Social media marketing continues to be an extremely effective way to reach and engage with your target audience. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, draw attention to an upcoming launch, or introduce a new product or service, social media marketing can achieve these goals.
But there’s a challenge: managing all those networks. With so many different platforms and tools, it can be difficult to figure out which ones are helping you achieve your goals and which ones are irrelevant.
Social media marketing tools can broadly be categorized into social media scheduling tools, engagement tools, analytics tools, and many more. Read the article below to find out the top 5 best tools of each category. Click here.
What can social media scheduling tools do?
Social media scheduling tools allow you to
- Share the same content on different profiles and networks
- Publish posts at a specific time based on your audience’s most active times
- Queue and post all of your social media content with one click, and
- Use data from analytics applications to schedule all of your social media campaigns.
The 5 best social media scheduling tools
1. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a great tool for content creators who want to efficiently publish and distribute their posts. It connects to company blogs via WordPress, allowing brands to publish and push their content to social media simultaneously. It also offers a “Top Content Report” that documents shares and engagement. This is fantastic for anyone who wants to find out what resonates most with readers.
CoSchedule focuses primarily on the relevance of your message, not just social performance. Features like “ReQueue Bucket” allow you to save time by automatically reusing your best messages without requiring extra effort from team members. This results in more fresh content getting into your brand’s feed faster.
2. Airtable
Airtable is a content management and social media scheduling software that brings together the processes of scheduling and writing posts. You can use it either as a team or as an individual to schedule future content and promote those posts on different social sites.
Another nice bonus is Airtable’s Asset Manager, which gives users consistency in their campaigns before publishing. In short, with this program, you’ll always be one step ahead because you’ll be able to estimate how your post will look before it’s even published.
3. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a CRM and social media scheduling tool that helps agencies and teams collaborate. With Agorapulse, you can engage, listen, collaborate, and measure your social media efforts.
The built-in CRM helps you understand your audience better, so you can get a clearer picture of what they expect from your content or service in terms of marketing opportunities that generate revenue for both parties. Agorapulse supports sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and provides bulk scheduling and unified inbox RSS feeds. Agorapulse also allows you to assign messages to your customers, which they can edit directly in the social inbox feature.
The only downside is that it does not have the latest features compared to other similar tools in this price range, as it does not offer integration options like Dropbox. Therefore, the reports do not include items shared on external platforms.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media scheduling tool mainly used by enterprise-level agencies. It is comparatively difficult to use and has some drawbacks. One disadvantage of Hootsuite is that the rates are quite expensive, sometimes even completely overpriced.
The best thing about Hootsuite (and arguably its only advantage) is its Social Streams feature, which allows you to engage with your audience and monitor your accounts right from the dashboard. It also offers account-specific analytics that let you track results based on periods or create custom reports based on your needs.
With Hootsuite, you can link more than 150 apps from the app directory, enabling efficient collaboration between different tools like webinars and Google Hangout. This makes this platform an excellent choice when teams are working in different locations or when employees with different skill sets need other access at a given time.
This social media posting tool offers many features. Still, each additional service costs money – such as access to specific analytics for certain platforms customizable reports as needed, so this costs both upfront and in the long run.
5. Buffer
Buffer is a social media publishing platform for scheduling and publishing content. It is very popular with its users but does not have the same features as SocialPilot.
Buffer integrates well with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram. Another great Buffer feature is WordPress integration, which allows you to schedule shares from your smartphone. The app also offers support for iOS or Android if you want to use the tool from your browser on any device.
Customer support responds immediately when you contact them if you have problems using this posting tool.
What can social media analytics tools do?
Social media analytics tools. The second category of social media marketing tools can do a lot:
- They aggregate all of your social networks and profiles into a single place.
- You can see the effectiveness of a particular campaign by tagging it and reporting on its performance individually.
- You can determine which messages resonate best with your audience to decide what content to post and where.
Finally, after tracking how quickly or efficiently teams respond to messages that require a response. You can determine which social media marketing tool provides the best results.
Top 5 best tools for social media analytics
1. Sprout Social
You can use Sprout to track Facebook page impressions, count clicks on Twitter links, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement and content performance on Pinterest – all in one place.
Then quickly organize and share your results with easy-to-understand reports ready for presentation. Take it further with Premium Analytics and create your report tailored to what matters most to you to reduce noise.
Sprout offers both pre-built and customizable reporting options, so you have multiple choices when collecting social metrics or understanding what those metrics mean. You can present only those related to audience demographics, industry influencers’ opinions on a campaign’s performance status concerning their product/service offering, or consumers’ views on a particular topic via platform feedback.
2. SocialPilot
SocialPilot’s social media analytics allow you to view analytics for your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts. The detailed reports give you an overview of all critical metrics, such as engagement, best posting times, and popular hashtags. You can also create a consistent brand experience by adding your company’s name or logo to the report.
You can either export the PDF or Excel reports directly from SocialPilot or email them to team members/customers by creating contact lists with different filters. There is a 14-day free trial now, pricing starts at $50 for three users, and it has many features such as social calendaring.
