Social Media is one of the most lucrative career fields right now. Having a successful business campaign is almost impossible without a strong social media strategy. It might look like it’s an easy job on the surface but if you think Social Media Marketing is a simple job, you could not be more wrong.
While you have to have good intuition to be successful in this field, it takes time and effort to become good at it! You have to understand how to drive the algorithm for your benefit. And no, there isn’t a cookie-cutter approach to do this as the algorithms and social media platforms are constantly evolving with new trends and new metrics constantly popping up.
So if you are serious about growing your ROI for your business, you can’t just rely on random posts, stories or a photogenic model for it!
For an effective social media campaign, you need monetary resources, competent employees, and suitable tools that make your job more manageable.
In this post, we are going to be talking about the latter- Social Media marketing tools. We have curated a list of the best social media marketing tools that are user-friendly and adaptable to industry changes. These tools can be divided into three groups based on the importance of tasks being automated:
- Social media marketing management
- Social media monitoring
- Social media advertising
1. Social Media Marketing Tools: Scheduling & Workflow
When to post what? Who is in charge of what? If not properly planned, these questions can create a lot of confusion and slow down your marketing strategy.
Thankfully, there are many social media management tools that help control the workflow for social media requirements. You can make your marketing campaign easier, more organized, and less stressful, by integrating these tools into your social media marketing process. Let’s take a look at our favourites!
Tool 1: IFTTT
IFTTT. It sounds like a mouthful, doesn’t it? Well, maybe it will fall into perspective when you hear what it stands for. IFTTT stands for If This, Then That.
It is a tool that is designed to automate the whole process of posting on a schedule. Once your content is ready, IFTTT will do the rest. It connects all types of apps and services together to automate multi-step tasks to suit your requirements. Suppose you publish a blog, now you probably want to make a few tweets, an Instagram post or a Facebook update about it so your audience knows to check it out. With IFTTT, you can do all this all at once. IFTTT creates a “recipe” that automatically detects the blog and creates a tweet and an Instagram post about it.
Once you start using IFTTT, you will never miss a task even if you forget about it! To top it all, IFTTT is free.
Tool 2: Buffer
Buffer is another popular scheduling tool. It lets marketers schedule posts on a range of social media platforms. You don’t have to post the same post on each platform, you can design the post layout according to the different platforms.
Buffer can be used as a Chrome extension that you can use to add any content you find across the Internet to your Buffer queue. This gives creators a lot of leeway’s and makes the process more creative and engaging. The best part is you don’t even have to prepare what to share in advance but your posts will be shared at optimal times still. It has a lot of interesting features like tracking best-performing content, etc. It is free to use but the best-paid plans start from $15/mo.
Tool 3: Quuu
What if we told you that you don’t even need to look for content to share on your own? Quuu is a social media marketing tool that curates content for you!
It may sound too good to be true but it is! Quuu works by collecting hand-picked, consistently relevant content, and adding it to the Buffer queue. Quuu saves you from the trouble of searching for content to share. Other than the content you want to share on your own, you can leave the rest up to Quuu. The Quuu Subscription plans start at $15/month.
Tool 4: MeetEdgar
Recycling is one of the best habits. It is true even in the context of digital marketing. You can recycle old content from time to time and MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool that does it for you! Recycling content should be a crucial part of any social media strategy because old content, that is good and popular often gets forgotten before all its benefits can be reaped. You can get more views and engagement by just recycling that old content lying in your archives or old posts.
MeetEdgar organizes and then schedules posts by category. Every time the tool goes through your scheduled posts, it automatically posts old content that is relevant from that category so that it can get engagement again.
Price: $49/mo
2. Social media marketing tools: Monitoring
Tool 5: Awario
Awario is a social media tool designed just for solo entrepreneurs or small businesses. The reason why Awario is a big hit amongst such audiences is that it provides all social media listening capabilities without a big budget. What does a listening tool do? It listens for mentions of your brand throughout the web and recognizes the tone of the conversation regarding it. Are the mentions positive, negative or neutral? It also provides a list of influencers and gives a detailed report about people that mention your brand. Awario pricing starts at just $29/mo.
