Aseem Badshah
Best Tools for Social Media Marketing
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best tools you can imagine for managing just about any social network. Dedicated to social media marketers, it can be the one and only tool you ever need, and it’s great for anyone looking for an alternative to the common Twitter interface. Hootsuite offers a free account with limited features, and the basic plan is lower than $10 per month.
I use it for Twitter and Google+. Once you’re registered, you are able to collect clicks, download activity and engagement reports, manage account groups, track posts by hashtags and schedule future tweets. Hootsuite supports Google+ formatting but doesn’t allow you to tag other users.
2. Sprout Social
The price is what I like best about this tool. It’s extremely affordable — only $9 a month for a Pro account and $49 for a Business account.
There is one word for SproutSocial and it is, “awesome.” With SproutSocial you are able to:
- Schedule posts for multiple times in a couple of clicks;
- Discover users you should follow/unfollow on Twitter and Facebook;
- Compare your Twitter account with your competitors’;
- Assign tasks to different team members; and
- Create beautiful reports for customers or inside presentations.
Discovery and Reports are my two favorite sections. Adding people you have already conversed with on Twitter helps you to grow your audience significantly. And reports enable us to download Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ posts into Excel for further analysis. Another great feature is its Competitor Comparison. Keep an eye on your number of daily mentions and your engagement, and follow people who are talking about you.
3. Sumall.com
Sumall.com is a free, powerful tool suitable for digital marketers all over the world. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t provide data on its own but aggregates statistics from Google Analytics, PayPal, MailChimp, Twitter and Facebook, etc.
What I love the most about Small is its daily newsletter summarizing all activities for the previous day. It has a great Twitter overview; and, although its data for Google+ is not always accurate, its Twitter stats are invaluable.
Nonetheless, it’s free. It provides a wide-ranging functionality, and you can upgrade to the Pro version for only $9 in a month (I now use the $20 plan with the detailed Twitter report). The main difference in the free account is that you can tweak alerts and get early access to new features supported by a professional manager, which can help you reach your goals.
4. RivalIQ
Knowing what your competitors are up to is crucial for every marketer. What are they posting? What does their audience like best and what are their followers talking about? How is your audience growing compared to other accounts in your niche? What kind of content are your competitors posting?
Rival IQ was designed for complete competitive analysis, and it’s an absolute must-have for every social media marketer. It allows you to compare your business with your competitors. It also allows you to see the size of their networks, their posting frequency, and their total number of shares, retweets, likes and comments. This data can help you balance your social media channels and win a larger audience.
How cool is that? What’s more, RivalIQ sends you notifications of breakout posts that receive more engagement than your competitors’ posts, bringing useful information right to your mailbox! I absolutely love it.
Tools that Help You Boost Your Twitter Presence
5. Just Unfollow
Just Unfollow is a great free tool to manage your Twitter and Instagram followers, add users and search for users you might want to follow. And then follow your competitor’s followers.
My tip: Follow influencers in your niche and or your competitors (you have a daily limit of 100). Some will follow you back; some won’t. After a while, go back and locate the accounts of users that you are following but that isn’t following you back and perform regular clean-ups. It’s better to engage and build a community around your brand with people that you are connected with.
6. Twitonomy
This is an awesome tool, yet fairly simple. It’s best for a complete profile analysis — general statistics: audience, number of tweets, and engagement. You can also check which lists you are in (or any other profile you are searching for). It also allows you to know who your most influential followers are and who retweet you the most. You can also dig much deeper with paid access.
The most interesting aspect is that you can analyze any Twitter account you wish, allowing you to obtain detailed visual data on tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, and hashtags, and export them into Excel or PDF format in one click.
7. Topsy
Topsy is handy when it comes to quick profile or keyword analysis. You can find key speakers and search by time, place, and language. You can also set alerts and analyze your competitors. It’s easy and extremely helpful.
8. RiteTag
RiteTag is the tool for hashtag analysis and is fully compatible with Hootsuite and SproutSocial. Using the right hashtags help you reach the right audience and increase the total reach of your tweets.
