Social media has redefined digital marketing.
Are you actively promoting your business and improving your brand at the same time on social media?
If you can’t confidently answer this question, then it’s possible that you haven’t leveraged the right tools – you prefer to do it manually.
Come on, how far can you go with a ‘manual’ social strategy?
No matter your level of expertise as a digital marketer, if you use the right social media tool, you’ll gain more traction online and achieve your sales goals.
Stop struggling to drive targeted traffic and customers to your business. They’re right under your nose. Really!
The use of social media tools have skyrocketed since 2013. According to Cloudswave, 3 billion out of 7.2 billion people on earth have access to the internet, and 2.1 billion of them are active on social media. That’s huge!
With millions of people engaging on social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ and lots of others, leveraging social media marketing will jet your business to a higher level.
Since customers now interact with brands via social media, it’s a great opportunity for every marketer to develop a good social media marketing plan.
Yes, you need to do this if you want to get customers attention and increase revenue.
The benefits of social media marketing are enormous. Recent study from Dzineclub shows that up to 51% of internet users are more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social platform.
See, you don’t have to become a certified social media manager before you can benefit from it. Sure, if you have the opportunity to get certified, go for it.
Moving on, I’ve a question for you:
“How do you manage your social media activities?
Activities such as monitoring, posting, updating, analyzing, technical issues, decision making, customer services, and the like.
Trust me, the mere thought of it could scare the hell out of you.
Social media marketing is tedious and discouraging.
However, if properly done, you’ll be amazed at the significant result and impact that your brand would make.
Enough of the praises. Here are the 24 social media tools that will boost your social presence. These tools are quite affordable. Some of them are 100% free.
1. Hootsuite.com
How serious are you with social media marketing?
At Buildfire.com, we invest a lot of time and money on social media marketing, because it helps us amplify our content reach.
You should embrace social media. It’s worth your time. Except that you need the right tool.
Hootsuite is a project level social media management tool, which enables you to post, monitor and grow your brand on different social media platforms. It’s used by over 10 million professionals.
Now that the internet is widely used to promote a business and distribute content, Hootsuite range of social features will amaze you.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out or you’re an advanced online marketer, this social media tool might just be your hidden gem.
When you’re business minded and wants to connect with like minds, LinkedIn is the best channel. Could this be the reason why 91% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn and only 34% uses Pinterest?
Truth be told, it’s difficult to see a brand or marketer using only one social media platform. Most brands use 3 – 5 social sites. All in all, Hootsuite supports the major social sites.
Though managing social media campaigns can be tedious at times, but when you leverage Hootsuite, you can simplify the entire process and achieve maximum results.
Specifically, Hootsuite helps you to monitor your posts, and review what your audience are saying about your product/services and brand.
And with these information you can easily optimize your content to suit your audience.
2. AgoraPulse.com
As a marketer, you can acquire leads from different sources other than social media. However, social media is a great source for generating inbound leads.
According to the 2013 State of Inbound Marketing, “inbound delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads.”
Therefore, if you’re looking to power your inbound marketing via social media, I introduce another powerful social media tool that has received a lot of love from digital space – AgoraPulse.
If you’re worried about using different apps to manage each of your social media accounts, then choosing Agorapulse won’t be a bad idea.
It’s a simple and affordable social media management tool. And of course, you can view reports on your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram timelines in one dashboard.
More importantly, you can schedule content for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with Agorapulse.
This app is great for lead generation, because it comes with an unlimited campaign features, which increases your brand awareness on Facebook and other social media platforms.
And with facebook being one of the largest social platform, which 52% of marketers testified to have acquired a customer from.
It also allows you to organize in-store contests, promotions and offer coupons, through which it collects your visitor’s or lead’s data.
With the rich messaging features, you’ll never miss a comment or message on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
It’s high time you upgrade your social experience. Use AgoraPulse to Schedule and publish content. And get stunning reports.
3. Socialoomph.com
Socialoomph is a social management app with lots of rich features that will boost your brand awareness quickly. Several brands have testified to boosting their productivity with this social tool.
Like most social apps, Socialoomph enables you to schedule your posts, and track your results. So whether you’re logged on to your social accounts or not, this app ensures that your brand is never asleep.
To a large extent, the more relevant content you post on different social media sites, the more chances you’ve to drive more traffic and leads.
Similarly, consistent posting will keep you in touch with your customers, as 93% of customers expect their preferred brands to always be online on social media.
Socialooph comes with extra features for monitoring your tweets. Based on your settings and keywords, it periodically sends you relevant tweets.
