Which social media tools should you should use for your business?

Social media management can become time consuming, and that’s why we compiled a list of some of the best tools to enhance your social efforts.

Whether it’s a small business or a large corporation, these tools can be useful for everyone trying to create a consistent social presence. And many are free to use…

Social scheduling

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is among the most popular social media management platforms, offering an overview of all your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram), along with the option to create and schedule content, analyse performance, and monitor your favorite topics and hashtags.

It also features a Beta Campaign Builder, which makes social campaign creation even easier.

Buffer

Buffer is another popular option for social media management, focusing on content creation and scheduling, with a user interface that makes the process easier and faster.

What’s more, its Business version offers powerful analytics for content scheduled through the platform, analysing  engagement,  reach, the clicks on each post, and also the performance of your profiles at set or custom periods of time.

My favourite feature is the quick ability to re-buffer content, to spot for example the most successful posts and load them again at your posting queue, after any necessary editing.

Sendible

Sendible is a powerful social media management dashboard, blending content creation, scheduling and analysis of social accounts, also offering brand and reputation monitoring, along with Social CRM to turn followers into clients. 

MeetEdgar

Edgar allows you to organise and schedule your content in order to make sure that your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) never run out of content.

What makes it special is the ability to load content to your library depending on its category, set your preferred posting schedule and let Edgar handle the rest.

SocialOomph

SocialOomph allows you to schedule content on your social networks, monitor (Read more...) social activity, track keywords, and find the right people to follow.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is another useful tool to help you create, organise, and schedule your social posts and what makes it even more effective is its integration with a Wordpress blog, which can help you plan, create, schedule and promote your editorial content.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a complete social media management platform, allowing you to schedule, publish, and analyse your content.

Moreover, it is offering a useful social customer service directly through its platform, with the reports on engagement and trends providing useful insights on your social activity and the topics you want to follow.

Monitoring

TweetDeck

TweetDeck may remind you of Hootsuite’s interface, but it is focused on Twitter, offering a complete experience for scheduling content, monitoring activity, tracking mentions, hashtags, topics, etc.

It can be very effective in real-time tracking and it even allows you to manage multiple accounts.

Brand24

Brand24 have been used by many brands as an efficient way to track real-time information, whether it’s about social insights, competitors, trending topics, or mentions.

It even provides an influencer score to help you discover the right people, along with a sentiment analysis to filter each mention.

Klear

Klear (formerly known as Twtrland) allows you to monitor, report and analyze social users, finding the right people for each occasion by accessing 500 million profiles, 60,000 categories and 5 years of historical data. 

Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers social insights and monitoring of a brand’s social conversations, while there’s also the option to analyse trends, hashtags, people to find what’s relevant for your brand.

The coverage of more than 80 million online sources makes the platform very effective, with social listening, reputation management and competition monitoring making ROI easier.

Social Clout

Social Clout is another monitoring tool that allows you to track even in real-time conversations in Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, or Instagram, while it also offers keyword research, analytics, sentiment analysis and competitive analysis.

Analytics

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a reliable analytics platform for Facebook Pages, as it offers the main insights that are relevant for brand pages.

From the best times to post to a basic analysis of the audience, it can be a useful starting point for the analysis of the most successful posts, while “Pages to Watch” can also help you track your competitors.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics is simple but still effective to analyse the performance of your tweets, the impressions, the engagement, the followers, also featuring the top tweets, the monthly performance and the visits to the profile.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is used by many brands as a powerful platform to analyse the content that performs better for any topic, or competitor, providing social data for any page.

This can be very helpful for a brand trying to understand the type of content that works well, from the topic, to the right social channels.

It is also useful for finding the key influencers for each case, while it can show the most shared posts for each topic, useful insights into what people talk about (and how a brand can jump in any of these topics).

LikeAlyzer

LikeAlyzer is another useful tool that helps you analyse your Facebook Page and the effectiveness of your content.

It helps you explore the best ways to handle the content of your Facebook Page by monitoring and comparing what could lead to further success.

FollowerWonk

FollowerWonk was created by Moz to analyse your Twitter profile, helping you discover, measure, optimise your efforts, while it may also be useful when you’re trying to discover the right influencers.

