Which Social Media Marketing Tools Are Right For You?

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AgoraPulse is among the best social media marketing management tools. It’s made for both teams and agencies. It supports most social platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. AgoraPulse covers everything including marketing, management, and monitoring.
Image via KUKU.io. One of the top social media management tools for small to medium-size businesses and in-house marketing teams, KUKU.io helps to maintain your brand’s online visibility. Using it, you can publish content on a variety of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
Social Clout shows you which demographics have the best engagement and which platforms convert the best, and at what times. Related: 5 Up-and-Coming Social Media Tools You Should Know About 3.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Social media is transforming the way brands market themselves online. Actually, it’s safe to say that social media has already changed things in a big way.

Related: Top 10 Social Media Management Tools You Should Try Now

Social media tools are constantly evolving, with new apps and platforms being released regularly to help improve your social marketing efforts. Not every tool is relevant. Not every tool provides the functionality you need. Look at your social media strategy and consider the goals you have in place as well as the channels you use and how you.

New platforms have emerged that continue to transform the way we communicate. These changes affect both how brands promote their message, and how their fans respond.

With these new platforms comes a handful of new tools to help social media marketers engage with audiences in creative ways, and to keep track of their efforts. To keep pace with the latest social media trends, it’s time to review and update that tool set, recognizing which tools we should keep, which we should discard and which new tools we can add to supercharge our social media efforts.

Here’s my shortlist of the top social media tools that every marketer should be using in 2016.

1. Buffer

With its clean interface and simple analytics features, Buffer just barely edges out Hootsuite as my favorite social media scheduling tool. You can share content across multiple accounts and networks, all from one central dashboard.

A Chrome extension makes it even easier to share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and even LinkedIn simultaneously. Buffer has some epic social media guides and case studies on its blog, which is a great place to start if you’re new to social media marketing.

2. Social Clout

It’s all well and good to share content and get likes. In fact, it can be quite addicting. But to really understand which posts get the most engagement, we need to look past vanity metrics and focus on the metrics that matter.

Enter Social Clout, a social media analytics tool designed specifically to track engagement and calculate social media ROI. Social Clout shows you which demographics have the best engagement and which platforms convert the best, and at what times.

Related: 5 Up-and-Coming Social Media Tools You Should Know About

3. Feedly

Put your content ideation on autopilot, with Feedly. To set it up, just add the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs and writers and Feedly will create a daily “magazine” with all its content, organized by topic.

Moreover, Feedly is a great way to know what niche influencers are talking about, to join the conversation and to stay up to date with the latest industry trends. Staying up to date with the latest current events helps guide your own content strategy and social media posting schedule.

What’s great about the app is that it integrates with scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, so you can share and schedule posts from directly within the dashboard. In my own work, Feedly saves me hours of time and energy combing through social media posts to find good content.

4. Canva

Here’s a thing most people don’t know about me: I’m terrible at graphic design. (Blog design is another story.)

This is especially true when it comes to choosing and editing photos for my blogs. Luckily, there’s a tool that’s built specifically for non-designers: Canva.

Canva is my favorite tool for creating stunning images for social media posts. Creating images is so easy even a bean-counting marketer could do it. Using Canva’s multiple templates, fonts and colors, all you need to do is drag image elements around and drop them into place.

Canva is free to use, but don’t let that fool you. Despite its affordability, major sites like Buzzfeed use Canva to create images for their posts (which, last I checked, drive nearly half a billion visits each month).

5. Socedo

Social media campaigns have countless moving pieces, all of which need to work together if the campaigns are to be successful. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or an established social media manager, there’s never enough time in the day to manage it all while still you're looking for customers.

Socedo is a B2B demand generation tool that does most of the grunt work, so you don’t have to. It works by automating lead generation, and finding and acquiring targeted leads through different social media channels. That way, you can focus on increasing ROI (sales and revenue) without getting bogged down in minutiae and repetitive tasks.

Using a combination of keywords and demographic criteria, Socedo finds and engages prospects across major social networks. Whereas most demand-gen platforms focus on email, Socedo is one of the few that handles outbound prospecting via social.

6. Edgar

Ever notice how influencers like Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk and Richard Branson repeatedly share their old content?

While that practice may appear redundant or irksome, the fact is that old posts have high engagement when shared. It’s just plain smart.

First, social media accounts gain and lose followers with time. Re-sharing content is an excellent way to showcase your top stuff to new followers. Second, even the most loyal fans won’t be online all the time. Regular sharing is a way to engage with audiences at different times throughout the day

That said, it’s not always easy to know the best social media schedule for new and old content. Edgar knows, and shares your content at the times when it’s most likely to engage your audience. The tool categorizes all of your content by topic and target demographic, determining which posts get the highest engagement with which followers.

