Social media has become an essential part of marketing strategies for businesses. With the help of social media marketing, you can easily reach out to your target audience and convert them into potential customers. While it may seem easy to create a social media account and fill it with content, there is more to this strategy than meets the eye.
In order to gain traction on social media platforms, you need to understand the basics of digital marketing. Digital marketing includes several aspects like search engine optimization, email marketing, blogging, paid advertising etc.
It is important for any business owner to understand the basics of digital marketing before diving head first into social media marketing.
Social Media Tools In Digital Marketing
1. 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.
best social media marketing tools
- eclincher
Platforms: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Twitter, Google My Business, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok
G2 Ranking: 4.7 out of 5
eclincher homepage screenshot
eclincher might just be the best kept secret in social media due to their grassroots ‘word of mouth’ content marketingefforts. eclincher, as brand advocates tote, has been reviewed as “the swiss-army knife of social media”.
Why eclincher?
They are pushing out more value and functionality to businesses, marketing agencies and larger teams, than their competitors.
You might expect customer service to be a standard. But, in the SaaS world, eclincher’s support team really takes the clients’ expectation of service seriously. They offer 24/7 live chat support, 1 on 1 demos or meetings and listen to their customer’s feedback. Their customer support is consistently and notably awarded best in class from sites like G2Crowd, Capterra, GetApp and the like.
You’ll capture some serious social media ROI using eclincher’s social media management tool. Centered around marketing automations, eclincher helps marketers and social media managers to save time using a single dashboard. This digital marketing platform automates tasks such as bulk scheduling, publishing from smart queues and RSS feeds, collecting and responding to all social media interactions in one inbox, automated and custom analytics reports, and team collaboration workflows. In addition, you can find a comprehensive content scheduler and publisher, drag and drop visual calendar, campaign tracking, competitor analysis, and omnichannel customized social media post editing.
This top rated powerful social media management tool, or a platform, has everything you need to execute your social media marketing strategy.
If Instagram scheduling is top of mind you’ll love the Insta Link in bio traffic driver, custom Instagram grid planning, and being able to schedule Instagram posts, stories and carousels.
The eclincher’s inbox or a social media CRM is desinged so you never miss an interaction, a message, a comment or a review. All interactions are automatically collected in one inbox. Once you reply, you can complete the item and “clean” your inbox.
In addition, eclincher helps you discover relevant content and eassily curate and publish articles to your social mediaprofiles.
Also included are keywords and hashtags monitoring, social media analytics, Google Analytics integration, URL shorteners, campaign tracking and more.
This social marketing tool really has it all to keep campaigns innovative and organized catering to multiple social mediaaccount(s).
Other integrations to mention are: Yelp, Canva , wave.video , Zendesk , Bitly , Feedly , Unsplash. Slack is coming in 2022 and TikTok for Business was already integrated in 2021.
Remarkably, two of the most amazing benefits of working with eclincher is their agile team atmosphere and their ability to be nimble with the ongoing addition to features benefiting new and current clients without additional cost pushed onto users.
The real value of eclincher evolves when you need to scale. If you have many brands to manage or a lot of franchise locations, that cost adds up in thousands.
Comparing against some of the social media marketing giants like Hubspot, Sprout Social, or Sprinklr, eclincher is the best choice for scaling large accounts with multiple locations or brands.
If a feature doesn’t exist, suggest it with their 24/7 live chat and if it is scalable and beneficial for companies like yours, they will implement that suggestion. How cool is that?
They have recently updated their User Interface in January 2022 and users are loving it! There are a lot of features to choose from, so make sure to get a live FREE personal demo.
Plans are scalable and customizable with add-ons such as Users and Profiles. The platfrom supports large accounts with hundreds of profiles and users for large companies.
Currently they offer a 14-day FREE trial with no credit card required.
Pricing starts at $59/month (1 user) – $219/month (6 users).
RELATED : Why eclincher is Perfect For Agencies
- Falcon.io
Platforms: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube
G2 Ranking: 4.1 out of 5
Falcon
Falcon.io. is a cloud-based social media marketing and customer experience management solution that features tools for social media listening, engagement, publishing content, measuring, and customer data management.
They pride themselves in being versatile for any type of marketer whether it’s for a solopreneur or a digital agency. Toting Auto-Queue posting and visual planning, their tool can be used for monthly planning across different social channels.
They have a Social Inbox feature in addition to social monitoring and listening. They do not have an Influencer Search feature, yet they are a fully encompassed tool that is likely to serve business of any size.
Falcon.io provides users with a content calendar that allows them to plan, create and schedule content in collaboration with marketing teams.
It also facilitates the creation of pages using the campaign builder that consists of pre-designed templates providing APIs that deliver metrics on social data, audience and content, for integration with existing client CRM, CMS and analytics systems.
This social media management software offers support through online guides, tutorials and via email and a ticket submission portal 24/5 on business days and custom hours on weekends.
Pricing starts at $129 per user/month and increases based on custom features.
- Sprout Social – Rate: 4.3 out of 5 via G2
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Pinterest
G2 Ranking: 4.1 out of 5
SproutSocial
Sprout Social has positioned their scalable platform to large organizations and teams known favorably for monitoring, scheduling posts, analytics, and team management with approval workflows. Those interested in employee advocacy will also enjoy this social media management tool.
This simple yet powerful platform is user friendly and offers all of the basics that you’d expect in addition to any customized features upon requests. One such feature is the individual statistics for each post.
Sprout offers post approvals and administering permission settings, which caters to digital agencies in addition to medium sized businesses.
There is a social inbox tool that is great for communicating and engaging with your audience, in addition to a social monitoring and keyword search feature. Unfortunately, it does not have the Auto Post with queues feature or an influencer search feature.
Pricing starts at $99 per user/month – $279 per user/month and increases based on custom features.
- Hootsuite
Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, & Pinterest)
G2 Ranking: 4.1 out of 5
Hootsuite
Hootsuite was first on the social media marketing scene and has been around since 2008. Hootsuite is the most blogged about social media platform out there and you will find they exist on most listicles.
They are well known for content curation, organization, scheduling, monitoring, and RSS integration and have a notable reputation. We feel a lot of teams large and small start with Hootsuite and then scale to other services that might meet their needs better.
But, what we can genuinely appreciate is the sheer size of Hootsuite, their marketing prowess, their educational Hootsuite Academy that helps you learn social media marketing and allows you to pay for certifications to arm you with the skills you need to be successful.
Hootsuite social media management tool allows for bulk scheduling, meaning you can upload several posts at once in addition to client management support. They do not have an Auto Post feature, social inbox or influencer search.
However, it is highly well-known for being a fully integrated tool that has a great social listening feature. They also offer a 30 day trial.
Pricing starts at $49/month – $739/month,
Conclusion
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