The world of SEO and social media is constantly changing, and it can be hard to keep up with all the new developments. That’s why we’ve put together this list of some of the most useful tools out there.
We’ll start with the basic SEO tools, like Google Analytics and SEOmoz, then move on to more advanced social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social.
Table of Contents
Seo And Social Media Tools
ocial media marketing has been around for a while, and it’s become a proven tool for increasing traffic and generating new leads. Incorporating social media such as Facebook and Twitter into one’s business development strategy is an absolute must for any business these days. Ninety-two percent of marketers declared that social media was very important for their business, and 77 percent of them stated that their social media efforts increased traffic to their sites, according to Social Media Examiner research.
Those are not new facts. What’s new, though, are the tools you can use to enhance your social media efforts — like SEO and management tools. Let’s review seven tools that can improve your social media management and increase revenue.
1. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo allows you find the most popular content and share relevant content filtering by categories: videos, interviews, guest posts, giveaways and so on. It’s also a good way to discover hot topics and know how many social shares each post generates via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.
You can use BuzzSumo to monitor top competitors and get a clear picture of which types of content resonate with your users and which posts get the most social shares. It’s a good option if you want to learn new ideas for your content marketing projects and define top influencers in your niche who can boost your site visibility and brand awareness.
[blockquote] BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for search marketers who want to gain greater insight into their content’s performance. With a low price tag for acres of data at your fingertips, it’s a no-brainer. — Larry Kim via Search Engine Land[/blockquote]
2. Oktopost
Oktopost is a social media management tool for B2B companies that generates qualified leads for online business. With this tool, it’s simple to schedule and share your content to different social profiles and measure its effectiveness. You can also detect relevant conversations, replying to them in a natural way.
Oktopost keeps tabs on your social media marketing and conversions and reports on clicks for each post. The tool determines the most shared content with your audience and keeps them involved at all times.
[blockquote] Oktopost supports social media marketing on all of the main platforms but has been built specifically to support B2B marketers and focuses on their favourite platform, namely LinkedIn. — Steve Rayson via Social Media Today[/blockquote]
3. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform that offers a wide range of useful tools, including some you might not expect to find in SEO software. It’s cool, progressive and innovative. As SEO Hacker puts it:
[blockquote] SE Ranking is an honest to goodness helpful tool. This is one of the best and promising SEO tools of this generation. It’s very new, but it’s already proved so much about itself. [/blockquote]
Social media management is among the unexpected features that make SE Ranking a different kind of SEO platform. The tool offers scheduled publishing, comprehensive reporting and valuable ranking data to show you what’s working and what requires your attention in terms of getting more relevant traffic to your site.
What’s so valuable about it? The tool enables you to auto-post all social media updates to social networks (Facebook, Twitter). But what’s also cool is that you can see how your social media activities are affecting your SEO metrics because you have it all on one platform within the same interface.
Other useful features include the ability to see the best time to post in order to interact with your audience and the type of content that brings the best results. And if you run different social media accounts, you don’t need to switch from one account to another.
The SE Ranking social media management tool comes with a detailed analysis of user activity, demographic data, retweet and bookmarks statistics, and much more. It notifies you when your website is mentioned in a post or tweet, and even presents you with information on people who comment or reply to your posts and tweets.
4. Cyfe
One of the most dangerous pitfalls of social media marketing is overthinking each post. A 2014 article about one agency’s seemingly endless meetings and discussions surrounding a single branded tweet caused a bit of a stir in the industry, prompting many to wonder about the best ways to avoid this type of waste.
Everyone’s situation is different, so there’s no magic bullet to ensure that your time investment is balanced across social media management activities. Regardless, an important aspect of the solution is maintaining a broad view of activity.
No matter how far you drill down into per-post performance analytics, it’s important to keep it all in perspective. When you use a tool like Cyfe to build your own social media dashboard, you can access all of your channels’ analytics in one place, with widgets for each channel displaying visualizations of your impact over time.
Cyfe also offers pre-built widgets for other aspects of your business that have little to do with social media, which gives you the ability to correlate traction on your social channels with whatever’s happening elsewhere — your web traffic, email engagement, advertising campaigns, or even accounts receivable.
[blockquote] I love this tool. I’ve only been using it for a little while, but Cyfe allows you to integrate a ton of different tools into one dashboard to report on projects that you’re running. — Matthew Barby via Search Engine Land[/blockquote]
5. Inkybee
Inkybee plays a big role in social media marketing. Its primary goals are to monitor and share quality content, services and products with your target audience and interact and build good relationships with them.
