A Marketer’s Guide To The Top Social Media Tools

It’s fair to say that social media can be a minefield. Yet it’s one that must be conquered. This is where social media tools can prove to be so indispensable.

With this in mind, here is a marketer’s guide to the top social media tools that these professionals just can’t live without.

Instagram

Thanks to the simplicity of social storytelling that Instagram offers, it’s a popular choice of platform amongst marketers. It can connect deeply and immediately with an audience in a truly visual way.

Twitter

Social media is often leveraged as a response vehicle, keeping in touch with and communicating appreciation to people who have supported the brand or interacted with it.

Buffer

It’s possible to install browser widgets which allow you to “Buffer” any image or page so that it can be immediately sent or sent on later. It also has a Content Inbox where marketers can enter their favourite blog’s URL and instantly, Buffer will create an enormous list of tweets coming from the blog. Furthermore, Buffer is a very transparent company, and this is appealing to marketers who want to see the human face of the organization.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows marketers to see what’s popular in your social media space at any one time and what really isn’t. This allows them to craft ideas about which kind of posts you need to write in order to generate more leads and traffic.

Even better, BuzzSumo shows the person sharing the content and this allows marketers to connect with those influencers to ask them whether they could share the content they create too.

Animoto

At the moment, native video represents Facebook’s top-performing post type, getting three times more engagement than link posts as well as twice that of image posts. Animoto also has lovely themes, stick music and templates while the integrated marketing builder tool simplifies the process of adding text overlays. This is something that’s essential for sound-off autoplaying videos since around 80% of all video adverts on Facebook will be watched without sound.

Tweeps Map

Tweeps Map can give a clear visual representation of followers; geographical locations and this allows marketers to target followers in specific areas with valuable and relevant content tailored to them.

Elevate

Many marketers want to keep things streamlined and simple and that’s where Elevate comes in. It allows all content to be shared, organized and measured across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn quickly and conveniently.

Facebook Audience Insights

Finding out target customers’ behaviours, demographics and interests is key for marketers and Facebook Audience Insights is ideal for this since it provides all kinds of useful information including education level, job titles, location, lifestyle, household details, buying behaviour and more to allow marketers to create relevant and highly targeted content.

TikTok

This short-form video platform is becoming more popular amongst marketers for many purposes. From running paid adverts tot building up a branded organic audience, TikTok is a great choice to reach a wide audience.

Venngage

For marketers, infographics can be a key element of content creation and having a handy tool with which to create them is key. This is where Venngage comes in. It can speed up visual output with its intuitive and versatile platform.

WordSwag

This mobile app can turn quotes, content and ideas into appealing graphics for sharing on Instagram, Facebook and more. In under 5 minutes, this tool can create a visually appealing, high-quality graphic that will impress users.

Ahrefs

If marketers connect Google Search Console to Ahrefs, they can monitor not only their own website, but also those of their competitors to obtain new keyword ideas for social media content. There’s even a Search Suggestions feature which makes finding keywords a breeze, and each keyword is given its own difficulty score as well as its expected clicks and global and local search volume.

Facebook Messenger

These days, social media has become increasingly personal with customers actually starting to communicate directly with companies, not just to comment or have a conversation, but actually to make transactions. Facebook Messenger empowers marketers to directly communicate with customers and the impact is only getting bigger.

Evernote

Social media strategies must contain content which tells a brand story in order to be successful but that story doesn’t need to always be crafted in a single sitting. Rather, it can evolve from an assortment of animated GIFs, photographs, song lyrics, scribbled ideas, daily pain points, infographics and so much more. Evernote gives marketers ways of organizing their storytelling to make their social media strategies even more successful.

Bit.ly

This tool is a key component of any social media stack for marketers. It doesn’t just abbreviate links, it can also measure campaign performance, track links and identify which channels are bring in most traffic. Bit.ly can monitor all growth and marketing efforts’ daily activity effectively.

Semrush

Although Semrush is primarily known for PPC and SEO competitor research, more recently it has added to its platform the Social Media Toolkit. This is a one-stop-shop allowing marketers to manage and track all their social media platform profiles. On top of the typical post editing, tracking and scheduling, Semrush enables marketers to discover which content topics and types are getting most industry engagement, and to boost Instagram and Facebook ads and create campaigns from right inside its own interface.

Pocket

This tool allows marketers to batch all their social media reading. They can find things that they find interesting, save it then read everything at a later time. Even better, it allows for smooth direct sharing to Facebook and Twitter or to send direct to Buffer. It also has a recommendations area where marketers can build up authority and a dedicated following while collecting content for curation.