Edgar doesn’t stop there. After posting an update, the tool recycles the post back to the bottom of your queue, so it will post again later once the rest of your content has been shared. The result is an endless supply of social media posts that shares and reshares itself continuously, without you having to lift a finger.

Conclusion

In 2016, social media marketers can choose from thousands of tools to help streamline their social media campaigns. However, it’s important not to get bogged down with decision anxiety, giving in to the feeling that you need to learn everything all at once.

Related: The Top Social Media Tools for Working Smarter, Not Harder

These six social media tools handle the 80/20 of social media marketing, adding sizzle and power for everyone from the bootstrapped freelancer to the full-scale social media agency. Are you ready to try them?

Social media marketing is a rather counterintuitive field. It looks like anyone could do it: post something (anything!) on social media, look for existing content, talk to people, fill your company’s Instagram account with your most photogenic team members. Sounds like a task for any kid of today’s social media era.

However, if you want your social media marketing ROI to grow, this isn’t the way to go.

It may look easy, but it’s almost impossible to make social media marketing effective without financial resources, talented people, and the right tools for the job. This post will focus on social media marketing tools. The social media marketing tools I'll be talking about today stand out because they are user-friendly and keep improving in response to changes and trends in social media. I’ve divided them into three groups according to the most important social media marketing tasks that require automation:

Social media marketing management
Social media monitoring
Social media advertising

Here's a quick preview list of all 12 social media marketing tools:

IFTTT
Buffer
Quuu
MeetEdgar
Awario
Mention
Brandwatch
Talkwalker
Social Insider
Facebook Ads Grader
Qwaya
Perfect Audience

...but keep reading to learn more about how these tools work, how much they cost and more!

Social media marketing tools: Scheduling & workflow

These social media management tools are the ones that help you manage the workflow that social media requires (yes, it’s in the name). They make the process easier, more organized, less stressful, and, therefore, more effective. Here are a few of my favorites.

1. IFTTT

So you’ve got your social media posts scheduled and maybe you even crossed off the content curation task. What’s the next step? To automate everything that comes before and after (and in between). That’s what IFTTT is for. The name of this automation tool stands for If This, Then That. It links all kinds of apps and services together to automate multi-step tasks in whatever way you want. So for example, if you publish a blog, you can create an IFTTT “recipe” that will see the new post and create a tweet as well as an Instagram post about it.

If there’s a task in your social media marketing workflow that you always forget about despite all the post-it notes, try IFTTT.

Price: free

2. Buffer

Buffer is a popular scheduling tool that allows marketers to schedule posts across a variety of social media platforms. You can either tailor each post to each platform or publish the same one everywhere.

You can use a Buffer Chrome extension to add any content you find on the Web to the Buffer queue. This adds a bit of fun and creativity to the whole process of content aggregation and sharing, because for once you don’t have to plan what to share in advance. Yet your posts still will be shared at the best possible times. You can also track links to see which content is most popular with your readers.

Price: freemium; paid plans from $15/mo

3. Quuu

Already got Buffer? To simplify your work even further, i.e., to eliminate the part where you are the one looking for valuable content to share, start using Quuu. This is a social media marketing tool that curates content for you: it takes hand-picked, always relevant content, and adds it to the Buffer queue. This eliminates any trouble of curating and sharing any content other than the stuff you most want to share (i.e., your own blog posts and promotional content).

Price: plans start at $15/mo

4. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is another social media scheduling tool that stands out for one reason: it allows you to recycle old posts. This is more important than it seems: Content, even good and popular content, gets forgotten and left behind. Recycling that old content so it can get views again is low-hanging fruit, and too often a missed opportunity.

With MeetEdgar, you organize posts by category, schedule content by category, and then, every time the tool has gone through your scheduled posts, it will automatically post old content from each category so it can get attention again.

Price: $49/mo

Social media marketing tools: Monitoring

Organic social media marketing is divided into two processes. One is about the content that comes from you and your brand. It’s the content you create, the content you aggregate and share with your audience, and promotional content. Social media marketing tools that automate and optimize this part of the job are discussed above. The second aspect of social media marketing comes from the audience. It’s the mentions of your brand online, reviews, questions, compliments and complaints directed towards you.