Using the tool, it’s simple to find the right influencers in your niche on all of the main social media platforms. You just need to enter in keywords, and you’ll get all the data by filtering using the most important metrics: number of social media connections, size of audience, how often they post and basic SEO metrics.
The tool also shows a list of related blogs, filtering on visibility, location, data, SEO data and engagement. You can detect top influencers in the friends or followers of any Twitter profile, and it provides white-label reports showing all crucial metrics data.
[blockquote] Inkybee helps you find influential blogs and bloggers in your industry while pulling in engagement metrics, audience, and social accounts. Its real glory lies in the ability to manage outreach. With its tracking functionality, Inkybee enables you to manage the outreach process, track engagement, and produce reports for the project’s stakeholders. — Steve Olenski via Marketing Land [/blockquote]
6. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a simple, all-in-one social media marketing tool that allows you and your team to monitor mentions in all the major social networks and reply to users in your panel. It also helps you with directorial control, creating different tasks and assigning them to members of your team. This feature helps you better manage and delegate all tasks.
The tool comes with scheduling capabilities and detailed analytics to better understand how to use the platform. Sprout Social comes with a suite of influential tools to easily interact with your fans and leads, solve key issues and build brand advocates.
[blockquote] Sprout Social is a nicely designed social media management tool with lots of useful features. It offers a viable alternative that is simple to use, has a really nice user interface and has some great additional functionality. — Ian Cleary via RazorSocial [/blockquote]
7. Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster is another smart social media tool that provides you with the most important social media metrics such as number of retweets, followers, likes, comments, shares, impressions and so on. The tool gives you detailed reports on the best times to post or tweet in social media networks and guides you on possible opportunities for interacting with your users and followers who often retweet you.
The dashboard helps you create customizable and beautiful tables and graphs to view, and you can export all the data to CSV files.
[blockquote] Crowdbooster is my tool of choice to manage social media activities on Facebook and Twitter. This tool does many things to help me save time and streamline activities.” — Amy Porterfield via Social Media Examiner[/blockquote]
Bottom line
Do you want to rocket ahead of your competitors and take advantage of the power of social media? Consider using the tools above, and share with us what’s working for you.
SEO platforms: A snapshot
What is SEO? Search engine optimization encompasses a wide range of marketing activities, including content marketing, user experience strategy, technical analysis, and more, all with the goal of increasing the traffic websites receive from search engines.
What do the tools do? SEO platforms help marketers draw more insights from their work. They offer capabilities such as rank-checking, advanced keyword research, competitive intelligence, and backlink analysis. What’s more, enterprise-level platforms take these functions to new heights with extensive auditing and analysis of page performance, making it easier to find key areas needing improvement.
Why we care. SEO has remained one of the key foundations of digital marketing for years. Search drives roughly 50% of website traffic on average, according to a study on SimilarWeb data by Growth Badger. And while marketers have developed strategies to keep up, SEO’s growing complexity has made this a more complicated marketing discipline that companies cannot afford to ignore.
free social media tools for marketing
From design and copy to video and image editing to analytics and account insights, these top social media apps can help you stay at the top of your game without increasing your budget.
- AdsReport
With a successful paid social strategy, you can accelerate progress toward your brand’s goals.
Whether you want to grow your audience, sell more products, or do anything in between, Facebook Ads can give a much-needed boost.
But tasks like monitoring ad accounts and tracking results aren’t as simple as they should be.
If you need to confirm basic metrics like spend, impressions, or cost per click (CPC), you often have to sort through a mountain of data in your Facebook Ads account.
When you want to streamline your analysis, AdsReport has you covered.
Once you connect your Facebook Ads account, you can see insights in seconds.
Key metrics like spend, revenue, impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and CPC appear at the top with helpful comparisons to the previous period.
adsreports is a free social media marketing tool to help track facebook ads results
Track your Facebook Ads insights with one of our favorite social media marketing tools.
Click to view more metrics, and you can see all the other data that matters to your team, such as page likes, landing page views, post engagement, and purchase metrics.
Just want to check stats for a specific campaign? Scroll down, and select the right campaign.
Along with campaign metrics, AdsReport identifies the best-performing ad based on criteria like clicks, impressions, CPC, or CTR.ad campaign insights from adsreports
- Facebook Barometer
Does it seem like your Facebook strategy is missing something? A little perspective can go a long way. But when you’re so focused on what’s right in front of you, it’s tough to consider external factors.