Tool 6: Mention
Mention is another real-time social media monitoring tool. This tool allows you to set up alerts for not just your brand but also your rivals. You can keep track of new news in the industry with Mention easily. The name of this tool comes from its unique feature which allows users to view and reply to every like, tag, or mention all in one app.
It offers a variety of effective features like sorting mentions based on significance, customizable filters, etc. Mention can be tailored to the distinct audiences who need it- small businesses who use it for their own branding and agencies that work for other clients. It is priced at $29/month.
Tool 7: Brandwatch
If you have a larger budget for social media marketing, consider investing it in the multi-purpose app Brandwatch. Brandwatch provides highly accurate and pictorial analytics data. Brandwatch visuals are just the thing you need when you are trying to make a client make sense of all the confusing bar graphs and pie charts.
Brandwatch stands out due to its unique feature of sending out Signals. Every time a keyword is cited by the authors of your choice, Brandwatch sends you an alert. These signal alerts notify about sudden spikes in the data set, like an increased number of mentions or a decrease in the number of reshares. Brandwidth can be a bit heavy on your pocket though with its pricing starting at $800/month.
Tool 8: Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social media marketing tool that offers an enormous range of filters, sub-filters, and forum ranges. Talkwalker covers social media, news sites, blogs and forums, along with broadcast, TV, and print. The stream of data provided through Talkwalker is humongous. It provides a factual report on every characteristic of the audience by combining information gathered from Google Analytics, social media analysis, sentiment study and image recognition.
Talkwalker makes working in teams and managing workflow easier than ever by allowing cross-sharing of data between departments smoothly. It is an entrepreneurial tool that is priced accordingly at $9,600/year.
Tool 9: Socialinsider
This is a tool that you should not miss if you want to improve your social media marketing strategy across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. Socialinsider is an analytics and benchmarking tool.
Socialinsider provides a real analysis of where you stand against your greatest competitors and gives recommendations on how to optimize your social media strategy through advanced analytics.
You can do many other things via Socialinsider like keep track of your social media KPIs, and get branded reports about your performance. Socialinsider can save you a lot of time and effort by providing fresh data and insights. Socialinsider provides a free 7-day trial. Its pricing starts at $59/month.
3. Social Media Marketing Tools: Paid Advertising
Tool 10: Facebook Ads Grader
It’s true that Facebook offers helpful analytics on ads for free. However, these are not enough to decipher whether it is a good idea to spend money on which ads and which ones to ding. If you’re also wondering the same, WordStream’s Facebook Ads Grader is here for your rescue! The Facebook Ads Grader tool does exactly what its name suggests. It provides you with a completely free examination of your Facebook Advertising performance.
You are provided with a detailed summary of the areas in which you’re thriving along with the ones where you are slipping. It shows an elaborate analysis of Key Performance Indicators that vary according to who you’re advertising to. You can also compare your best and worst-performing ads compare to your competitors. It even keeps a check on whether your campaigns comply with the industry standards specified by Facebook. The most useful feature of Facebook Ads Grader is that it gives you enough information to decide if you’re making the most out of your budget and if not, how you can enhance your performance.
Price: free
Tool 11: Qwaya
We know the importance of Advertisements on Social Media. Qwaya is a social media marketing tool that helps to create and manage high-performing Ads for Facebook and Instagram. This is a tool that you must have before you start cashing any money on buying Ads on Facebook or Instagram. Qwaya offers a multitude of features like you can schedule ads, checking the analytics and keep a track of team collaboration.
However, its most lucrative feature is the A/B test for ads.
Any digital marketer worth his salt knows the importance of comprehensive testing in finding the right content for your audience. And with the help of Qwaya, you can test as many scenarios you’d like to make the most of your advertising money. Qwaya subscriptions start at $149/month.
Tool 12: Perfect Audience
Need a tool for Facebook Advertising? Perfect Audience might be what you need. Even though it has a pretty old design, it is a very effective tool for your business.
So what’s special about this tool? It helps retarget your old content. Perfect Audience makes the process super simple by allowing you to set up campaigns and track results. It gives insights on impressions served, clicks back, conversions, and cost. Perfect Audience for Facebook retargeting through both PC and mobile devices. It uses a CPM charging method.
