Here’s a list of our favorite social media tools.
Are you looking to improve your social media presence? What’s holding you back from going full throttle on all of your business’s social media accounts?
We get it. Social media takes a lot of time, energy, and commitment. It can be daunting to think about how much work is involved in growing your business, as well as which platform you should use to grow it.
We’ve compiled a list of some of our favorite social media tools to help you out with managing your accounts and maximizing your reach.
List Of Social Media Tools
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Buffer Publish
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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Animoto
Website: https://animoto.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $5/month
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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
7. 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
8. Buffer 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
9. 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
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
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
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.
10. 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.
social media tools for business
1. Unbox Social
Monitoring your businesses’ social media presence is more than just about the total number of likes and comments. Unbox Social is a social media tool that allows you to analyse your social media presence in depth. The tool has three major solutions namely, influencer marketing, social media analytics, and competition tracking.
The tool gives you in-depth insights into how your content is performing on different social media platforms. Additionally, it also allows you to analyse your audience base. The Unbox Social tool caters to all the major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube). The tool also has a competition tracking solution that allows you to compare your business with your industry competitors.
The data insights from the tool can help you frame effective strategies for the future.
2. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool to measure social reach. This tool comes with a number of features such as brand monitoring, content insights, and competitor research.
BuzzSumo’s feature of powerful content insights lets you identify the content that your audience relates with and optimizes your content marketing strategy to drive engagement. Through their reports and insights, you can gain valuable information to enhance your campaigns.
Not just that, the tool also helps you find influencers that can enhance your content strategy.
3. Buffer
Buffer is a tool that gives you solutions for publishing, analytics, and engagement. The tool helps you figure out what content is working for your brand and what is not. Moreover, it also gives you insights into audience demographics. Businesses can generate reports for post and stories performance and frame relevant content plans. Buffer provides a single dashboard for you to reply to the audience comments. This helps in prioritizing important conversations.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a multifaceted social media tool to drive a campaign and promote business. It covers almost all the major social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.
It offers the multiple features of scheduling your content, monitoring what you’re sharing, and curating content for you. Apart from that, it comes with a feature of analytics for social media. Here, you can get reports and insights into your performance on the social media front.
5. Agorapulse
Agorapuse is a social media management tool that helps you with multiple tasks like social media publishing, social media monitoring, and social media reporting. Additionally, the tool also has a social media inbox that allows you to manage all the messages under one dashboard. The inbox feature of the tool helps you assign, label, and bookmark important conversations so that you do not miss out on any important messages.
6. Sprout Social
The Sprout Social tool helps you with publishing, social listening, engagement, and analytics. The tool gives you a detailed report of how your business is faring on different social media platforms. The social listening feature allows you to look into trends and gives you actionable data. With the publishing and scheduling feature, you can plan and implement your content strategies smoothly.
7. SocialBee
Timing is very crucial in social media marketing. Brands and businesses need to remain consistent with their content posting on social media platforms. SocialBee helps with the same. The tool helps you organize your posts systematically. The features include content scheduling, content sharing, post editing, collaboration, and performance analysis.
8. Mention
Mention is a useful social media tool that helps you track brand mentions and generate reports on your social media performance. The platform also offers social media data and lets you analyse your social media posts. These insights will help you improve your social media strategies. Moreover, the tool also has compare and filter features that will give you deep insights into your audience and industry competitors.
Conclusion
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