Once you type in a hashtag, it turns gray, blue, green or red. Grey indicates that the hashtag is not so popular; blue means “good to go;” green stands for “excellent” and red warns you that the hashtag is overused and that your tweet is likely to disappear among all the other tweets with the same hashtag.
RiteTag has recently rolled out hashtag analysis for Google+. I recommend that you try the tool there as well. I would love to hear your feedback.
9. Bio is changed
A very simple, yet effective tool that sends you notifications about any changes in the biography of any profile. This may seem unnecessary at first, but what if someone tweets you, “Awesome new profile pic! Love it!” after you’ve just changed your profile picture? Your followers would love it too. The ability to do this makes Bio is Changed a great tool for keeping in touch with your audience when they least expect it.
10. ClickToTweet
This small web app could significantly increase your conversion rates. It provides the unique opportunity to convert any quotation from your blog to a re-tweetable phrase that can be submitted to Twitter with one click. This means a higher rate of engagement and a higher rate of conversions. It’s free, so go ahead and can try it right now.
11. TweetBinder
TweetBinder is indispensable for Twitter chats and offline events that use a Twitter hashtag. It provides full hashtag analysis, helping you keep in touch with your audience.
This tool provides analysis of two thousand tweets over a period of seven days and allows you to see your possible reach (the number of times someone might have seen your hashtag). You can also check the number of followers per contributor, an the average number of followers for someone contributing in the hashtag.
Tools To Improve Your Facebook Marketing
12. LikeAlyzer
It’s a simple tool for your Facebook page with further recommendations. It’s great for competition analysis, and it’s one of the best free tools around.
LikeAlyzer not only audits your Facebook page, it also provides recommendations for improving your social media activity and engagement. This is what you get: total score at the system, page Information, general performance, post statistics and profile comparison.
13. Quintly
This tool helps you track and analyze Google+, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles and provides an opportunity to benchmark these pages. It is useful for all brands, media groups and agencies that want to consolidate and improve their reporting on social media.
Benchmarks allow you to compare your performance with your main competitors, and customizable dashboards are handy for monitoring key metrics. Quintly reports are automatic and can be sent to people within your organization.
14. Heyo
Heyo is a powerful tool for effective campaigns and contests across social media. It has a wide range of ready-made templates, an easy interface that enables you to create your own designs and looks great on mobile devices.
Creating amazing contests will grow your fan base, generate leads and improve engagement, which can drastically increase your sales.
15. Mention
Tired of monitoring your mentions manually? Mention scans the web to find out if anyone talks about you or your business, or is sharing your content. Just click on the link and say, thank you!
It has a nice interface, which makes it easy to use and exciting to explore. Plus, you can arrange mention alerts on a daily basis, and it works with Twitter’s and Facebook’s blogs and forums.
16. Conversation Score
With Conversation Score you can discover key influencers on Facebook. It works very similarly to Likealyzer, but don’t expect improvement in recommendations. You would get the whole information for any Facebook page: influence, engagement and total performance. It requires no Facebook authorization and is absolutely free.
Tools for Creating Awesome Visual Content
17. Canva.com
Canva.com is one of the most beloved tools for creating covers and images for your blog or social networks. It’s free and has tons of templates. It doesn’t require installation and support logging in from Facebook.
A piece of advice: you can use free vector graphics from Pixabay.com and upload them to Canva.
18. Adobe Color CC
The power of this tool is in its simplicity. Shoot an object with your iOS camera and you can receive its color pattern. All patterns are easily integrated into Photoshop as well as InDesign and Mobile Adobe apps.
(Bonus) Tool for Headline Ideas
No doubt, content is king in this era. But you can’t have content without a strong headline. Portent’s Content Idea Generator offers thousands of funny and creative headlines. You can test your own by this tool and find more creative ideas.
Don’t See Your Favorites?
Here’s a list of social media tools I’ve used before. Use them wisely and the heights of social media can soon be conquered.
Is your favorite tool on the list, or did I leave it off? Let me know in the comment section!
