Like all businesspeople, you have no idea what will happen to social media marketing n the years to come. However, you’ve seen its benefits, and you’ve witnessed how quickly the businesses started using social media to promote their products. Companies and organizations invest millions of dollars in online marketing via social media. As a consequence of this, social media managers want each dollar to generate profit in an efficient, successful way. They invest in new and powerful social media marketing tools almost every day.
New social media platforms pop up nearly every year. Furthermore, the ones currently popular on the market, such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to name a few, keep using new features that help out businesses. Of course, businesses also have to keep up, and they constantly find new ways to promote their brands to their customer bases. As such, they use lots of social media marketing tools, and upon reading this text, you too will learn of a few that can help you expand your business. Using these tools, you will spend far less time doing campaign management. That time can be better invested in developing successful messages for your brand, while also reworking the ones you already have.
List of Social Media Marketing Tools You Should Use
Campaign Management – Buffer
Buffer is a tool that all successful social media marketers use. It’s popular, and not without reason. You see, by using Buffer, you will manage to schedule social media posts across the board in any way you want. And we’re talking nearly all popular social media platforms out there.
Let’s get into some of the specifics. With Buffer, you can design specific schedule patterns for your posts. The time frame is no problem – that same post can be posted either daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or whenever you feel like it. Furthermore, Buffer has a dashboard for analytics. It contains every post with its specific timeframe and allows you to observe and rate how engaging your posts are and how well they’re performing.
Note: The right way to use Buffer is to customize schedules for every single social media platform you’re on. That way you’ll be sure that each post is timed when the customers use social media the most. In other words, you can time them to appear when the majority of people are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else.
Buffer has a free and a paid option. The paid option, “The Awesome Plan,” will let you make any number of schedules for all of your platforms. You can use this to perform A/B testing.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Sprout Social
Both Buffer and Sprout Social are all-in-one social media marketing tools. Sprout Social, however, has one major difference and one major benefit. It differs from Buffer insofar as you have to pay for its services. However, it also offers management of customer relationships. Naturally, it also has other major features like scheduling, an analytics platform, functions for social listening and a multi-level coordination team access.
The features of this tool are geared towards tracking engagement. In other words, as a manager, you can take care of relationships using efficient, fast responses to requests, comments, and suggestions.
Note: You might want to pay attention to the feature called Group Report. This feature of Sprout Social can show you the analytics data of all of your users. The data includes how engaged they are, their gender, age, and location.
Visual Content Creator – Canva
Canva is one of those social media marketing tools which everyone who isn’t good at graphic design should use.
Visual content is everywhere on social media, and users love it. Therefore, having quality pictures and videos is vital to your business. Canva will work perfectly for you in this area, and like Buffer, it has a free and a paid option. This tool will give you a vast suite of templates and tools which you can use to make amazing visual social media content on nearly every platform. Do you need to make a quick Facebook ad? Canva’s got you covered. What about complex infographics? No problem, Canva can do it. It’ll even help you with lettering and some stunning presentations.
Canva is usually easier to use than Photoshop or InDesign. However, that doesn’t mean that you’ll know everything right off the bat. You will probably have to take a few basic classes on general graphic design. That way, you can use this tool to its full potential.
Note: Like all tools, Canva works better if you pair it with something else. In this case, you would want to use the tool with a decent stock image source. The best one for Canva is called Pexels. If you require complex color palettes, pair Canva with Adobe Color CC.
Content Aggregator – Feedly
It happens to everyone – sometimes you just don’t have any ideas for new content. It’s like a writer’s block in a sense. However, there are even tools to help you with this, and Feedly is the best one out there.
Another tool with both free and paid options, Feedly aggregates content. By doing so, it gives you a decent content feed which it assembles based on what you like to read. Whatever the topic, Feedly will give you a single feed, and within that feed, you’ll see what the internet is talking about in your preferred field of interest. All topics go – sports, tech, business, entertainment, literally everything.
Note: Feedly is a perfect tool for idea creation. You will look at what’s trending, popular, or interesting, and it can inspire you to write or make your own content. It focuses on current trends and news, so you will never be out of the loop using it.
Content Shortener – Bitly
Nobody likes long URLs. They’re clunky, ugly, and can distance a reader or viewer. But you’ll still need to share some long links on your Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, which is why link shorteners exist. Another free/paid tool, Bitly is your choice for URL shortening. You can use it to make compact, attractive-looking URLs which you can later share on social media. Furthermore, it gives you the ability to track how your shortened URLs are doing, all using a single platform. As far as social media marketing tools go, this one is perfect.
Note: Bitly is especially useful for Instagram and Twitter, considering they prefer shorter links and fewer characters. Also, if you use the Bitly dashboard, you can track the URL activity all the time. It will show you the number of total clicks per URL and the most visited click sources.
Conclusion
The five social media marketing tools above are merely a starting point. Ultimately, the best solution for you will depend on what you want to do with your business. There really is no problem which an online tool cannot solve. However, you should be careful in finding the ones that work best for you and that will solve your problems in no time, as well.