3. Keyhole
Keyhole focuses on tracking hashtags, keywords, and listening for your social media profiles. Real-time analytics are displayed on the dashboard; you can also export reports in PDF format.
An added benefit of this tool is that you can discover the most relevant influencers in your niche by filtering the list by keywords, hashtags, or location information (geographically).
The price ranges from $199 to 3 users for a 30-day free trial; no URL shorteners are available- and, after all, Facebook is one of the few platforms supported.
Top features of Keyhole:
- Hashtag Analytics
- Hashtag Tracking
- Social Listening
- Social Media Account Monitoring and Reporting
- Social Mention
- Twitter Historical Data.
4. TapInfluence
TapInfluence compiles and calculates relevant metrics to help brands decide if their potential relationship with a particular influencer makes sense before reaching out to them. These include an influencer’s reach, engagement rate, and campaign price. Performance is also compared to industry benchmarks and specific data for each influencer.
TapInfluence is one of the more well-known influencer marketing platforms. They boast an impressive list of clients, with huge names like Whole Foods, Seiko, Canon, and Volvo. Their head of product marketing Laura Smous was a featured speaker at last year’s Influencer Marketing Days conference in New York City.
Top features of TapInfluence
- Influencer Search
- Influencer outreach
- Analytics
- Campaign Management
5. Audiense
Audiense is an advanced analytics tool with unique audience personality insights and intelligent customer segmentation features. The ability to refine your audience segments helps you target them better, while the ability to understand the mindset of your customers gives you a more accurate view of their behavior.
Audiense has another product called Audiense Connect that helps you with all your key Twitter analytics, such as insights, competitive analysis, Twitter follower management, chatbots.
Key Features
- Audience Manager – helps find and understand large or particular audiences perfectly matched to your product or brand.
- Reports – show you what an audience talks about, their affinities, and how they think, behave and define themselves.
- Monitoring- allows you to listen and evaluate relevant conversations on social media.
What can social media engagement tools do?
- Consolidating all your messages from all networks into a single inbox.
- Notifying you when the number of mentions on any profile increases.
- Assigning messages to people most likely to answer questions when someone contacts one of your handles.
- Displaying entire history (if available) when someone reaches out again, including what was previously discussed and how they responded – similar to Google’s “Chat” feature, which shows previous conversations over email, SMS, or WhatsApp chats over time.
Top 5 best social media engagement tools
1. PostPlanner
PostPlanner helps you find great content that’s already doing well on social media. PostPlanner does all the work for you with a few clicks – it finds and schedules what your audience wants. When it comes to content marketing, you should spend most of your time developing quality content rather than scouring the web for ideas. Postplanner takes this task off your hands and allows you to schedule posts at optimal times so they get even more attention.
Key Features of PostPlanner
Post Planner is a social media management tool that offers collaboration tools, content management, customizable branding, drag and drop functionality, engagement tracking capabilities.
It also includes keyword filtering for better post targeting and features like post scheduling and monitoring of your brand through their integration with Instagram.
Reportings & statistics allow
2. Statusbrew
Statusbrew is a social media engagement tool designed for various platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It allows you to make your customers feel valued by quickly responding to their questions. Statusbrew also ensures long-term loyalty through its unified “Engage” inbox, which keeps you informed about conversations on different channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc.
StatusBrew’s notification system even allows you to analyze how busy your team is on a given day of the week or at a given hour. Each employee is instantly notified via email or Slack, whichever they prefer for real-time responses.
3. Socialbakers
Socialbakers is a social media engagement software that uses AI for its automated inbox capabilities. Socialbakers also has several engagement tools like conversion tracking, contact management, sentiment analysis, and multi-account management that can help you manage your social media account more efficiently.
The only downside of this program is the price, as it is pretty expensive for small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford it due to the high cost of the application.
Pros
- AI-powered “Persona Mapping” identifies target audience for your brand
- AI finds influencers whose audience matches the Persona and influencers within your audience.
- Comparison tool shows which influencers provide the most value, and it’s all at a low cost.
Cons
- It does not have TikTok support
- Compared to the other tools, Socialbakers is a little on the expensive side.
4. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a real-time social media tool for businesses. It offers features like monitoring hashtags and keywords, searching for new leads, or listening to what customers say about your brand on social media.
It offers enough bells and whistles if you manage it as a team – just not as many products that are available elsewhere for more money. Zoho also does not have YouTube integration, which may deter some brands invested in video content strategies.
Sprout Social and Hootsuite are other social media engagement tools.
Other categories of social media marketing tools include content curation and social media management.
Conclusion
To sum up, social media is a pivotal part of marketing any brand or product. You need to be clever and use the right apps to make sure you can master it.
The best social media marketing tools will help you get deeper insights into your campaigns, find their strong points and weak points, and optimize your workflow without too much sweat!
There are a lot of great tools out there, with new ones popping up all the time. The key is finding one that supports what you’re trying to do with your business; invest in getting used to them by doing some research on how they work before deciding whether or not they are worth buying- don’t just chuck old ones because something fresh has come along.