While posting may be more important for increasing brand awareness, keeping an eye on what people say about you and responding appropriately is important too. It’s pretty much impossible to manually find all mentions of a brand on social media, as even on social media platforms people don’t always tag the brand. That’s why social media monitoring tools exist: to make communication with an online audience comprehensive. Here are a few that stand out:

1. Awario

Awario is a social media listening tool made for solopreneurs and small businesses. It doesn’t require a large budget, yet it covers all major social media listening features: finds mentions of your brand or any other keyword on all major social media platforms, including influential forums like Reddit; breaks mentions down into positive, negative, and neutral ones; shows you a list of influencers; and offers reports with all the stats on the authors that mention your brand.

Price: starts at $29/mo

2. Mention

Mention offers real-time social media monitoring, and you can set up alerts for your brand, your competitors, and your industry. With this tool, you can view and respond to each like, tag, or mention (ah, see what they did there?) right in the app. You can also sort mentions by importance or significance, and even set up filters, including by source or by language.

Mention also offers two options tailored to the different who need social media monitoring: small businesses focused on their own branding and agencies working on behalf of their clients.

Price: starts at $29/month

3. Brandwatch

If your budget is much larger, then Brandwatch may be the tool for you. Brandwatch’s analytics data is highly visual: perfect to illustrate the meaning of social media marketing to clients, if you’re an agency.

Another feature that makes Brandwatch stand out is Signals. You have an option to set up an alert whenever a keyword is mentioned by the authors you choose. Signals alert on significant changes in the data set, such as a sudden peak in the number of mentions or an increase in negative mentions.

Price: starts at $800/mo

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is another enterprise-level social media marketing tool that’s undoubtedly one of the most powerful on the market. It offers a huge range of filters, sub-filters, and platform coverage. Not only does it cover social media, news sites, blogs and forums, but also broadcast, TV, and print. The data available is almost endless. It combines information from Google Analytics and social media, sentiment analysis and image recognition to show you the most accurate report on every aspect of the audience.

Talkwalker is aimed at teams of marketers and PR pros, and it makes working in teams easy. It allows you to manage a smooth workflow within a department and easily share data across departments.

Price: starts at $9,600/year

5. Socialinsider

Socialinsider is an analytics and benchmarking tool for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube.

With this tool, you can see where you stand against top competitors, optimize your clients' social media strategy with advanced analytics and competitive benchmarking, track social media KPIs, and share branded reports with your clients. Add your logo and brand color to give them a more personal touch.

Using Socialinsider, you will save time and impress clients with data they haven’t seen before.

Price: Starts at $59/month or get a free 7-day trial.

Social media marketing tools: Paid advertising

Social media marketing is tricky. Sometimes it seems as if everything can be achieved organically and for free, as long as your efforts are creative and authentic. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case, and it becomes less and less common to achieve social media marketing success without any advertising budget. This is especially the case with Facebook. However, as appealing as Facebook makes advertising look, it’s pretty hard to make it work if you don’t have the right tools. So here’re the chosen ones:

1. Facebook Ads Grader

Although Facebook offers some analytics on ads, it’s often hard to tell whether your ads are worth the money, and if not, what has to be improved so that they could be more effective. WordStream’s Facebook Ads Grader lets you know just that: it provides a complete free assessment of your Facebook Advertising performance.

The report-based social media marketing tool generates a detailed summary in the areas in which you’re succeeding and falling behind. The analysis includes metrics which show you how much the Key Performance Indicators differ based on who you’re advertising to; how your best and worst performing ads compare to your competitors; whether you’re paying too much; whether you’re targeting the right audience; etc. It also shows if your campaigns, ad sets, and ads adhere to the industry standards established by Facebook. Basically, the Facebook Ads Grader is the easiest way to see if you’re getting the most out of your budget and how you can improve.

Price: free
2. Qwaya

Qwaya is a social media marketing tool to help create and manage Facebook and Instagram ads. It makes sense to buy it before you’ve even started investing money in Facebook Ads. Qwaya lets you schedule ads, offers analytics integration and team collaboration. Most importantly, it lets you A/B test your ads.

Anyone in marketing knows that testing is key to find the right message for your audience. Social media advertising isn’t an exception. With Qwaya, you can test every variable you’d like to make sure you’re not wasting your money and getting the best possible outcome.

Price: starts at $149/mo

3. Perfect Audience

Perfect Audience is a retargeting tool that can be used for Facebook advertising. Once you get over the clearly outdated design (sorry) and try the tool out, you might find it to be very effective for your business.

Retargeting is a big part of any advertising strategy – or at least it should be. Perfect Audience simplifies the process and helps you set up campaigns and view results. It provides info on impressions served, clicks back, conversions, and cost. The tool can be used for the Web and mobile as well as Facebook.

Price: charged on a CPM basis (more details here)

About the author

Alina Gorbatch is an experienced web marketing specialist and content writer at Awario. Follow @BlondeAlina on Twitter.