Social media is a great tool for promoting your business, but it’s also a great way to waste time and money. If you want to really make an impact with your social media presence, you need to know how to use the right tools.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular social media tools and explain their benefits, as well as give you some tips on how to use them effectively.
Table of Contents
Social Media Tools To Promote Business
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.
free social media tools for marketing
- 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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