Best Tools to Use for Social Media is a guide filled with social media tools such as how-to guides, charts, resources, and white papers. This guide helps business owners and marketers understand what will benefit them the most when it comes to using social media platforms.
We strive to keep the best tools to use for social media in the forefront of our minds, be it content generation, accounting, advertising, or analytics. To help us in this endeavor, we’ve lined up the top tools out there and their uses.
BuzzSumo
Website: https://buzzsumo.com/
Pricing: Plans start at $79/month
Details:
BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you find the most shared content and trending influencers. You can use it to analyze which content performs best for any topic and all you need to do to get started is to search for a topic or a domain.
Through BuzzSumo you’re able all gather a better understanding of your impact on social media and develop smarter content strategies by seeing which of your own pages were engaged with the most. BuzzSumo will break the results down by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit shares.
This provides the added benefit of being able to see which articles are performing well across the web without having to constantly monitor multiple social channels.
Google Trends
Website: https://trends.google.com/trends/
Pricing: Free
Details:
Google Trends is a completely free tool that Google created to help anyone search for trending topics online.
Brands use it to monitor notable things that are happening in the world. Many professionals use this as a way to discover and share information related to what’s most popular right now.
You can also use Google Trends to monitor keywords to see if they are trending and how their current volume compares to previous months and years. You can then use this information to inform your content and social media marketing strategy.
Kicksta
Price: Starts at $49/month for individual creatives
Kicksta is an Instagram growth service that helps you get more organic followers on your Instagram business account. Using your company account, the growth service “likes” around 30,000 photos a month on carefully-targeted accounts. Those users — real people, not spam bots or fake accounts — will begin to follow your account, increasing your brand awareness.
Kicksta is a good fit for any industry and provides a friendly, responsive, and helpful customer success team. “Kicksta helps introduce new audiences to our brand while providing consistent organic Instagram growth,” says Ryan Beltran, CEO of watch company Original Grain. “It’s great for social proof too!”
Lightroom
Price: Starts at $9.99/month
Adobe’s Lightroom product is a tool that lets you organize and edit photos. Since social media is all about visuals, it’s critical your business’s social media accounts showcase vibrant, on-brand photos.
Sliders, filters, and many other features make Lightroom a user-friendly tool to create beautiful photos even if you don’t have much editing experience. Lightroom is available for both mobile and desktop, and best of all, changes made on one device immediately apply to all devices.
Canva
Price: Free, or starts at $9.95/month
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design website where you can create custom, on-brand graphics for your company’s social media accounts. The website has dozens of templates — everything from Facebook banners to Instagram stories to Twitter posts — so if starting from scratch to create social graphics seems intimidating, use a template instead.
One user said, “Canva has been a lifesaver to me and my business. No more hours sitting in front of the computer coming up with graphics for social media post[s] or Pinterest post[s].”
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social content streams from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. It is one of the most famous social media tools in the market.
Working across multiple networks with a social team can be difficult, and Hootsuite makes it possible for you and your team.
It will be easier to delegate among replies to fans and followers, eliminating the stress of coordinating answers and potentially neglecting valued fans.
In the past, one of the biggest frustrations with Hootsuite was how it handled social media images. The good news is this issue is now fixed on Twitter so that scheduled posts will show up to four images directly in the feed.
Pricing:
- Free: up to 3 social profiles, 30 scheduled messages, and 1 user;
- Professional: $19/month. 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, and 1 user;
- Team: $99/month. 20 social profiles, unlimited scheduling and 3 users;
- Enterprise (custom pricing): unlimited.
MeetEdgar
Posting most updates or sharing a piece of content once just doesn’t cut it these days, which is why MeetEdgar recycles social content for you.
Meet Edgar will schedule and automate re-posts of your content for you, helping get your posts in front of a larger percentage of people. The tool works by enabling you to build a library of social media updates organized into a publishing queue.
Posts can be tagged and separated into different categories to ensure that different content types are evenly spread out in your queue.
Pricing:
- Edgar Lite: $19/mo: connect 3 social accounts, unlimited manually scheduled posts, 10 automatically recurring weekly time slots and 4 content categories (first month for free);
- Edgar: $49/mo: connect 25 social accounts, unlimited manually scheduled posts, 1000 automatically recurring weekly time slots, and unlimited content categories (first month for free).
Biteable
Creating content for social media is an essential part of the game. Visual content gets three times more engagement on Twitter than plain ol’ text, so good visual content can help you take it to the next level.
With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share on social media.
With a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes, Biteable is a godsend for anyone who wants to create studio-quality quickly without needing expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment.
Biteable was created to be super easy to use and one of the cheapest tools of its type on the market. Most features are available even with free accounts (it’s pretty cheap to upgrade to Premium anyway) so why not add a bit more excitement and spark to your social media content by creating some short, super-shareable videos?
Feedly
Feedly aggregates top content in your niche from industry blogs and other publications. Their AI bot, Leo, acts as a research assistant to learn your reading habits and deliver articles you’ll be interested in.
It then “reads” each article and annotates them with relevant summaries, analyses, and links to relevant content.
If you save an article, it will show you more like it. If you click “less like this,” Leo will remember and show you fewer articles on that topic.
You can also set up priorities within topics. Choose a sub-topic, and Leo will include those articles under a Priorities tab.
Unfold
Price: Free
Described as “a toolkit for storytellers”, Unfold is an iOS and Android app that helps you create beautiful templates for Instagram stories. Bringing your creative visions to life is the driving idea behind Unfold.
It’s an ideal app for lifestyle brands who want to create stylish collages to keep their social media accounts on-brand and receive the maximum amount of engagement from followers.
Buffer Publish
Website: https://buffer.com/
Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $15/month)
Details:
Buffer is a suite of brand building tools designed to make it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule social media posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place.
For example, Buffer Publish allows you to set up a schedule for your social media profiles, and after you add content to your Buffer queue, it will publish at the times you’ve designated.
In addition to our web application, we also have both Android and iOS apps as well as a fantastic Chrome Extension that’s great for Buffering while you’re browsing the web or on the go.
Conclusion
Social media is so important these days, and what good is it if you’re not using the best tools available to share your message.