The right social media marketing tools can make a big difference.
And without the right social media marketing tools, your social strategy can fail before it has a chance.
Good social media marketing can transform a brand's success. But without specific and powerful tools that align with your organization's goals, you won't be able to create or share valuable content, attract new audiences, or drive meaningful engagement.
The list of marketer responsibilities never stops growing. Luckily, you don't have to, as we explain in detail what to look for in each social marketing solution. Let's dive in.
Looking for something specific? Use these links to navigate to the section that fits your needs.
table of contents:
social media scheduling tool
There are several social media scheduling tools available on the market that can be used for a variety of purposes, from creating posts to curating content to queuing and organizing.
But they all have one common goal: saving time.
Any marketer knows that bouncing back and forth between networks is a waste of time. Multiply that time with all the social properties you manage, and the workday can become an uphill battle with content scheduling.
Look for interactive tools to not only restore your sanity but also your time.
Social media scheduling tools make it easy to schedule and track all the social messages you create across your individual social media profiles and networks.
Social scheduling tools also make it easier to work with large social teams. Specifying access to the appropriate managers or creating advanced permissions will ensure that messages are never sent without double-checking.
What can you do with social media scheduling tools?
- Share the same content to multiple profiles and networks with one click.
- Use your own social media data to automatically post content when your audience is most interested.
- Queue and publish the same post across multiple profiles in one step.
- Plan and organize all your social content with a dynamic calendar.
social media analysis tools
If your data is wrong, your social strategy is also wrong.
Whether you want to track impressions on Facebook, aggregate click-throughs on Twitter, measure follower growth on Instagram, or evaluate engagement on LinkedIn, you need tools to analyze each piece of the puzzle. In other words, it is not possible to get a complete picture of the efforts.
Social media analysis tools are key to getting a clearer picture.
What can social media analysis tools do?
- Track the performance of all your social networks and profiles in one place.
- Monitor the effectiveness of your social campaigns by tagging them and reporting on them individually.
- A guide to your social publishing strategy is to see which messages resonate most with your audience.
- Monitor your competitors and see if their engagement and growth matches yours.
- Track how quickly and efficiently you respond to messages that require a response.
- See who among your team members is publishing the most efficient, engaging content
social media engagement tools
Engagement tools are at the core of brand visibility, responsiveness, and efficiency. Instant and consistent interactions with your customers on social build loyalty.
Consider looking for collaborative tools like review management systems, task management, and tagging for customer comments. The more organized the customer messages you receive on the backend, the more seamless the user experience you create on the frontend.
What can social media engagement tools do for you?
- Consolidate all your messages from all your networks and profiles into one inbox.
- Notify me if your profile has a sudden increase in mentions.
- Assign the message to the individual on your team who is most likely to answer the question.
- See the complete history of social media where someone has reached out to your handle.
social media listening tools
Social media listening tools allow you to use more advanced features to analyze and provide actionable responses to the insights you collect through social monitoring. Together, these tools can help you meet higher standards for your customers and improve your overall brand health.
What can social media listening tools do?
- Shows the general sentiment that social users have about a particular topic or brand.
- Quickly analyze your entire campaign and create concise reports.
- Identify industry trends long before they become the latest hot topic.
- Identify gaps in your industry, track opinion shares, understand consumer attitudes towards your competitors and discover business opportunities.
social media monitoring tools
Social media monitoring is often used interchangeably with social listening, but social listening only undermines the value of each method.
Social media monitoring tools can help you understand the “what” and “why” of your listening. Think of it as a search and gather stage of gathering data from social conversations that can help you better understand your audience and improve how you engage with them.
When looking for a tool, keep in mind that monitoring is not a replacement for enterprise-grade listening tools. Therefore, first assess your needs. If you're just starting out and a tool that helps you track social media mentions can meet your immediate needs, use a reactive monitoring tool so you don't get overwhelmed by all the features of a listening suite. If you want to dig deep into your customers' emotions and drive change in the way you understand your audience, the proactive nature of listening tools has you covered for those needs and more.
It all depends on your immediate business goals, but any marketer will tell you that using a combination of monitoring and listening tools is your best bet.
What can social media monitoring tools do?
- Combine all messages from your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram profiles into one stream.