Let’s say your client’s Facebook following is growing at a steady clip. Or maybe your social media marketing agency is rocking reach compared to previous months. Nice work!
But how do your results compare to your competitors’?
After all, your competitors are working hard to attract a similar audience. It’s essential to keep their progress in mind when you review your brand’s results.
With the free social media tool Barometer, you can compare your Facebook Page to your competitors’ Pages in seconds. Connect your Facebook Page to this free tool, and see how your performance stacks up to over 58,000 other pages. You can compare metrics like:
Fans reached
Engagement rate
People talking about your page
Negative feedback
Organic reach
Paid reach
Viral reach
CTR
free social media marketing tools barometer for facebook
Barometer is #2 on our list of favorite free social media marketing tools.
The average percentages featured in Barometer are based on the last 50 posts for each Facebook Page, giving you a solid basis for comparison.
To fine-tune your Barometer, choose the audience range that matches your Facebook Page and get more accurate industry averages.free social media marketing tools
Then scroll down for page insights like reach and impressions.
You can compare your Facebook Page against the industry average for the past 30, 90, or 180 days to get a better idea of how your brand is truly performing.
conquer social media inbox with agorapulse header image
- Bit.ly
When you share links on social media, you don’t always want to show the original URL. Maybe the URL is way too long and would clutter up your post so you’d prefer a shorter link. Perhaps the URL points to a website that you don’t manage and you’d like to find a way to track stats.
Many of the best social media management apps include tools that automatically shorten your URLs.
But these built-in tools don’t always give you much control over the process.
free social media marketing tools bitly
Bit.ly—one of the social media marketing tools out there that make work easier
Meet Bitly, a free social media marketing tool that shortens URLs and stores them in your own personal database.
With Bitly, you can make any URL shorter or create a URL with a custom slug, such as bit.ly/my-custom-slug.
Within your database, you can give URLs original titles and add tags for better organization. That means you can tag all URLs related to a campaign or promotion so you can find and analyze them easily.
But Bitly offers much more than shortened URLs. This tool also provides basic analytics, so you can understand how each link performed. You can monitor the number of clicks your URLs received each day, and you can track each link’s referrals.
With a quick glance, you can see whether social media, email, or SMS campaigns drove clicks.
If QR codes are part of your marketing strategy, you’ll appreciate Bitly’s simple QR code generator. You can create a QR code for any Bitly link, giving your audience another way to connect with your brand.
If you have extra room in your budget, Bitly also offers paid features.
With a paid plan, you can create branded URLs with custom domains, which can improve CTR and help you reach your web traffic goals even more reliably.
- Canva
Whether you’re sharing a blog post, a seasonal sale, or anything else on social media, you need images. Good, high-quality images.
But snapping your own photos and designing your own graphics takes time and money.
If you don’t have much of either to spare, Canva is an excellent option. This free design app lets you create all kinds of graphics, from Facebook cover images and Instagram Stories to tweets and images for your blog posts.
Canva, one of the most popular social media marketing tools for easy design crafting
You can get started by choosing from hundreds of templates.
All of Canva’s social media templates follow each platform’s recommended image dimensions, so you don’t have to worry about resizing. Just swap in your own text, logos, and photos to customize each graphic.
If you don’t have original photos to work with, choose from Canva’s free library or download free images.
Once you create something you like, you can use it over and over. Just copy the design and update the text or images, and you’ve got a branded template that you can reuse.
If you find that you’re using Canva constantly, you might benefit from the paid version.
When you upgrade to Canva Pro, you can set and save brand colors and fonts, add GIFs, and resize designs for other platforms with a single click.
If you’re an Agorapulse user, you can also take advantage of our Canva integration. Here’s how:
- Easel.ly
When you publish a social media post, you have limited space and time to attract attention. If you have a long or complicated message to share, you have to get your point across before followers scroll past.
Infographics use the power of images to capture attention and convey more complex ideas.
But designing infographics takes talent. You can’t just throw one together in a few minutes.
That’s where free social media marketing tool Easel.ly can help.
This free social media tool lets you create sharp-looking infographics without a graphic design degree.
Get started by choosing a basic template. Then add graphics, charts, data, and other visual elements.
To add movement to your infographic, you can insert animated GIFs. Easel.ly is also integrated with Unsplash, so you can add royalty-free photos to your design.easel.ly is one of our favorite free social media marketing tools
When you’re finished, you can download or embed your infographic. You can also use Easel.ly’s social media integrations to share directly to Facebook or Twitter.