But that’s not all. It also alerts you when your brand or website is mentioned in a tweet or post, including people who replied to your tweets or posts.
4. Sproutsocial.com
Sprout social is a widely used social media management app, because it allows you and your team observe, reply, gauge and work together in order to achieve your set goals.
When it comes to customer service, Sprout Social provides you with the most influential tools. Through these, you can connect and communicate with your leads and social fans easily, resolve issues, and create brand advocates.
For your convenience, Sprout Social organizes information in six areas:
And messages from your social fans and followers appear in one stream:
You can easily reply a tweet or comment from the message stream faster.
It’ll shock you to know that customers are likely to recommend brands on social media that offer quick response even when it’s ineffective compared to brands that offer slow, but effective response
This is an indication that your social fans and customers want to hear from you as quickly as possible – and they are likely to make purchase again, if your response is effective.
As a social media marketer, Sprout social app will redefine how you connect and communicate with the target audience. Because it helps you manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts in one place.
5. Crowdbooster.com
Do you want to make smart social media decisions?
If yes, then you can count on Crowdbooster. Armed with this social tool, rather than analyzing your social media reports manually, it automatically updates it automatically and periodically.
CrowdBooster provides you with the most important social media real-time reports, such number of likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, potential impressions, reach, followers, all in time for your use.
In order to get the best out of your post on social media, it’s important to understand social timing, as this would boost or mar your engagement.
Crowdbooster gives you deep insights on the best time to tweet or post on Facebook.
It guides you on emerging opportunities to engage your followers and influencers who often retweet your tweets.
6. Edgerank Checker
Do you know the direction that your social media campaign is going? Being cautious can help you identify this path. In search marketing, you split test your campaigns.
“EdgeRank is the Facebook algorithm that decides which stories appear in each user’s newsfeed.”
Edgerank checker is a free tool you need. It sets the bar high, giving you an edge over your competitors. It enables Facebook marketers to check their page’s exposure within Facebook.
A sure path to optimizing your Facebook pages effectively.
Since Facebook currently has the highest social media users, leveraging on it and tracking your progress along the way is a sure path to acquired targeted leads and customers.
With the Ads analytics that allows you to gauge your ads, page and content performance on facebook, alongside your competitors’ in order to ascertain how effective yours are – you need this tool.
Edgerank Checker will checkmate your performance against regional benchmarks with the use of flexible multi-compare feature – giving you ideas about the best strategy to integrate into your social marketing to attain optimal results.
7. Tailwindapp.com
Tailwind is an official partner for Pinterest marketing, so it’s the most attractive tool to boost your social marketing through Pinterest.
Though Pinterest is a fairly new social media platform, but it currently has over 100 million active users.
Most brands are still skeptical about Pinterest advertising, because it’s new. Yet, they forget this is the core reason why they should leverage it.
In fact, Pinterest users are targeted buyers. What attracts them to this social network is its visual appeal. Guess what? social posts with images receive 94% more page visits than social posts without images.
A study by Shopify revealed that 96% of Pinterest users research what they plan to buy on Pinterest. And 87% of sales are made on Pinterest.
Tailwind gives you the opportunity you to schedule multiple pins, bulk uploads and calendar, for consistent audience engagement.
Use the social tool to optimize your pins, by suggesting the most efficient time to send your pins in order to maximize your engagement.
Yes, you can get detailed reports for your published content – to determine what’s effective and what’s not.
8. Buffer.com
With over 1 million users, you can’t go wrong with Buffer.
Buffer is a social media scheduling manager that allows you to schedule your social posts, update your timelines, giving you the opportunity to reach new fans and engage existing fans and customers.
Buffer currently supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
With the constant use of social media by internet users, leveraging on each of the social platforms will boost your chance of increasing your brand awareness.
You see, even if your blog posts are great, if you don’t distribute them effectively, no one will read them. That’s where Buffer comes in.
As you schedule your posts to go out as a tweet, Facebook share, or pins, you can measure performance through the user-friendly dashboard.
9. Oktopost.com
If you’re a B2B marketer, don’t make the mistake of choosing a social media tool that’s designed for B2C marketing. Trust me, the plan, approach and features you need are different.
According to Lee Odden, founder of Top Rank Blog, “B2B marketers who are goals focused, strategic in planning and action are more effective.”
Oktopost is a B2B social media management tool designed to help you generate qualified leads for your business. It helps you to schedule your post to more than one social profiles, from a single interface.
