After reviewing more than one hundred social media tools, we’ve narrowed the list down to what we believe are the essential social media marketing tools for small businesses. These tools can help save you time by staying organized and automating your day-to-day tasks. We’ve also included some resources and tips for beginners. On that page, you’ll find a more detailed description of each tool, and how it may best fit into your company’s marketing strategy.
Your social media marketing plan will be most successful when you have access to the tools that help your business best accomplish your goals. Be aware of industry trends, and stay ahead of the game with our digital marketing tools for businesses.
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.
Buffer Reply
Website: https://buffer.com/reply/
Pricing: Plans start at $50/month
Details:
This next tool is one of our very own at Buffer: Reply. I think we’ve mentioned it a few times on the show but we’ve never gone too deep.
Buffer Reply makes social media engagement easy for marketing and support teams who need to respond to social conversations. It’s all in one inbox.
What’s great is that through Reply you can see social conversations across social networks:
- On Twitter, you can see public tweets that @ mention your handle, direct messages, and any searches you have set up for keywords or hashtags.
- On Facebook, you can see comments on your Facebook Page posts and ads, visitor posts, private messages, and reviews.
- And for Instagram business profiles, you can see comments on your posts and ads as well.
It’s a single inbox where you can see all of these conversations happening. It’s a huge time saver. In our case, our customer support team and social media manager, Bonnie, spend a lot of time in Reply every day, and we know that when someone reaches out, they would be getting an answer from us.
Native Analytics
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention native analytics for each social platform, which is completely free.
(If you prefer something more advanced, we would love for you to try Buffer Analyze, our social media analytics and reporting tool!)
Let’s quickly go over the top three, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Facebooks Analytics
Under the Insights tab on your Facebook Page, there is just so much information. Everything you ever wanted to know about your engagement, number of likes and followers, how your posts are doing, and, of course, Facebook’s Pages to Watch which lets you compare the performance of your Page and posts with similar Pages on Facebook.
You also get insights for Facebook Groups so if you run a Group definitely check those out.
Instagram Analytics
With Instagram Insights, you can see activity around how frequently users interact with your posts, see how your posts are performing over time, and find out where your audience is from as well as their age range, gender, and when they are online.
Twitter Analytics
Starting with Twitter, their analytics can reveal a lot of valuable data about your audience, how well you’re engaging your following, and what your top-performing content is.
All you have to do is go to analytics.twitter.com to log in and start learning more about your audience and their interests.
Tailwind
Candice Galek, founder, Karma Honey Project
“Tailwind has been a lifesaver over the years, allowing my team to work more quickly and efficiently when posting to Pinterest. It’s a scheduling app on steroids, helping you to choose not only when to post for maximum engagement but also what might go viral thanks to their pixel-matching technology and image recognition capabilities. You can seamlessly measure pin virality and repost that content to continue to grow your following on the platform.
Don’t sleep on Pinterest. Their introverted user base is keen on consuming online content, and Tailwind helps you to get it in front of more potential customers faster.”
Elevate
Jason Miller, head of brand, ActiveCampaign
“I like to keep things simple and streamlined: Less is more. The tool I use religiously is Elevate: LinkedIn’s employee advocacy tool. I use it to share, organize, and measure all the content I post across my main three social accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I share daily from Elevate and track engagements.”
Twitter Promote Mode
Brian Clark, founder, Copyblogger
“Now that the days of organic social media distribution for content marketing are long in the rear view, the most valuable social media tools are the advertising features of the platforms themselves. Facebook (and Instagram), of course, but also Twitter given its high-profile resurgence. We’re testing Twitter Promote Mode, which for a recurring monthly fee promises to give constant broader reach – just like the good old days.”
Audiense
Audiense provides insights into your analytics, suggestions for targeting and engagement, and helps keep tabs on your key influencers and competitors.
Listening and insights tools provide intelligence into the quality of a social audience, crossover between different communities, and combines content with relationship analysis. It’s social marketing tools provide the ability to segment audiences for campaigns.
Pricing:
- Free: limited version of Twitter Marketing and Audience Insights;
- Twitter Marketing: $79/mo: boost your performance on Twitter;
- Audience Insights: $696/mo: audience segmentation and profiling reports with social data.
Conclusion
Businesses that have a social media presence can improve their digital marketing through the use of quality tools. These tools are designed to help target and reach out to customers, as well as monitor what other businesses are doing. They also help with growing your followers and the creation of content for all social media channels.