Our Recommended Social Media Marketing Tools To Use

With social media always within close reach, customers go to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter and TikTok to learn about brands, compare and contrast offerings, and make inquiries. A recent study by Hootsuite suggests that more people are using social media as a customer service platform more than any of its other uses.

But social media is becoming a one-stop-shop for customers and a guidebook for businesses. Advertising executive Paul Barron even said, 

“I use social media as an idea generator, trend mapper and strategic compass for all of our online business ventures.” See? It may only be a part, but it’s essential in a digital strategy.

Social media is more than just posting news and updates and personalized responses to every query. Every social media marketing agency can tell you that it involves a number of elements, including strategizing, ideation, content creation, and scheduling, audience engagement, and reporting. Your social media content must answer the following questions:

1. What are my social media goals?
2. Who is my target audience?
3. What platforms suit my brand and audience?
4. What will I share on social media?
5. When will I share content with my audience?

Tough to answer? Luckily there are social media tools you can use to create and plan out your social media strategies efficiently and effectively. In this article, we’ve divided the tools into four of its major uses:

• Social media tools for strategizing and researching
• Social media tools for scheduling posts
• Social media tools for engaging your audience
• Social media tools for engaging your audience
• Social media tools for gathering data and analytics

When diving into a new tool, it's always best to start with the basics. Get comfortable with the in-app tools and features to build a strong foundation. As you become more familiar, you can gradually explore and scale up your usage. Remember, there's no rush! Take your time and enjoy the process of learning and mastering each function. If you ever find the need for more advanced features, you can always explore what other platforms on the list have to offer.

Social media tools for strategizing and researching

Strategizing is essential to your social media marketing plan. It is the summary of everything you plan to do and hope to achieve on all platforms social media. But how do you even start crafting social media content? Don’t worry; everything starts once you have good research in hand.

1. Buzzsumo

Research is the starting point of your social media strategy. Buzzsumo tells you what type of content is effective and which is not. You can use it to find content that is widely shared socially, the influencers for particular interests, and the right keywords your audience is most interested in.

2. Socedo

Socedo is a social media tool for businesses to target their audience and understand them for a more effective content creation strategy. It allows users to grow their Twitter followers and drive traffic through targeting, based on job titles, interests, and location. Socedo also gives you insights on areas of interest relevant to your audience.

3. SocialBakers

SocialBakers uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify your target audience, create relevant content for them, and share these at the right time. This tool defines buyer personas across channels and how they evolve. By focusing on the right people, you can better maximize your social marketing resources.

4. Audiense

Strategizing requires you to know your target audience. Audiense is a tool that can help you with that. Its intelligence identifies audiences and reaches them across channels through a media strategy. This social media tool for strategy also helps you understand your competitors’ audience, to enable you to gain market share.

5. AdsEspresso

AdEspresso can work as a social media analytics tool. This ad program creates, analyzes, and edits your social media campaigns across platforms using an intuitive interface. It also features a user-friendly creation process for Dynamic Ads and optimizes ads for Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

6. Newslit

Stay on top of your industry’s trending news with Newslit. This tool makes it easier to monitor the Internet for the news of the day through customizable industry insights and focused intelligence reports. Newslit continuously scans more than 100,000 sources daily. It also allows you to share important news with your team.

7. Refind

Generate ideas and better understand your audience with Refind. This tool follows your choice of topics, websites, and people, and collates the most relevant content for you. It allows a more focused delivery of news and trends that matter to you. Refind helps you discover relevant items without wasting your time.

8. Quuu

How do you create a social media content strategy? Let innovative social media tools, such as Quuu help you. Quuu delivers hand-picked content in over 500 interest categories to help you decide what to share with your audience. It automatically shares content to your social accounts, saving you time and effort.

9. Planable

Planable creates content for multiple pages and provides previews of posts in any format. You can now do away with clunky spreadsheets. The previews are shown, as though they are live; so there’s no longer any need for test pages. Planable also includes a scheduling feature which allows you to set a time slot for every post for each day of the week.

10. IFTTT

IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.” This plug-and-play social media tool allows you to create sets of instructions for posting social media content. You can set it up to upload a Facebook update every time you post an Instagram photo. It connects apps and devices and allows them to talk to one another and work seamlessly.

