Social media marketing is an important part of any business strategy. With the right tools, you can make the most of your efforts and ensure that your content is reaching a wide audience. Here are some of the best social media marketing tools out there:
- Buffer: With this tool, you can schedule posts across multiple social media platforms at once, so you don’t have to check back in all the time. You can also use their analytics dashboard to track results and see which posts are working best for you.
- Hootsuite: This tool has a dashboard that lets you monitor all of your social media accounts from one place, allowing you to respond more quickly and efficiently when someone mentions or responds to one of your posts.
- Sprout Social: This platform allows for easy collaboration between team members so everyone stays on top of things like scheduling posts as well as responding promptly when someone engages with them (which means faster response times!).
Table of Contents
Powerful Social Media Marketing Tools
. Biteable
Creating content for social media is an essential part of the game. Visual content gets three times more engagement on Twitter than plain ol’ text, so good visual content can help you take it to the next level.
With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share on social media.
With a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes, Biteable is a godsend for anyone who wants to create studio-quality quickly without needing expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment.
Biteable was created to be super easy to use and one of the cheapest tools of its type on the market. Most features are available even with free accounts (it’s pretty cheap to upgrade to Premium anyway) so why not add a bit more excitement and spark to your social media content by creating some short, super-shareable videos?
2. Buffer
Buffer started off as a scheduling tool for Twitter. Today, it supports all the major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google + (for the one person who still uses it.) Let’s take a look.
You can do some pretty neat things with Buffer:
- Use the chrome extension to add articles and content from the web to your Buffer queue or share content on the go.
- Automatically shortens links you share. If you’re Bitly user, you can connect your accounts.
- Upload custom photos and videos (or use ones pulled from the article you shared).
- Access complex analytics to track your content’s performance.
- Create a posting schedule so your content gets spread out throughout the day.
- Reply to posts from inside Buffer.
- Add team members.
A social media dashboard like Buffer helps you fill your social media feed with relevant and exciting content without spending half your life logged in to Facebook and Twitter.
3. Buzzsumo
Research is a crucial part of marketing. If you want to do well and leave your competitors in the dust, you need to understand what they’re doing and if what you’re doing is working or not.
Buzzsumo is a research tool which tells you how your content is doing and who’s spreading the word.
Sometimes when you sit down to create content, you’re on fire. Other times it’s like pulling teeth and you’re just grateful to have met a deadline. It’s impossible to guarantee success, but a tool like Buzzsumo can help you increase the odds.
One of the most powerful research tools on the market, the functionality includes:
- Find content that’s most shared on social media channels – you can enter your own or someone else’s domain and see what’s been shared socially.
- Find influencers related to particular topics.
- Get alerts based on keywords, brand name, links, author name, or domain.
- Track competitors and do an analysis based on their content.
- Use it to research keywords and trending topics your audience is interested in. You can use it to find interesting new posts to share or to search for content ideas based on what’s performing well.
- And, if you’ve got some cash to splash, Buzzsumo Pro is a powerhouse for competitor research.
4. Missinglttr
Social media promotion is vital to success in the online world, but the act of scheduling posts may not be the reason you bounce of bed every morning. Even if you use a tool to help you speed up the process of blasting all your channels at once, you still need to manually input the text and images for each post. Rinse and repeat to re-promote the posts.
Missinglettr helps you automate the process of creating social content by scraping your blog post content and creating a year’s worth of social content for you: nine individual posts dripped out to your social channels over a year.
This means you can focus on writing long-form blog posts while someone else takes care of the creative side of social promotion and the scheduling of posts, so there’ll be one less thing on your to-do list.
With templates for content creation, scheduling, and facilitating client approvals, plus a custom URL shortener to export campaign assets so they can be used in other marketing initiatives, Missinglettr has some great features that’ll lighten your load. You even get a weekly report so you’re on top of your marketing performance.
5. MeetEdgar
So you need a content manager but you’re already a one-person-band responsible for evergreen content creation, tech support, and design? Meet MeetEdgar.
A social media management tool that handles both re-sharing your content and optimising your social traffic, MeetEdgar is your handy automated content manager.
