Social media has become a huge part of every business’s marketing strategy. And for good reason—social media is an incredibly powerful tool for connecting with customers, reaching new audiences, and creating brand awareness.
But if you’re not using the right tools, all of that power can be wasted. You need to use social media tools that will make your job easier, so you have more time to focus on growing your business in other ways.
That’s where we come in! We’ve done the research for you and found some of the best social media tools for marketing and advertising out there.
Social Media Tools For Marketing And Advertising
These social media management tools are the ones that help you manage the workflow that social media requires (yes, it’s in the name). They make the process easier, more organized, less stressful, and, therefore, more effective. Here are a few of my favorites.
1. IFTTT
So you’ve got your social media posts scheduled and maybe you even crossed off the content curation task. What’s the next step? To automate everything that comes before and after (and in between). That’s what IFTTT is for. The name of this automation tool stands for If This, Then That. It links all kinds of apps and services together to automate multi-step tasks in whatever way you want. So for example, if you publish a blog, you can create an IFTTT “recipe” that will see the new post and create a tweet as well as an Instagram post about it.
If there’s a task in your social media marketing workflow that you always forget about despite all the post-it notes, try IFTTT.
Price: free
2. Buffer
Buffer is a popular scheduling tool that allows marketers to schedule posts across a variety of social media platforms. You can either tailor each post to each platform or publish the same one everywhere.
You can use a Buffer Chrome extension to add any content you find on the Web to the Buffer queue. This adds a bit of fun and creativity to the whole process of content aggregation and sharing, because for once you don’t have to plan what to share in advance. Yet your posts still will be shared at the best possible times. You can also track links to see which content is most popular with your readers.
Price: freemium; paid plans from $15/mo
3. Quuu
Already got Buffer? To simplify your work even further, i.e., to eliminate the part where you are the one looking for valuable content to share, start using Quuu. This is a social media marketing tool that curates content for you: it takes hand-picked, always relevant content, and adds it to the Buffer queue. This eliminates any trouble of curating and sharing any content other than the stuff you most want to share (i.e., your own blog posts and promotional content).
Price: plans start at $15/mo
4. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is another social media scheduling tool that stands out for one reason: it allows you to recycle old posts. This is more important than it seems: Content, even good and popular content, gets forgotten and left behind. Recycling that old content so it can get views again is low-hanging fruit, and too often a missed opportunity.
With MeetEdgar, you organize posts by category, schedule content by category, and then, every time the tool has gone through your scheduled posts, it will automatically post old content from each category so it can get attention again.
Price: $49/mo
Social media marketing tools: Monitoring
Organic social media marketing is divided into two processes. One is about the content that comes from you and your brand. It’s the content you create, the content you aggregate and share with your audience, and promotional content. Social media marketing tools that automate and optimize this part of the job are discussed above. The second aspect of social media marketing comes from the audience. It’s the mentions of your brand online, reviews, questions, compliments and complaints directed towards you.
While posting may be more important for increasing brand awareness, keeping an eye on what people say about you and responding appropriately is important too. It’s pretty much impossible to manually find all mentions of a brand on social media, as even on social media platforms people don’t always tag the brand. That’s why social media monitoring tools exist: to make communication with an online audience comprehensive. Here are a few that stand out:
1. Awario
Awario is a social media listening tool made for solopreneurs and small businesses. It doesn’t require a large budget, yet it covers all major social media listening features: finds mentions of your brand or any other keyword on all major social media platforms, including influential forums like Reddit; breaks mentions down into positive, negative, and neutral ones; shows you a list of influencers; and offers reports with all the stats on the authors that mention your brand.
Price: starts at $29/mo
2. Mention
Mention offers real-time social media monitoring, and you can set up alerts for your brand, your competitors, and your industry. With this tool, you can view and respond to each like, tag, or mention (ah, see what they did there?) right in the app. You can also sort mentions by importance or significance, and even set up filters, including by source or by language.
Mention also offers two options tailored to the different who need social media monitoring: small businesses focused on their own branding and agencies working on behalf of their clients.
Price: starts at $29/month
3. Brandwatch
If your budget is much larger, then Brandwatch may be the tool for you. Brandwatch’s analytics data is highly visual: perfect to illustrate the meaning of social media marketing to clients, if you’re an agency.
Another feature that makes Brandwatch stand out is Signals. You have an option to set up an alert whenever a keyword is mentioned by the authors you choose. Signals alert on significant changes in the data set, such as a sudden peak in the number of mentions or an increase in negative mentions.
Price: starts at $800/mo
4. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another enterprise-level social media marketing tool that’s undoubtedly one of the most powerful on the market. It offers a huge range of filters, sub-filters, and platform coverage. Not only does it cover social media, news sites, blogs and forums, but also broadcast, TV, and print. The data available is almost endless. It combines information from Google Analytics and social media, sentiment analysis and image recognition to show you the most accurate report on every aspect of the audience.
Talkwalker is aimed at teams of marketers and PR pros, and it makes working in teams easy. It allows you to manage a smooth workflow within a department and easily share data across departments.
Price: starts at $9,600/year
5. Socialinsider
Socialinsider is an analytics and benchmarking tool for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube.
With this tool, you can see where you stand against top competitors, optimize your clients’ social media strategy with advanced analytics and competitive benchmarking, track social media KPIs, and share branded reports with your clients. Add your logo and brand color to give them a more personal touch.
Using Socialinsider, you will save time and impress clients with data they haven’t seen before.
Price: Starts at $59/month or get a free 7-day trial.
Social media marketing tools: Paid advertising
Social media marketing is tricky. Sometimes it seems as if everything can be achieved organically and for free, as long as your efforts are creative and authentic. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and it becomes less and less common to achieve social media marketing success without any advertising budget. This is especially the case with Facebook. However, as appealing as Facebook makes advertising look, it’s pretty hard to make it work if you don’t have the right tools. So here’re the chosen ones:
1. Facebook Ads Grader
Although Facebook offers some analytics on ads, it’s often hard to tell whether your ads are worth the money, and if not, what has to be improved so that they could be more effective. WordStream’s Facebook Ads Grader lets you know just that: it provides a complete free assessment of your Facebook Advertising performance.
The report-based social media marketing tool generates a detailed summary in the areas in which you’re succeeding and falling behind. The analysis includes metrics which show you how much the Key Performance Indicators differ based on who you’re advertising to; how your best and worst performing ads compare to your competitors; whether you’re paying too much; whether you’re targeting the right audience; etc. It also shows if your campaigns, ad sets, and ads adhere to the industry standards established by Facebook. Basically, the Facebook Ads Grader is the easiest way to see if you’re getting the most out of your budget and how you can improve.
Price: free
2. Qwaya
Qwaya is a social media marketing tool to help create and manage Facebook and Instagram ads. It makes sense to buy it before you’ve even started investing money in Facebook Ads. Qwaya lets you schedule ads, offers analytics integration and team collaboration. Most importantly, it lets you A/B test your ads.
Anyone in marketing knows that testing is key to find the right message for your audience. Social media advertising isn’t an exception. With Qwaya, you can test every variable you’d like to make sure you’re not wasting your money and getting the best possible outcome.
Price: starts at $149/mo
3. Perfect Audience
Perfect Audience is a retargeting tool that can be used for Facebook advertising. Once you get over the clearly outdated design (sorry) and try the tool out, you might find it to be very effective for your business.
Retargeting is a big part of any advertising strategy – or at least it should be. Perfect Audience simplifies the process and helps you set up campaigns and view results. It provides info on impressions served, clicks back, conversions, and cost. The tool can be used for the Web and mobile as well as Facebook.
best 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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
Conclusion
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