It’s an easy way to sort your followers by the number of tweets, following, followers, or even the social authority.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster helps you measure and optimise your social media efforts, providing real-time data, hashtag reports, analysis of your most popular posts on Facebook and Twitter, while it may also help you discover the most engaged fans and followers.

Audiense

Audisense (formerly known as SocialBro) offers a free tool for Twitter users (with up to 5000 social contacts -both followings and followers-) allowing you to analyse your followers, their region, their interests, segmenting them accordingly, and also helping you discover more relevant people to follow.

It also helps you select the best times to tweet. Although it might not be suitable for brands, it’s still a useful tool you might want to try out.

Monitoring Hashtags / Trending topics

Spredfast

Monitor online conversations, search for hashtags and find what’s relevant for your brand. There’s also an option for optimal scheduling time and management of multiple social accounts.

Hashtagify

This is another popular option for discovering, analysing and amplifying your content through the search of the right hashtags, but also the right influencers.

Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time hashtag tracker for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, helping you discover the best opportunities for your brand to jump on a relevant trending topic.

Tweetbinder

This is another popular option for big brands, as it helps you analyse, curate, display, and search for hashtags, keywords, and mentions in Twitter and Instagram.

Creating visual content

There are many tools for visual content creation and here are only some of them, giving you an idea of all the different ways that you can create visual content to improve your social efforts.

Canva

Canva is probably among the most popular choices for the creation of visual content and it’s extremely useful when trying to create the right visual content for each social network.

From the customization of imagesize, to the numerous available templates, it’s a reliable solution for any type of image that you want to have ready as fast as possible, without compromising on its quality (and without being a graphic designer).

Pablo by Buffer

Buffer has built Pablo to help you create visual content while you’re using its scheduling platform, offering a simple and fast solution for your social posts.

It may not be as powerful as Canva, but it still has a large library of images and it helps you create appealing images for all the popular social networks.

Adobe Spark Post

Adobe wanted to create its own quick solution for visual content creation, and it created Spark Post, as an alternative to Canva. In fact, there’s a big similarity between the two.

Stencil

Stencil (formerly known as Share As Image) is another useful option for the quick creation of visual content, offering more than 700,000 backgrounds and 200,000 icons for you to create the perfect image for your social post.

The user interface is simple and effective and you may save your image as a template to speed up your next creations.

IFTTT

IFTTT is a powerful automation platform that can be useful in many different ways. It relies on the “cause and effect” and it helps you link one platform with another, to simplify your posting on social media.

For example, you can activate the option to automatically post all your Facebook posts to LinkedIn, which means that IFTTT will save you time from manually doing it on your own.

Moreover, you can activate the option to save all your Instagram posts to Google Drive, to create a backup of your posts.

There is a large database of available “recipes” and I suggest you try this out, as it can be very useful, though it’s always important to keep automation in moderation to make sure you don’t surrender too much control over your social posting.

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse can be very useful for your the management of your Facebook and Twitter presence, offering customer relationship management software, applications, analytics reports, contests and more.

Socedo

Socedo is a very useful tool for the automation of the lead generation through social media. It works with Twitter and LinkedIn and it may help any business find the right leads and include them in its sales funnel.

SocialFlow

SocialFlow allows you to manage all your paid, owned and earned campaigns in a useful platform that also helps you discover the posts that would be relevant for your business.

It also offers keyword tracking and the right segmentation to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Inkybee

Inkybee is very useful when you’re trying to discover the right influencers and celebrities that could benefit your brand’s social efforts.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly may be known as a link shortener, but it is also has a useful analytics platform to monitor the effectiveness of your posts.

As it can be integrated in all your editorial and social efforts, the analytics platform can become very useful.

Tailwind

Tailwind is a very useful tool for your Pinterest and Instagram marketing efforts.

It first started focusing on Pinterest, helping you discover content, schedule posts, monitor conversations, launch promotions and analyse its results, but it soon expanded to Instagram, making it even more appealing.

Tweepi

Tweepi is a tool focusing on Twitter, helping you discover the right influencers, interacting with them and keeping track of the engagement and the way the conversation goes.

Little Bird

Little Bird is another tool that helps you discover, target and engage with influencers on social media.

In summary

There are so many tools out there that we could add to this list, so here I’ve listed a mixture of the most popular tools, along with some lesser known ones that could be useful for you.

Feel free to bookmark/share/save this list for future reference and we’d love to hear your own suggestions for additions.

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