Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools For 2024
With the rise of social media networking, many businesses today choose social media as one of their main marketing platforms. Well, no questions about that because we all knew that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have a huge user base and therefore businesses take advantage of that to promote their brand or products.
And since there are lots of social media sites across the Web, it is becoming hard for them to manage and organize all of their advertisement and promotions that will be posted on different social media sites at once. With these being said, businesses rely on tools to help them manage their social media marketing and help them reach their desired number of audience.
So, for you to keep updated with the latest tools for social media marketing today, here’s our list of the 15 must-have social media marketing tools for 2014.
SocialClout
SocialClout is a social media ROI (return on investment) optimizer, which aims to make sure all your posts on social media sites will effectively target your potential audiences. It is designed to calculate social media ROI as well as track customer’s engagement.
This tool allows you to see which demographics and touch points have the best engagement and which social media platforms convert the best, and at what times, allowing you to improve your targeting to match the market that wants you. SocialClout also integrates “social listening,” which includes analytics, sentiment, comparative analysis of the competition, and a lot more.
SocialClout enables you to get access to the most comprehensive database of social conversations, with real-time coverage. You have access to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, or LinkedIn. So, you will never miss out on any important conversation that is relevant to your brand.
It also allows you to search for keywords in various social media sites and provides you insightful marketing reports with their Social Media Analytics Reporting dashboard.
Social Metrics Pro
Social Metrics Pro is a WordPress plugin that tracks your site’s social engagement across major social media platforms and provides you with analytics and report that will help you understand all the data gathered and how your brand is trending. It is very helpful for identifying the social media sites that you need to focus on and pay more attention to, and which platform naturally connects themselves to your content.
The control panel of Social Metrics Pro includes lots of great features, such their traffic-light analysis feature of your posts, which is very useful in identifying the posts that have more engagement. It will be highlighted in red when your post is underperforming and green when they are performing well, reaching the number of targeted audiences.
This plugin also powerful enough to track both posts and pages on any WordPress-based site to ensure that you are aware and have knowledge of how the sales page perform as well as the content of your site. The best part? All additional and updates to this plugin are free for a lifetime after your initial payment.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management dashboard that is both very convenient and powerful as it allows you to post the same content across multiple social media platforms at once. On top of that, you also have an option where you can schedule your post in advance and aggregate your content on a number of different social media platforms, so you will never miss a single day without promoting your brand.
Hootsuite also has analytics tools that will give you insightful reports of the overall performance of your site as well as all your posts on different social media. In addition, this tool also integrated an impressive feature that focuses on “sentiment,” which allows you to see how many of the comments are relevant to your brand. It also identifies the comments directed at your social media sites, whether it is positive, neutral, or negative.
This tool also has the capability to help you easily create campaigns, competitions and curated collections of user-generated content across different platforms. And lastly, it allows you to measure your team’s performance to improve their service.
IFTTT
Everyone’s probably heard of IFTTT (If This…Then That), one of the most popular applications helpful not only for social media marketing but also for everyday use. IFTTT helps you find simple “applets” that allows you to create a single time-saving response to a preset condition. In other words, you can use this tool to create a sequence of a condition, functionalities, or programmable events.
Using IFTTT, you can create “recipes” that utilize multiple applets to describe more complex circumstances. For example, you get a positive tweet about your brand, you can re-tweet it, and if you get a negative tweet, you can auto-respond with a DM request. This simple task can help you boost your marketing by just programming their own automated tasks.
This tool also automatically syncs your profile images across social media platforms or post your Instagram photos as native images on Facebook, which is pretty cool.
IFTTT can really help you save a lot of time, but you just need to form a habit of using this app as it can be difficult to use at first.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social focuses on customer relationship management (CRM) through different social media platforms, allowing you to quickly manage and respond to engagements. It functions as an all-in-one social media marketing tool to help you organize and manage your content effectively.
Sprout Social incorporates multilevel access that allows businesses to have teams of editors and writers, who have different access levels. It allows you to assign teams with directorial control and have lower level team members to log in to receive and update tasks.
This tool also offers detailed analytics platform that allows managers to keep on top of all the engagement and help them understand how their team and performance is doing. This will help the managers to respond quickly and effectively to comments and requests and eventually help them to nurture and foster the business.
Tagboard
Tagboard is a specialist social listening tool and is very useful for those people who are looking for deep insights, especially for research, development, innovation, and more.
This tool allows you to input any keywords or topic areas to get a collective set of prioritized insights and important takeaways. This type of data gathering helps you understand how the topic relevant to your brand or campaign is being discussed socially.
Tagboard is built as a hashtag-based search engine, allowing you to see all mentions and content related to your brand or service across different major social media platforms. You just have to register your hashtag to Tagboard and then you will see what social media users are saying using your hashtag and how they discuss your brand and services. On top of that, you can also track your brand and product mentions.
In addition, Tagboard provides insights on how your brand is discussed, helping you to come up with new ideas on the topics to bring in more engagement.
Bitly
Pasting a URL along with your Twitter updates can really help you boost a market. Your target audiences can quickly access your site using the URL you provided. However, URLs can get really long, and with Twitter’s 140-characters limitation, it may not be optimal.
Bitly is one of the original link shorteners used to shorten any long URL to fit perfectly across every social media platform, including Twitter. Bitly does the job right without eating up space and character count. It will also give you an option to custom-shorten a URL, so you can create a link that will still effectively reflect the content of your page.