Oktopost keeps you informed about your social marketing, with reports on clicks, conversions, and other engagements for each of your posts.
This social media tool helps you to determine quality contents to share with your audience – and keep them engaged at all times. Magical things happen when customers are engaged.
According to a case study by Gallup, customer engagement boost sales and average revenue per user.
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Truly, it’s difficult to manually determine which type of content your audience prefers you post on social media. But with Oktopost it’s simple. The tool finds relevant conversations and leads you into it naturally.
10. MeetEdgar.com
Meet Edgar is a social media tool manager which you can use to categorize your posts and specify which social sites you wish them to be posted on. It also creates a posting schedule based on the category.
If you find yourself constantly replacing old posts with new ones on your blog, it’d be difficult to squeeze the most results out of your best posts.
But when you leverage social Edgar, you can still your target audience to enjoy your old posts.
Data from Wiselytics shows that the Your tweet half-life is 1 billion times shorter than Carbon-14’s, the Half-life of a tweet is 4x shorter than a Facebook post tweet, and that of your blog post is 10 days.
This simply implies that a post can only receive its full traffic if exposed for 20 days after being published. Tell me: do you’ve enough time to tweet 20x per day?
I know, it’s daunting.
That’s where Edgar comes in. Use Edgar to schedule both your old and new posts for your social fans.
This gives you an edge over your competitors, as well as help you gain more traction and build social influence.
So unlike other social tool manager, Edgar tries as much as possible to optimize each post for optimal performance.
After publishing posts, Edgar kicks into action and queue them up to the bottom of your schedule library, to republish them in the event that no new post is added.
It keeps your audience engaged, giving your useful posts another exposure to drive more traffic to your website or blog.
11. Socialflow.com
Socialflow employs a data-driven approach to social media marketing.
As a social management tool, it helps you replace illogical scheduling with actionable data about the best times your target audiences will be active and monitors their activities when they’re online.
Monitoring your social fans is the most effective way to guarantee that your posts and messages reaches the right people.
It allows you to schedule your posts accompanied without jeopardizing your brand culture. In other words, you get to keep your cool.
More so, your audience can view your social updates via mobile. Data from Adobe on Mobile Consumer Survey found that 71% of people use mobile devices to access social media.
With its recent update, new features like calendar and content classification have been added to Socialflow – to improve your posting.
12. Discover.ly
The best social media marketing strategies are informed by data and one of the most versatile social app to supply user data for developing your strategy comes from Discover.ly.
Discover.ly has amazing features to power your social media campaigns.
If I were you, I would give it a shot. You can easily download the Chrome Browser Extension to see information from social networks as you browse.
Discover.ly enables you to preview all your social accounts from a single interface. It provides essential information on the performance of your posts across different social channels.
Creating a strong brand awareness goes beyond focusing on one social platform.
With more than 176 million users already active on social sites and each user having more than one social media account, maximizing your brand awareness can be confusing, when trying to reach these people.
But with Discover.ly, managing multiple social media account is child’s play.
From a single dashboard, you can schedule posts, post to your timelines instantly, track performance, engage your audience, and do much more.
13. Snip.ly
Trust me, social media marketing goes beyond updating your Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
Way more!
If you look the ROI of social media chart below, you’ll see that 74% of CMOs believe they’ll tie social media efforts to hard ROI this year.
You also need to drive conversions. With Sniply, you can add a call-to-action to every link you share.
Sniply is one of such powerful social media tool that allows you to engage your followers through every link you share.
Snip.ly generates a clean call-to-action into your content, in such a way that your readers can easily see it. This is a powerful way to increase lead generation.
Even Tandberg, a leader in the field of teleconferencing, increased its lead generation by 50% from a simple homepage CTA, which perfectly blended with the headline, subtitle and images.
Since you’re likely to get more traffic from social media and authority sites, by exposing your post link more, Snip.ly is the tool you should grab with both arms.
Snip.ly monitors your links click-through rates, conversion rates, and collects loads of data to determine how engaged your audience is with the link you shared.
14. Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho is an all-in-one platform tool that facilitates live chat, analyzes and track visitors’ behaviors, and powers your social marketing.
This attractive tool collects essential information like user location, web path, and so on are monitored and captured by Zoho tool.
Zoho is good for building a strong customer relationship that will in turn lead to build trust and customer loyalty.
As you already know, your customer’s information is the most valuable asset for your business. Hence, you’re advised to capture email address and phone numbers of your ideal customers.