LinkedIn

This social media platform is ideal for prospecting. Marketers can look at an individual’s profile before doing any cold outreach, learn as much as they can about them, and then use aspects such as their post title, past projects and common contacts to improve their chances of receiving a response. Messages can be customized and related to each prospect based on all the details that have been gathered from this platform.

Biteable

Since visual content gets 3 times more Twitter engagement than text, it’s clear that good-quality visual content can boost your social media campaign to a whole new level of success. This is where Biteable comes in. It allows marketers to create entertaining, informative and engaging short videos easily so they can be shared on social media platforms.

Since it offers a plethora of free footage, video templates, animated scenes and music, it’s a perfect choice for anybody who needs to create content that is studio-quality rapidly without any costly resources such as sound or film recording equipment.

Biteable is super simple to use. It’s also a really affordable tool. A lot of features can be accessed even with a free account, and upgrading to Premium is pretty cheap anyway.

Missinglttr

It’s fair to say that social media promotion couldn’t be more important when it comes to online success however scheduling posts can be a real pain. Even when using tools to assist in speeding the process up, it’s still usually necessary to input all the images and text manually for every post. Missinglettr was created to automate this process.

It scrapes your own blog posts then creates a whole year’s worth of perfect social content, with 9 individual posts that are dripped into your social media channels across the course of 12 months. That means marketers can put all their focus into writing longer-form blog posts, allowing somebody else to handle all the creative elements of promotion and post schedule.

Thanks to its content creation, client approval and scheduling templates as well as its custom URL shortener for exporting campaign assets for use in different marketing initiatives, this tool offers some impressive features to lessen the marketer’s burden. It even sends weekly reports to keep you on track of marketing performance.

MeetEdgar

If you need to have your own content manager but you’re actually having to manage everything on your own, MeetEdgar is the ideal solution. This management tool for social media platforms handles re-sharing of content and optimization of social traffic, acting, essentially, as an automated content manager on your behalf.

It works with Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles via web plugins, so social channels can stay populated with regular posts. It also allows check-ins via mobile from anywhere and at any time.

This tool also enables scheduling of content re-sharing as well as monitoring of traffic while increasing engagement and fully optimizing ROI of digital assets. MeetEdgar puts evergreen content regularly out onto social platforms to boost engagement and increase traffic.

It even has an auto-refill queue that is automated so you’ll never run short of posts. Its scheduling tool is category based, so you can mix up various content types to keep your audience from getting bored.

Hootsuite

This helpful tool can handle several social media accounts, and brings them all under a single login and one dashboard for convenience. Even better, it’s free to sign up.

It’s no wonder that Hootsuite is one of today’s most popular tools for social media management. It allows collaboration between team members and it has its own approval process. While its major benefit is being able to see all mentions and comments in a single location, it also offers the advantage of being able to plot your social media update calendar, schedule those updates, and assign tasks.

Experienced marketers can also use its tools to integrate with Google+, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and get in-depth breakdowns of analytics so you can interact more effectively with prospects. It’s even possible to integrate other platforms like Storify, Tumblr and Reddit to gather more customer data and feedback to feed into marketing strategies.

Mention

This comprehensive tool for social listening monitors mentions of a marketer’s products, brands or competitions, all in real-time. Mention makes it a breeze to stay on top of conversations, and it even allows responding to mentions and comments on social media from inside its platform. It’s even possible to use Mention to locate relevant influencers to take part in your influencer marketing campaign or analyse competitors.

Rebrandly

This is a highly advanced link shortener to allow branded links to be created as well as customized short URLs. Every piece of information that you share online has a link behind it, and each link can be a company asset. Rebrandly allows marketers to put their brand on their links. This is valuable since branded links are capable of driving a click-through rate that is 39% higher. They also enhance brand visibility and awareness and boost link trust.

AddThis

The entire purpose of making content is so people can see it. The AddThis tool has social share buttons which make it a breeze for readers to share content to all their top social media platforms, all for free. It allows connection to over 200 global social networks from Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Pinterest to Kakao, WeChat and more. Even better, the tools can be customized so it’s possible to select colours and type to match branding. There is also a Smart Sorting feature which automatically displays readers’ most frequently used and recently used social media platforms first to boost sharing as much as 20%!

All of the above great tools go to prove that there’s a wealth of excellent social media tools for marketers out there today and new ones are popping up frequently. The most important thing that any marketer will tell you is the you need to find the right tools to support your individual marketing efforts then put in the time and effort to getting to grips with them.

While new tools are exciting and may well offer great value, don’t rush into discarding old tried and tested tools simply because they are no longer the latest thing. Having a mix of old and new tools in your marketing kit is key!