Models (and Tools) to Understand, Predict, and React to Your Social Media
- AgoraPulse
Neal Schaffer, social media consultant
“AgoraPulse is a comprehensive social media dashboard along the lines of a Hootsuite, but it offers some unique functionality. The feature that I most love is auto post with queues. Basically, it’s a killer feature for companies who have lots of evergreen content and want to share it on a periodic basis across a wide variety of social networks. You can choose to post from your queue as often or as little as you’d like and stop sharing on a certain date, which is perfect if you are promoting an event.”
An image showing an AgoraPulse screenshot of auto post with queues feature.
- Qwaya
Ed Leake, managing director, Midas Media
“Marketers often overlook one big aspect of social – native advertising. As a paid click and data guy, I love Qwaya because it allows me to treat and optimize Facebook as I would AdWords: robust campaign structuring, split-testing, and automation tool set. If CTRs drop or CPC jumps … pause it. Might sound simple, but when you’re managing big accounts and budgets, it’s a godsend.”
An image showing a screenshot of Owava tool.
Optimize #Facebook campaigns with @QwayaSocial as you would with search and AdWords, says @EdLeake via @CMIContent.CLICK TO TWEET
- Evernote
Gerry Moran, global head of social media, Cognizant
“The key to every successful social media strategy is content that tells a story. However, the story doesn’t always get crafted in one sitting. It evolves from a collection of photos, animated GIFs, infographics, a line from a song, a saying from my grandmother, everyday pain points, scribbled design thinking on a whiteboard, industry facts, etc. Evernote gives me a way to organize my storytelling, making my social media strategy more successful.”
An image showing a screenshot of the Evernote tool.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
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