With the deep insights Zoho delivers, you can differentiate between casual visitors, qualified leads, and customers. That way, you can filter those who are still on the fence.
Remember that building a sticky online presence boils down to interacting with your audience. In 2012, the rate at which consumers interact with brands via social media increased from 19% to 36%.
Through Zoho, you will receive notifications from prospects and chat with them real time.
The strength of Zoho SalesIQ to integrate language translator has broken language barrier. No matter your customer’s country or language, you can still engage them.
15. Pablo
Using visuals in your social media marketing is guaranteed to bring you better results. One of such visuals is images.
Generally, social media users love images. Interestingly, Buffer tested the effect of images on tweets, and found that tweets with relevant images get about 198% more clicks than tweets without images.
Using the right images for your social engagement is critical. But not everyone is design-savvy. But don’t give up.
Buffer designed Pablo to help marketers like you who have no professional training in graphic designs.
Pablo is a simple app that helps you design compelling images for your social media campaigns. In less than 5 minutes, you can have a great image for your Facebook ad copy.
It has an image bank or library with over 50,000 free royal photos that you can choose from, or upload your own custom background image from your computer.
Then, the rest is fun: Simply select a tool, add text and logos that will best suit the social media you want and post it. Pablo will do the resizing for you.
Till date, visual is still king. According to Promoworx, 40% of your audience will respond better to visual content rather than written text.
16. AtomicReach
Content marketing is the lifeblood of your online business.
If you want to get ahead quickly, and build deep and lasting loyalty with your target audience, you need to invest money in creating compelling content.
When done correctly, you’ll be amazed the the results that content marketing will deliver to your business.
Though it takes dedication and skill to replicate one-time success with this marketing strategy, but 42% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing already.
What makes people love and read one particular article, but ignore the other?
The truth is, you can’t run your content marketing on assumption. You need a tool to help pinpoint where you’re getting it all wrong with your content.
This is why you need Atomic Reach.
AtomicReach is more than a social media tool. It helps you grow your sales with smarter content.
All you’ve to do is input your content URL into the search box, then click on the “submit” button.
Note: You need to sign up first.
Atomic Reach will analyze your content and give you deep insights on what your audience expects.
If your content isn’t well optimized for your readers’ enjoyment, the tool will likely return a score less than 50% – and show you how to quickly fix the errors.
Atomic Reach is built to help content marketers produce compelling content.
Posting compelling content to the wrong audience is one deadly mistake that most content marketers make.
Sadly, when your content gets to the wrong people, Moz confirms there’s a 96% increase of customers abandoning a page without completing the right actions.
17. Tweetdeck.com
Without a doubt, Twitter marketing, when done correctly, can help you acquire new leads and customers to your business.
There are several tools that you can use.
For example, Marketing Land shared a case study: How Adobe used Twitter Lead Gen Cards to drive enrollments for a brand new online college.
That being said, TweetDeck can help you achieve so much when you’re marketing on Twitter.
TweetDeck enables you to:
i). Create a custom Twitter experience: You can easily organize and build collections, track your lists, searches and other activities.
ii). Find exactly what you’re looking for: At the top of each timeline, TweetDeck allows you to create searches to track events, topics, and hashtags.
iii). Manage multiple accounts: Follow new accounts, tweet new posts, manage your accounts, and do much more.
It’s a real time Twitter app, good at tracking, organizing, and engaging your customers.
Read: The Beginner’s Guide To TweetDeck
Your customers’ experiences on social media are created and profiled individually.
Manage your timelines, track sites visited, searches made, all the activities, and user behaviors are summarized in a single interface.
All these are meant to strengthen customer relationship with your audience. And this is so vital, because building relationship with customers will improve customer satisfaction by 74%.
18. Tweetcaster.com
Twitter has numerous apps but Tweetcaster is exceptional. Many believe it’s the best that has happened to Twitter.
You’ve got a lot of Tweet Options when using TweetCaster, such as Popular tweets, Private tweets, Tweet history, Retweet, Reply, Zip It, unique tweets, themes and many more.
If you need multiple Twitter accounts, maybe for business and personal purposes, TweetCaster will be a perfect idea because it can manage and sort account details for clarity.
TweetCaster also has a feature called “Zip It”. With this Zip it, you can mute a user for a period of time.
For example, users’ who are passionate about football and basketball tweets can be monitored and controlled when such tweets aren’t needed.
TweetCaster lets you schedule tweets at the right time. As you already know, the success of a tweet depends on the timing.