11. Oktopost

Oktopost defines itself as a business-to-business (B2B) social media management platform. It updates marketers on the latest interests and trends for content creation, schedules posts, and fills up gaps in the content calendar. Oktopost is especially helpful if you are running social, since it arranges, publishes, and measures posts for a specific activity. You can book a demo for free.

12. Everypost

With Everypost, you can easily sift through relevant content across sources and publish it across your social accounts. This is content curation with ease. The post customization feature modifies content to suit each type of platform and target audience. Everypost’s cross-posting is one of its unique offerings.

13. SocialFlow

SocialFlow is a social media tool specially designed for publishers and media companies. This tool features updated content scoring that allows immediate distribution of fast-trending stories. You can choose which content to recycle via visual alerts of high-performing posts. SocialFlow also has an AttentionStream service, which allows publishers to monetize their top-trending content through effective targeting.

14. Biteable

People love video content for their concise, appealing, and entertaining elements. Create shareable videos with Biteable. It has a built-in library of more than 85,000 real-life Shutterstock clips and animations. Biteable also offers templates for instant videos. You can now create amazing content under an hour.

15. Missinglettr

Increase brand awareness with your blog. Missinglettr can help you maximize every blog post. It automatically detects your posts across blog platforms, scans each post, and looks for quotes and images that can work well on social media. It then combines the content into a 12-month campaign in your social accounts. Missinglettr essentially puts your blog posts to work on social media.

16. Design Wizard

You don’t need to spend too much time creating fresh and compelling content. Design Wizard is your answer to instant video and image designs. It boasts of a massive library of more than one million high-quality images licensed for commercial use. You can make your templates with your logo and personalized caption.

17. Canva

Need data visualization for your social accounts? Canva can create stunning graphs for you. You can choose from a list of professional graph types and templates in high-resolution. It also allows you to embed graphs in presentation and infographics easily. Another popular feature of Canva is Photo Editing that includes a photo straightener, image cropper, and photo enhancer.

Social media tools for scheduling posts

Scheduling is closely linked to content creation, as it involves the timing of publishing content. How you plot your content calendar can influence the rate of your post reach, engagement, and overall social media performance.

18. Buffer

Buffer is one of the most popular social media tools today. It primarily offers scheduling, but it also includes content curation, analytics, team management, and customer support. Buffer also has a follow-up feature that evaluates past posts, which helps you identify what worked and what did not for your businesses social media strategy.

19. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a widely used content calendar tool. It automatically schedules posts to keep your social media presence active at all times. It also organizes your scheduled posts in a content calendar. With the Hootsuite mobile app, you can create, approve, and manage your calendar. This tool also includes content curation, analytics, and team management.

20. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a straightforward social media marketing tool. It allows you to upload content manually via bulk import or RSS feed and just set a content calendar; then it does all the rest. MeetEdgar does the content management job, analytics, and customer support. Don’t have time to create new posts every time? This tool can find notable text from articles or blogs and write posts for you.

21. Sumo

Sumo is a preferred social marketing tool for businesses. It helps promote content through List Builder, Welcome Mat, share buttons, and Smart Bar. Sumo allows you to grow your list with email opt-in forms, social media sharing, and video targeting, among others. It enables you to contact your prospects via email campaigns and integrations effectively.

22. Zapier

Businesses that manage a number of social media accounts are advised to automate their workflow to manage their time better. Zapier connects the apps you use every day and let them work on their own. It starts by picking a trigger that sets the apps into motion, allowing them to finish routine tasks automatically.

23. Tailwind

Tailwind is a social media scheduling tool specially designed for Pinterest and Instagram. It features bulk image upload, a drag-and-drop calendar, multi-board pinning, pin looping, and hashtag lists. Tailwind schedules posts, based on when your audience is most engaged. It seamlessly combines analytics and scheduling.

24. Agora Pulse

Agora Pulse features a list of publishing options to schedule posts, queue posts, and categorizes queue posts. It also allows you to bulk upload and delegate posts. You can designate a frequency and interval in publishing a post and republish evergreen content. Agora Pulse enables you to publish the right content at the right time to maximize your reach and click-through potential.