Working with your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles through a web plugin, you can keep your social channels populated with posts and check in from wherever you are using your mobile.
MeetEdgar allows you to schedule content re-sharing and monitor traffic while boosting engagement and optimizing the ROI of your digital assets.
By putting your evergreen content out there on the regular, you can increase your traffic and boost engagement. With an automated auto-refill queue, you won’t run out of regular posts. It also features a category-based scheduling tool allowing you to mix different content types so your audience never gets bored.
MeetEdgar also features a URL shortener with in-app click tracking which means you can follow your clicks.
6. Hootsuite
In the chaotic world of social media, Hootsuite handles multiple social media accounts, bringing them under one login into a single dashboard, and you can sign up free of charge.
One of the most popular social media management tools around, Hootsuite allows for collaboration across team members and an approval process. Alongside the major benefit of seeing all your comments and mentions in one place, you can also assign tasks, plot a social media calendar, and schedule updates.
Through Hootsuite Podium you can check out free online social media courses to develop better social media management skills and learn the fundamentals of social media marketing.
Beyond that, for the more experienced digital marketer, its tools integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube, giving you an in-depth breakdown of your analytics and allowing you to interact with prospective customers.
You can even integrate other community-based platforms including Reddit, Tumblr, and Storify, which helps gather even more feedback and customer data.
7. Mention
Mention is an extremely comprehensive social listening tool. Monitor mentions of your brand, your products, or your competitors in real time.
Staying on top of the conversation is easy: you can respond to social media comments and mentions from inside the platform, and you can use Mention to find relevant influencers for influencer marketing campaigns and analyze your competitors.
8. Sumo
Sumo has a whole suite of useful traffic and social media tools that can help improve your marketing strategy. The most relevant for social media is the social shares feature, which makes it easy for visitors to your site to share your content to social media, and it keeps track of the number of shares.
9. IFTTT
IFTTT: If this, then that. This tool lets you set up rules that make running your social media marketing empire much easier.
Create rules that trigger specific actions when something happens. For example, you can create a rule that means every time you get a Google notification for a specific alert, it gets added into a Google doc so you can check it all at the end of the day.
These rules can eliminate some of the manual back-and-forth, and help you streamline your process in a way that emphasises and enhances individual productivity.
10. Zapier
Zapier is another tool that encourages automation and does share some similarities with IFTTT. One writer summarized the key differences rather well. IFTTT is easier to learn and great for light automation, while Zapier is a great tool for businesses that want to take their automation to new heights. A lot of marketers use both for different tasks. As an extra bonus, Zapier plays nicely with most of the tools on this list.
If you’re looking for some neat automation ideas, to get you started the Zapier team have a list of suggestions about how you can use Zapier to better manage your social media accounts.
social media strategy tools
As all marketers know by now, social media is a great way to for businesses to have fun, but also produce real, measurable, results that impact a business’ bottom line. And as we all know, time equals money and social media is a fast-paced exchange of information that happens instantaneously. These top 10 tools can ensure that your social media strategy properly aligns with your business’ goals and objectives:
- Edgar
Edgar is more than just a tool for the basic scheduling of content. Although sites like Hootsuite and Buffer can be great for the general purpose of arranging posts, there’s still a concern within social media marketing in how many users are getting a look at your content. You see, social users are inundated with new content and no matter how great your post update is, only a small fraction of your followers will ever see it:
social-media-tool-edgar
So, unlike reposting content on a blog, repurposing content on social media is actually a good thing! Fans who missed your post the first time get a chance to view it the second or third time you post it. The difference between Edgar and other content scheduling tools is that you can categorize your content, customize your settings and share some categories more than others. But, what about when you finally run out of content from a certain category? Well, Edgar starts from the beginning and will automatically re-share old content! Edgar currently works with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and it saves time and increases the amount of users viewing your content.