19. Followerwonk.com
Followerwonk helps you explore and grow your social influence, performance and social graph. It does this in 3 simple steps:
It finds trends
Analyze the trends
And optimize them for social growth.
With Followerwonk, you get to truly understand your followers, and their preferred time to tweet. You can use the “Twitter analytics” a sub tool of Followerwonk to manage all of that.
Influencer marketing is another reason for using social media. Knowing your influencers is critical if you want to amplify your content reach.
“Super actionable visualization” is a sub-tool under Followerwonk that distill out industry experts and influencers for you.
Also, Followerwonk plots a graph that differentiate users from super influencers in your niche, and easily shares your reports with them.
According to cognique, this idea of satisfying your customers and identifying your influencers will help your business gain 88% retention rate and loyalty.
20. ManageFlitter.com
Manageflitter is trusted by more than 3,000,000 users globally. It’s claimed to be the most powerful Twitter bio search on the planet. You should give it a shot.
If you’ve multiple Twitter accounts, you may run into muddy waters trying to manage all of them at the same time. Sorting and filtering your accounts with a mediocre tool will complicate the issue.
Connecting to relevant people increase your chances of reaching out to influencers that will grow your presence online.
21. Tweepi.com
If managing your Twitter accounts looks daunting, Tweepi can help you.
Tweepi is a simple Twitter tool that you can use to get more followers and engage existing ones.
Use the tool to cleanup your social media accounts. It’s necessary to flush out inactive users that aren’t responding to your tweets – so that you can pay more attention to loyal Twitter followers.
Your influencers and new prospects who indicated much interest should be given due attention to cement the relationship. This is important.
Therefore, keeping your accounts clean and active at all times is a process good social media managers must employ.
Remember that your Twitter followers (which consists mainly of your customers) need to be engaged, else, they will jump to another brand.
Listening to your loyal fans, answering their questions, and making visible your valuable content is the best way to build customer engagement.
According to Followup Boss, 78% of customers will be loyal to a brand if the content is compelling and relevant.
Tweepi will capture followers indicating interest on your topic and headlines.
Your brand needs Tweepi. If you’re yet to get aboard, now is the time.
Pauline Cabrera of Social Media Strategist said that, Tweepi is “an incredible tool for analyzing the activity and sociability of your Twitter followers.”
22. Socedo.com
Can I be honest with you?
Okay, I know that Socedo has a weird name, but it’s one of the most attractive social media tool out there. If you’re a B2B marketer, you need this tool right now.
According to Eszter Szikora, the Social Media Manager at Apigee, “Socedo helped increase the number of leads following Apigee on Twitter by more than 50% while connecting those leads directly to our Marketo system.”
What will Socedo do for you as a digital marketer?
Isn’t it obvious?
It’ll help you discover your best prospects, capture their data, interests and pain points.
You know, when prospects are looking to buy your products, but lack the confidence to move on, you need to understand the stage they currently are, eliminate the objections and persuade them to add an item to cart right now.
Socedo monitors real-time user’s behavior before qualifying them as leads. The user’s interests are strategically filtered to give room for motivated buyers.
Motivated buyers will not only buy your product, but also promote your brand.
Socedo helps you save time and get productive, as you focus on the core aspects of your social media campaigns – without getting drowned by the latest shiny object.
23. Postplanner.com
To a large extent, your customers don’t want more content, but a few content that truly helps them. Publishing generic content consistently is not a good content strategy.
Do you know that aggressive marketing could run you down?
Sure it can, especially when you’re pushing sales messages down your customer’s throat.
It’s always ideal to understand your audience first, before creating content. Because, whenever you push great content to the wrong audience, you’ll dent your brand image.
You need Post Planner to help plan your content strategy. The tool operates on the simple premise:
Post Planner plays a key role beyond social post scheduling and management. The tool is designed to boost your engagement.
With Post Planner, you can easily FIND, PLAN and POST content that is irresistible, valuable, and scientifically proven to increase social media engagement on Facebook and Twitter.
Without a doubt, publishing more posts will not bring you success. You need to publish and promote the right kind of posts.
That being said, since it’s generally daunting for both B2B and B2C to create engaging content, Post Planner can help you.
Data from SuperOffice found that 68% of customers will leave a company if they’re not catered for. On the web, the only way to engage people is through content marketing and customer service.
Having sleepless nights about the type of content your audience will read and share shouldn’t be your concern. Let Post Planner handle it for you.
24. Buzzsumo.com
How do you know the type of content that your audience loves?
Buzzsumo can help. Use the tool to scour the entire web and find most shared content and key influencers.
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