Today, most companies are using social media to promote their business. This is why it is important to know about social media tools that can help you improve your business. Promoting business with social media is one of the best ways to gain more customers.
Social media is becoming increasingly essential for modern businesses, but too many businesses are jumping on board without really understanding how social media works. Social media tools are important to learn about not just to help promote business online but also to create trust with prospective customers.
Infogr.am
A sweet tool to help you make snazzy looking infographics in a matter of minutes.
While you won’t be able to have ultimate customization, with plenty of graphics to choose from and some great drag-and-drop vector art, it’s a fine place for those who want a simple, high-quality looking infographic.
The free version lets you share your infographic and embed it on your website. To download your infographic, you’ll need the paid version.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is pretty darn cool – it lets you discover the “most shared content and key influencers” on the web. Search a keyword and see which related articles performed the best, complete with social media shares.
There’s a perfectly useful free option, plus paid options, which add the ability to set up alerts, export data, and access content analysis and domain reports.
HootSuite
One of the big names in social media management, HootSuite is a tried and true champion. Schedule posts across various social networks, set up feed streams to see what’s happening on different networks, and analyze the results.
Bit.ly
In essence, bit.ly is a URL shortener, transforming ugly eyesore URL strings into cute little clickables. However, it can be a heck of lot more if you let it. Sign up for a free account, and Bit.ly will save your “bitlinks,” let you organize your bitlinks into “bundles,” and even track click analytics.
Mention
Mention is a handy tool that lets you monitor keywords across various sites. You can ask Mention to track references to your brand name or other specific keywords, and it will populate a feed with mentions from the web.
Hook up your own social media account info, and Mention makes it easy to take action and respond to your brand/keyword mentions. Mention offers a 14 day free trial, and starts at $30/month.
For a cheaper, less comprehensive alternative, consider Google Alerts, which will aggregate keyword and brand mentions across the web.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media management software solution that provides everything you need to dominate social media right out of the box.
As an all-in-one tool, it comes with a diverse range of powerful features to help with all aspects of your social media marketing efforts. These features include:
- A unified inbox to manage communications across your social platforms
- Advanced publishing tools to create and schedule your social posts in advance
- Social listening tools to help you find out what customers are saying about your brand on social
- Team collaboration tools to make it easy to communicate and collaborate with your team members and clients
- Insightful analytics to help you gather data about your social media marketing performance
- And more!
Agorapulse also offers next-level support. They’re always available to answer any queries you might have, with an average 30-minute response time. If you’re running a social media marketing agency, this kind of rapid-response support is key to avoiding costly business interruptions.
Considering the depth of features Agorapulse offers, the price is very reasonable. There are various pricing plans available depending on the size of your team.
Pricing:
Agorapulse offers a free pricing plan limited to 1 user and up to 3 social profiles. Paid plans suitable for larger teams and more social profiles start at $79/month. A free trial is also available.
SocialBee
SocialBee is our top pick for the best social media scheduler tool. It makes it easy to organize your social media content calendar and manage your publishing tasks from one place.
SocialBee allows you to easily set up a posting schedule to help you to stay organized. All you have to do is use one of SocialBee’s calendar templates and customize it to your needs.
SocialBee also offers more advanced scheduling tools than some of its competitors, such as custom URL shortening and tracking, retargeting tools, advanced analytics, and more.
You can use it to organize your scheduled content into different categories to ensure a balanced mix, repost evergreen content, or create post variations to refresh recycled content. The RSS function allows you to easily import content from different sources.
Pricing:
SocialBee is available from $19/month for their Bootstrap plan. All plans come with a 14-day free trial if you want to try before you buy.
Rebel Mouse
Rebel Mouse is a digital publishing platform that functions as a social content aggregator, displaying your posted and shared content in a customizable layout. Rebel Mouse is similar to Paper.li, but with more customization.
My issue with Rebel Mouse is that I didn’t find its functionality instantly apparent. You’re abandoned to figure things on your own and, at least for me, it all felt quite complicated and overwhelming. Even after spending half an hour exploring it, I still wasn’t exactly sure what it was supposed to be used for.
The real value with Rebel Mouse seems to be in creating very stylish looking, high-quality pages composed of various content pieces (video, images, articles, etc.). These pages can be used as part of a blog, in a webpage as part of a campaign, or as a newsletter.
If that sounds up your alley, I suggest reading up on the various ways you can use and make the most of Rebel Mouse. I can definitely see the opportunity to do some really cool stuff with Rebel Mouse, so long as you’re willing to put in the time to figure out how it all works. I could see Rebel Mouse being great for specific campaigns. [Free and Paid Versions]
Tint
Tint is very similar to Rebel Mouse, but quite a bit easier to wrap your head around, especially thanks to their quick explainer video.
Nothing revolutionary here, but it’s a great tool to aggregate all the conversations happening about your brand. If you’re a big brand or hosting a major event, this could be a pretty cool way to set up a one-stop hub to see all the conversations.
For example, some of our WordStream folks attended the Inbound 2014 conference recently – if you threw the #Inbound2014 hashtag into a tool like Tint, it would be pretty cool to see all the different conversations, pics, and postings.
Of course, you can just type a hashtag into Twitter and see something similar, but tools like Tint and Rebel Mouse aggregate posts from a collection of social networks of your choosing, not just one source. Plus, these tools look aesthetically great, and isn’t style everything when it comes to attracting and engaging?
Tint ain’t cheap though – even the most basic account will cost you $250/month (with the most expensive plan being $1000/month). There’s a free version, but it’s pretty limited – you can aggregate content you’ve posted and not much else (for example, you can’t aggregate based on hashtags, which is a paid feature).
Conclusion:
We all know how important it is to use social media tools to promote your business, but how? The use of social media in the digital marketing field has grown leaps and bounds over the last few years. Business owners are realizing just how powerful social media can be when it comes to promoting business.