Although Easel.ly is one of the top free apps for social media, you can get even more out of the paid version of this tool. Upgrade to get hundreds of premium templates, over 1 million icons and photos, and better organization.
- Easy Advocacy
When your company or client writes a new blog post or publishes an amazing piece of content, you want to get the word out on social media. Your fellow team members can easily become some of your brand’s biggest supporters.
But first, you have to get them on board.
If you’ve found that emails and Slack threads aren’t doing enough to get the message across, you need Easy Advocacy, a free social media marketing tool. You can keep coworkers and stakeholders informed about new content. And you can make it easy for them to share it, too.
easy advocacy, a free social media marketing tool
First, set up your distribution list. Then create a campaign by entering a link, title, and suggested copy. Send it to your distribution list, and each person will receive an email prompting them to promote the campaign. The email includes social share buttons and an email link, so promotion takes a single click.
Once you send out the campaign, you can skip manual follow-ups. Your Easy Advocacy dashboard tracks all the key statistics from your campaign automatically.
You can see which members of your distribution list are your brand’s best advocates and on which social network your campaign has performed best.
- Feedly
As a social media marketer, you need to keep up with what’s happening in social media, marketing, and beyond.
What’s your audience reading? What’s trending in your industry? What content creation ideas can you glean from what your competitors are publishing?
Feedly, a news aggregation app, lets you make sense of all that noise.
With Feedly, you can create your own customized newsfeed. Add the sources you want to follow, and you can filter out irrelevant content while making sure you don’t miss anything important.
To organize your feed, group relevant sources together in a single feed. That way you can browse all the new posts on a single topic at once. As you read, you can check articles off your list or save important ones to read later.
You can also save articles to a board, which essentially bookmarks them for future reference.
- Headline Analyzer
It doesn’t matter if you’re an experienced writer or if you’ve been blogging for over a decade. Writing great headlines isn’t easy.
But an excellent headline can result in more clicks, which can turn into increased web traffic and greater reach on social media. That means taking your headline game up a notch can give your brand a critical boost.
With CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool, you can find out where your headline shines and where it could use some work.
Type your headline into the tool, and you’ll get a score and previews of how your headline is likely to look.
Here’s how this free tool scores your headline:
Word Balance: An analysis of the common, uncommon, emotional, and power words you’ve used
Characters: The number of characters in your headline, including measurement of how close you are to the optimal length
Words: The number of words in your headline, including tips for shortening or lengthening as necessary
First and Last: A spotlight on the first and last three words of your headline, which tend to get the most attention
Keywords: A review of the common search terms that appear in your headline
If your headline produces a green score, you’re good to go.
If it’s yellow or red, follow the tips to improve your headline and get more eyes on your social media post.Download this free social media calendar packed with ideas and examples!
- Loom
You can’t always say everything in your social media captions, especially if you’re limited to 280 characters. Ever want to dash off a quick message without having to write it all down? Or create a brief how-to video that explains it all?
Loom lets you share and record your screen quickly and easily.
For a nice personal touch, you can include a small video of you in the corner, explaining the screen share. Or you can record just your voice or the screen only.
Just press record, say your message, and share it with your audience.
When you’re done with the video, you can click to share to Facebook or Twitter immediately or copy the link so you can paste it into a scheduled social media post.
Incredibly easy to use, Loom makes these video messages quick and efficient.
- Twitter Report Card
You work hard to implement a solid Twitter strategy. You carefully write your 280 characters, use strategically selected hashtags, and curate super-targeted Twitter lists. How’s that working out for you?
If you aren’t sure how your performance compares to your closest competitors, Agorapulse’s Twitter Report Card can help.
Like Barometer, Twitter Report Card compares your performance to industry averages.
Unlike Barometer, Twitter Report Card lets you choose who to measure your account against.
After connecting your Twitter profile to the tool, add a few competitors. Then check to see how you compare in terms of audience, publishing, and conversion metrics. This free social marketing tool compares stats like:
Followers
Interactions
Interactions per follower
Tweets
Interactions per tweet
Conversation tweets
If you already run a Twitter account or two, this report card can tell you where you stand and show you where you’re winning.
If you want to attract new social media clients for your social media marketing agency, this tool can help you do competitor analysis on Twitter and reveal areas where you could help them improve.
In Conclusion
Sometimes, it makes sense to pay for a social media marketing tool. Many tools are worth the investment, especially when you need a reliable platform for content scheduling, social listening, and reporting. Still, you don’t have to pay for everything.
Add some of the best free social media marketing tools to your arsenal, and start driving better results for your company or clients.
Conclusion
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