- Enhance your social media monitoring with brand keywords that reveal valuable social engagement opportunities.
- Configure your Smart Inbox with profile, message type, keyword, and date filters to quickly find what you need.
- Create custom tags and apply them to incoming messages to better organize and report on your social monitoring efforts.
social media automation tools
A useful automation marketing trick is to avoid relying too heavily on automation tools to do things that should be done by humans, and instead identify repetitive tasks that can be automated without compromising the user experience. This allows you, the human, to handle more difficult or delicate items.
A common misconception is that automation tools are meant to make the social marketing process manual. But that's not the case. Sure, it saves time and effort, but it's no substitute for a powerful marketer's brain.
To get started, consider integrating automation tools like social media chatbots into your social marketing strategy to streamline customer service across Facebook and Twitter. Bots allow you to quickly create logic-based answers to frequently asked customer questions.
What can social automation tools do?
- Create rules to automatically flag or archive incoming social messages to empty your inbox.
- Increase your response rate by suggesting replies based on your typical social behavior.
- Assess how effective your social marketing is using automated feedback requests.
Facebook marketing tools
If Facebook is part of your social media strategy, you need to have your marketing tools in place. All the tools you need to publish content, engage with your audience, and analyze your results will help you transform your Facebook strategy.
With all the algorithm changes, finding ways to increase Facebook engagement should be a priority for every social media marketer. Use these tools to plan, execute, and analyze the perfect Facebook marketing strategy.
The Facebook dashboard is your central hub for data and analytics. Read this guide to learn why dashboards are so important, what metrics to include, and the tools you need to build your own.
What can you do with Facebook marketing tools?
- Simplify posting to Facebook by scheduling messages to publish automatically.
- Manage your Facebook presence as a team by delegating or removing access to users.
- Granting access to Facebook CRM allows you to send messages to individuals.
- Report on Facebook performance across all profiles.
- Dig into your Facebook competitors and see how they stack up.
Twitter marketing tools
Over the years, many Twitter tools have come and gone. So how do you know which software is worth investing your time and money in? These roundups provide a number of reliable and proven marketing tools for Twitter that will help you plan your Twitter marketing strategy. Every part is evaluated.
Tired of buying Twitter tools that you only use for a week? Bad software wastes your time and money, even if the tools are free. We've compiled a list of 10 great tools for everything from scheduling tweets to running Twitter chats to automating processes.
Which Tweets are getting the most engagement? What is the age range of your audience? Who likes and retweets you the most? Use the tools in this list to answer all these questions and never be left in the dark about your Twitter analytics again.
What can you do with Twitter marketing tools?
- Manage multiple Twitter profiles from one place.
- Schedule months of Twitter content from a single social calendar.
- Provides historical data about your interactions with your social media followers.
- Monitor Twitter for mentions of your brand or products.
- Create detailed reports on Twitter marketing to share internally.
Instagram marketing tools
Are you looking for the perfect app to edit your photos before sharing them with your audience? Or maybe you need data on how your campaigns are performing. Having the right Instagram marketing tools at hand will make it easier to engage with your audience, create better content, and analyze your efforts.
Let’s take a deep dive into what’s working and what’s not working for your brand on Instagram. Brands know they need Instagram, but how do they measure and make sure the platform is working? Use these 7 Instagram analytics tools to increase engagement, audience growth, and more. Measure hashtag statistics and more.
Capturing your audience's attention at first glance with eye-catching images is the key to success on Instagram. Master all the elements of creating great-looking visuals for Instagram with these apps for every situation.
What can you do with Instagram marketing tools?
- Manage and publish engaging content from a single location, including your desktop.
- Benchmark Instagram performance using deep analytics.
- Monitor your network for hashtags to use and messages to respond to.
- Measure your overall performance and prove the value of Instagram to your company.
When done correctly, social media marketing can bring tremendous success to your brand. With the right tools, you can create, curate, publish, schedule, analyze, and more. And all of this not only helps you work more efficiently, but also means more business by attracting new audiences, increasing brand awareness, and increasing engagement.
Are you ready to take control of the social landscape? Start packing your arsenal with the right tools. Not sure where to start? Try a free trial of Sprout Social or contact one of our social media professionals today.