- Canva
All social media platforms are highly visual in nature and great content calls for great imagery. Now, some brands and some posts in particular do require the work of a graphic designer, but some content and images don’t need to be absolutely stunning, they just need to be aesthetically pleasing, and Canva allows the busy social media marketer to make appealing visuals quickly and easily.
social-media-tool-canva
The platform provides a bunch of quick options in terms of the sizing of imagery. From there users can pick a background color, upload images or a logo, Canva even provides a few free “elements” to include in your image. Registration is free and the site even saves your designs, making it even easier to make changes to old imagery.
- AdParlor
What better way to prove just how great your social media strategy can look than with authentic mockups of your masterpiece? AdParlor offers a free mockup generator for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The platform allows you to choose from various campaign objectives for each platform and the option to view the ad in different forms such as news feed and mobile for Facebook and video and carousel for Instagram. The site is so easy to navigate, and it’s a great way to develop the perfect copy without accidentally going over character limits. - Buzzsumo
One of the keys to social media success is sharing relevant content that is not always yours and Buzzsumo is one of the best tools on the web when it comes to finding the most popular content.
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There’s two ways to utilize Buzzsumo that will take your social media presence to the next level. The first is typing in a competitor domain and viewing their most popular social content, which is sorted by total shares. After viewing your top competitors, you can gain a clear picture of what types of content truly resonates with your target audience. Secondly, you can look for popular content by keyword:
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You can choose to view the most popular content from the past 24 hours, the past week, the past month and so on, while filtering by categories like Infographics, Videos, Interviews, etc.
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- Kingsumo Headlines
This WordPress plugin easily allows for A/B testing headlines against each other. Once the plugin is installed, you’ll notice that there are multiple spaces for titles on any post you create. Kingsumo will randomly serve the titles to website visitors whenever possible until it determines which headline is the most effective. Statistics show that excellent titles can increase traffic to posts by over 50%! With the help of Kingsumo, you can be sure that you’re sharing the best headline with your fans and increasing traffic to your post. - Inkybee
Influencers are a big part of most social media marketing strategies and the goal is usually to connect with them, establish a relationship, and get them to share your content, products, services, etc. Finding the right influencers, however, can be tricky. That’s where tools such as Inkybee come in. Inkybee lets you search for top bloggers in your niche on all major social networks. Once you log in, you can search keywords. For example, I wanted to see what types of influencers would best benefit a health and fitness client:
social-media-tool-inkybee
It quickly found a large list of related blogs. It also ranked the blogs based on relevance, visibility, and engagement, all of which are positive traits for an influencer to have here:
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Since you can get many results for broad keywords, consider using the filter options on the left.
- Sprout Social
If you need a simple, complete, all-in-one, social media management tool, SproutSocial is a is the best contender. You can monitor all mentions across all major networks and reply to them in your messages panel. Additionally, you can create tasks based on messages or you can create helpdesk tickets and assign them to a member of your team. This is particularly if you receive a lot of questions through social media or your fans use your social media profiles as a port for customer service. - Onalytica
This is another tool that focuses on finding influencers to follow, but with a twist. Instead of just searching for a keyword, you can upload a file with a blog post or add a link to a published blog post. Onalytica scans your content, defines the theme, and returns influencers appropriate for your followers. For example, I want to find influencers who would love this blog post by Blue Fountain Media on marketing tips for Facebook:
social-media-tool-onalytica
Within a few seconds, I’ve been given top influencers for my content:
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- Post Planner
Post Planner is an app within Facebook that offers a dashboard to help manage and improve your Facebook presence. Of course, you can schedule your content directly through Facebook, but Post Planner provides a list of status ideas as well as access to viral posts on Facebook. It’s packed with insights and trending content for your industry, which makes Post Planner a great tool for optimizing engagement! - Bitly
For social media marketers, Bitly is a great tool to help shorten links and make posts more aesthetically pleasing. For platforms like Twitter, where character count is limited, Bitly makes it easy to save valuable space that would normally be occupied by lengthy links. Aside from it’s core purpose, you can also monitor how many clicks you get on your posts, allowing you to better gauge the content that interests your audience the most.
Social Media Tools for Your Business Strategy
If you have the creativity and passion for your company and you’ve fully committed to a social media strategy that aligns with your brand and goals, these 10 tools can only take your campaign to an even higher level than you expected.
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