You’re in search of a good set of social media marketing tools for your business, but you’re overwhelmed with all of the choices available to you. The good news is, your business doesn’t have to hire an expensive social media manager to properly use social media. There are a number of free and paid tools out there that let you manage your own accounts and schedule posts when and how often you want to post them. Using this list of the top social media management tools, start meeting your goals with ease!
Social Media Examiner has compiled a list of commonsocial media tools seen in the marketplace. These tools can help marketers create, monitor and manage their social media content. You will read about: what are the best social media tools that can be used for different platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube). Here is the list of most popular social media marketing software as of today: RSS Widgets, Facebook Insights, Buddy Media, Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, Post Planner, SocialBro. There are also free social media marketing tools in this article – BufferApp and Tweetbeep.
Benji Hyam, co-founder, Grow and Convert
“LinkedIn is great for prospecting. Before I do cold outreach, I look at the person’s profile and do as much research about them as possible. Simple touches like including common contacts, their job title, and past projects they’ve shared dramatically increase your chances of getting a response. Customize your messages and relate to them based on the information gathered. Above all, be personal not robotic.”
Buffer
Jon Morrow, founder, SmartBlogger
“Being completely honest, our teams don’t do a lot on social media … However, given that my goal with social is simply to stay active – and to get the most out of the investment – Buffer is my go-to tool for scheduling updates. It’s easy to use, time-efficient, and covers all my social-media bases.”
Repost
Monina Wagner, social media community manager, Content Marketing Institute
“In social media, relationships matter. Repost is a simple yet effective tool that takes the challenge out of engaging with others by sharing content while giving credit. The app gives brands an opportunity to tell their story with user-generated content – creating a positive emotional experience, building consumer loyalty, and securing customer retention.”
Rebrandly
Rebrandly is the most advanced link shortener for creating branded links and custom short URLs. Behind every piece of valuable information you share online, there’s a link. Every one of those links is an asset to your company. With Rebrandly you are able to put your brand on your links.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Rebrandly:
- Branded links can drive a 39% higher click-through rate.
- Enhanced brand awareness and visibility.
- Increased link trust.
This is how the insights of your branded link will look like within Rebrandly and some examples of things you can do with the tool.
Some of the more interesting features that Rebrandly offer marketers include:
- UTM builder
- Editable destination URL
- QR codes
- Traffic routing
- Link retargeting
- 50+ app integrations
- API
Sprout Social
As you’d expect in the ever-changing digital landscape, 2018 saw a lot of change and growth, with a huge shift from traditional content to video, and that’s only going to get bigger this year.
Thankfully, the days of scheduling a social media campaign across each platform are over. All-in-one social media management tool Sprout Social provides engagement, publishing, analytics, and team collaboration tools.
You can improve engagement by making it easier to start, join, and monitor social conversations. You can improve client relationships with speedy response times and you‘ll stick to your social marketing plans by using a range of optimisation tools.
You can connect and engage with customers and fans quickly and easily, staying on top of trends and keeping an eye on competitors. You can track internal data, including reply time, the total number of replies, and sentiment.
And if you want to grow your knowledge, Sprout offers additional resources and support through conferences and webinars.
AddThis
The point of creating content is for people to see it! AddThis is widely known for their social share buttons and makes it easy for your readers to share your content to their favorite social media channels. The best part? It’s free.
You can connect to 200+ global social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, WeChat, Kakao, and more. The tools are completely customizable so you can select the type and match the colors to your branding.
The Smart Sorting feature also automatically displaying readers’ most recent and frequently used social media channels first. This can boost sharing up to 20%!
Animoto
Website: https://animoto.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $5/month
Details:
Animoto is one of our go-to social media tools for quickly creating stunning marketing videos.
Their video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional content in just a few minutes. They describe it as “fast and shockingly simple,” – and we would agree with that.
There are so many benefits to being able to quickly create engaging marketing videos. Video is a content format that we know a lot of people struggle with, but Animoto helps to bridge that gap.
We’ve used it to create quick recaps of recent blog posts for social media, videos promoting a big announcement, and videos around product launches.
Using Animoto, there are plenty of opportunities for you to add value to your audiences’ lives.
Feedly
Website: https://feedly.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $5.41/month)
Details:
Our next tool is Feedly. Feedly is great for so many things. Maybe you work with influencers and want to follow their blogs, or you need to keep up on industry news, or any other reasons that you might visit several websites. Instead, you can add all those RSS feeds to Feedly and see them there. A huge time saver.
Feedly is also great for content ideation. You can add several of the blogs, writers, and publishers whose content you like to one feed and see them in one glimpse.
It even has a Buffer Publish integration so you can schedule your content to go out right from the Feedly dashboard.
We also want to give Flipboard a quick shoutout here, too. While it’s not an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you can follow topics on Flipboard and it curates the world’s news stories to help you stay informed.
We’ve used Feedly to follow specific influencers and industry news, and Flipboard to keep up to date with bigger stories.
Conclusion
In today’s information age, it is essential to stay in touch with your audience on multiple channels. It is vital that you can manage the messages sent through these channels, and create an effective way to monitor your marketing efforts. Here is a list of social marketing tools that you need to bring your social media marketing campaign full circle.