Social media tools for engaging your audience

Engagement is measured through reach, comments, likes, and shares your social media posts receive. The effectiveness of your social media campaigns should be regularly assessed via reporting or analytics. This will tell you what is working and what is not.

25. Sprout Social

Improve user engagement with Sprout Social. Its social media marketing service is generally divided into three parts: Plan and publish, monitor and engage, and report and analyze. Sprout Social provides a centralized content calendar to manage multimedia content that can be easily incorporated across social platforms. A Smart Inbox displays a single stream of keywords, hashtags, and ad engagement to allow you to track campaigns and engage with your audience.

26. AddThis

AddThis is a social media tool that aids in boosting user engagement by making it easier to share your content. It offers different types of customizable and mobile-friendly share buttons such as a floating bar, image sharing, expanding, and inline buttons. It also features a list-building tool through email integrations, pop-ups, and sliders, to name a few.

27. Conversocial

Conversocial’s solution is embedded in its Conversational Customer Experience Platform. It facilitates a smooth flow of conversation that moves with the customer across devices. It blends human support and automation in delivering customer service and offers large-scale productivity for big businesses. Conversocial puts user engagement and customer service on a high level.

28. Have2Have.It

Keep your Instagram followers engaged with Have2Have.It. This social media marketing tool directs your followers to a curated page where they can discover new products and buy what appeals to them. Have2Have. It features a user-friendly dashboard that lets you easily add posts, check customer registrations, and manage your billing. The best part is that it is free; and you are only charged, as you grow your e-commerce business.

29. Bitly

Bitly is a tool that shortens URLs and turns links into brand assets. Its creators claim that using custom links can help boost click-through rate by up to 34%. Bitly can also track clicks, view site referrals, and identify the geographical source of the highest clicks. Use it in creating a social media strategy template by knowing what campaigns suit your goals

Social media tools for gathering data and analytics

Analytics measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns, which should be regularly assessed. The data will tell you what is working and what is not in your social media strategy and campaign.

30. Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook Audience Insights gives valuable information about your posts and the engagement they earn when your business page earns more than 30 fans. The audience analysis tells you who are engaging with you, at what time, and from where exactly. To understand whether your paid ads are working, Facebook Insights provides an overview of your paid and organic ads. This service is free for Facebook users.

31. Brandwatch Analytics

If you want to analyze your social media accounts on a single platform, you can do so with Brandwatch Analytics. You can set rules to categorize mentions and generate data visuals for easier assessment. It can help you make informed social marketing decisions with live and historical data mined across the Internet. Ask for a free demo of this world-leading social listening platform.

32. Google Analytics

Google Analytics lets you understand the social media platform that drives the most traffic to your website and how users from these social networks interact with your site. You simply need to add your social media goals, such as traffic and downloads, to your Google Analytics dashboard. This free tool will then start tracking and analyzing social media traffic to your landing pages.

33. Vizia

Vizia Intelligent Reporting is a preferred reporting and analytics tool for medium- and large-scale businesses. This integrates data platforms, including Brandwatch Analytics, Buzzsumo, Facebook and Instagram Advertising, and Google Analytics. Vizia offers live and automated reports that can be shared with your team via email. Its presents data in stunning visual annotation, charts, content, and key stats.

34. Cyfe

Cyfe is an analytics tool that uses pre-built widgets to collect data from various platforms such as Google, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Its social media dashboards allow you to track how your business and clients are doing across platforms using real-time data and metrics. Cyfe gives you the big picture of how social media strategy impacts your business.

35. Quintly

Quintly is an analytics tool that has more than 350 metrics you can choose from to suit your strategic goals. You can also create your own metrics from scratch. Using free text search, you can find useful metrics and get instant insights into your social media content, content, and engagement. Quintly can help you unify goals across businesses, especially if you are operating in multiple markets.

Technology is like a living organism. It is changing with the times and faster than anybody would have ever imagined. A couple of decades ago, “social media” was not even a term. Today, it is continuously revolutionizing the way we live and do business. Stay on course by keeping abreast with trends. Maximize tech tools, but always be guided by a solid digital marketing strategy.

What are your battle-tested and proved social media marketing tools? Feel free to message us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.

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