Using Bitly, you will get an overview of all the links you have shared as well as the full history of the line’s performance, such as the number of users who click through and the number of users who view the page longer. If you also use the Bitly link, it will allow you to track analytics for one post using one source.
Buffer
Buffer is one of the most popular social media marketing tools currently on the market. And in fact, without a doubt one of the most sought-after social media marketing tool by experts. It is very easy to use and a powerful tool.
Buffer allows you to schedule your social media posts with whatever platform you use and distribute it across all different social media sites. It includes a multimedia extension that helps you optimize images and video for different platforms. It also incorporates simple analytics that can make all the data easy to understand.
This tool offers multiple-account syncing across different networks. With this you can easily share content to different social media platforms from one central dashboard. It also enables you to monitor posts that did or did not do well. If the posts did well, Buffer will provide you insights and reports before publishing your next posts.
In addition, Buffer also has a Chrome extension to help you share and schedule your posts or content you found online. The extension also allows you to upload items in bulk, which is great if you intended to schedule or produce your posts in batch.
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a virtual social media assistant, and a perfect tool for those sites who do not have enough content for their social media marketing campaign. MeetEdgar simply recycles your old posts and publishes it at the best times. The older the post, the higher chances of MeetEdgar publishing it first. However, MeetEdgar also allows you schedule new posts.
This tool analyses audience engagement on the specific post to determine when is the best time to republish the post to most likely to get responses from your audience. Once the old post has been published, MeetEdgar will then organize and arrange the post and eventually send it back to the queue to create an ample space between reposts. This will result in an endless supply of social media posts that shares and reshares itself continuously, without you exerting any effort.
MeetEdgar also gives you an option where you can categorize different types of content for different audiences, so you can target them independently with the right content. This will increase the chance of higher audience engagement.
Oktopost
Oktopost is a social media management tool designed primarily for business-to-business (B2B) companies. This tool helps the business by managing large teams and allowing unified global campaigns for large scale businesses as well as small business with an ambitious reach. Oktopost packs with amazing tools for scheduling, measuring, curating, and social listening.
It incorporates the following.
- Social Publishing, to manage and streamline the day-to-day activities of B2B social media;
- Social Analytics to provide you with insightful reports on how social media impacts your sales funnel, from lead generation to prospect nurturing;
- Content Curation, to help you grow your social footprint and keep your streams fresh with shareable content;
- Social Listening and Engagement, so you will never miss any discussions on social media; and
- Social Advocacy, to amplify your social reach.
On top of that, Oktopost also manages all social media marketing plan and activities and measure the results for clicks, conversions, and engagement for every post.
Canva
Canva is an online graphic design tool but also one of the most impactful social media marketing tools out there right now. It is also one of the easiest ways to create web-optimized graphics using only images and texts and also used in designing images and impressive illustrations for social media posts.
Canva’s interface is very easy to use. With their drag-and-drop feature, creating and designing an image has never been this easy. It also features font and color control, image editing and positioning, and a lot of other cool features. Many people use Canva to create menus, CVs, and other professional and creative documents.
And the best part about this tool is that despite the pro results, it is free.
Post Planner
If you are more focused on using Facebook as your medium for amplifying the reach of your social media marketing, then Post Planner is the tool of your dreams. Post Planner is a content scheduling management and an inbuilt app on Facebook (the largest user base by a considerable distance).
Using this tool, you can see what’s trending and what posts is viral on Facebook. Apart from that, you will also get insights on the trending content in your industry, which means you are not only tracking your content but also you are tracking the competition too—this includes their content, social media posts, and the number of their customers.
You can schedule your posts and at the same time tracks everything within your site. You also don’t have to worry if you are new to this tool, as it provides free training and video tutorials to help you use this app and maximize your presence on Facebook.
Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is an another kind of social media marketing tool and search engine. This tool helps you find the top hottest trending social content as well as search terms in your niche. All you have to do is to input any URL, phrase, or keyword into the search bar, and then BuzzSumo will show you who’s sharing relevant content on a different major social media platform.
It also allows you to see what content is at best performance, so you can take inspiration from it and create even better. You can even see who shares and reshares the content, so you can target them in your next posts and eventually build relationships with them.
Use this tool to get insights and help you in creating the content, crafting the best headlines, and create the types of content that most people would be interested in.
Socialoomph
Socailoomph is a simple social media manager, that allows you to do a bulk upload and updates of posts or content and have it distributed across different social media platform. Socialoomph is ideal for those who are just starting out and want to try a lighter social media marketing tools before committing to paying for a professional tool.
Some of the features of Sociloomph includes…
- scheduling posts,
- tracking keywords,
- saving and reusing drafts,
- URL shortening,
- multiple social media accounts,
- integrating a blog and social media updates,
- managing all of your accounts,
…and a lot more.
It also has features similar to Hootsuite that allow you to post the same content at once on the different social media platforms. It also helps you identify influencers to contact and follow promising user accounts. In addition, Socialoomph also offers time-limited recurring updates, drip feed posting and more.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a social media marketing tool that focuses on Instagram and Pinterest. It is designed specifically to help coordinate visual marketing for those people selling jewelry, shirts, personal hygiene products, prints, and more using Instagram and Pinterest.
Just like the rest of the tools listed here, it also offers scheduling and analytics tools with added features to help you target your audiences and discover content that is being talked about, especially content that is relevant to your brand.
Tailwind also integrates amplification features to help you reach more people and increase your conversions and content engagement. Their time-saver features, such as bulk uploading of content, pinning to multiple boards at once, and a drag-and-drop calendar for scheduling are also very helpful.