Creating and publishing quality content, staying active and engaged, monitoring and tracking campaigns on social media takes a lot of time and energy.
The big brands often hire people to join their marketing team as social media managers solely dedicated to these tasks.
But for smaller businesses and startups that do not have the financial resources to hire staff, there are tools to help.
To succeed on social media as a small business owner, you will need the help of social media management tools.
In this article, we’ll show you the importance of social media management tools and highlight 13 tools you can use to manage your social media audience.
Yes, they are.
Social media marketing has become one of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies to reach the majority of online users, increase visibility and brand awareness.
This means many local businesses are also competing for the same audience you’re trying to target.
To scale your social media campaigns and gain a competitive edge, you’ll need to equip yourself with the best social media management tools.
Good social media tools can help you manage your time effectively, find more content to share, and schedule your posts to go live at the time your audience are most likely to engage with it.
Using the right tool allows you to measure your marketing campaign’s effectiveness and get better results from actionable insights you can draw from the analysis these tools will give you.
Below are 13 social media tools that will help you annihilate the competition on social media, grow and engage your followers, and manage your account more efficiently.
Ready to find out which tool is right for your social media marketing campaigns? Let’s dive in.
Are you running out of content ideas for your social media accounts and blog posts? BuzzSumo is one of the best tools for finding new and popular content on the web. It’s the perfect idea generator for your new blog posts and articles to share.
To get started with BuzzSumo, just type in a topic or selection of keywords, and you’ll see a breakdown of popular trending posts in the category you enter.
You can also use Buzzsumo to generate a list of influencers who share keyword-related content on social media. You can use this to research content ideas for your marketing campaign and also reach out to the top influencers in your industry.
Looking for one of the best social media management tools? Sprout Social has all the solutions you need. It helps you to manage and better control your marketing efforts. It has multi-level access, making it easy for social media managers to assign and coordinate tasks with team members. You can use your account on all of the social media networks.
Sprout Social is also equipped with full post scheduling capabilities, social listening, a detailed analytics dashboard that tracks engagement and interactions with the content you post on social media.
Buffer is one of the highly recognized but inexpensive social media scheduling tools in the industry. With Buffer, you can link all of your different social media accounts and schedule your post across the platforms ahead of time.
You can automate your posts as you like; you could set it to “every day” or “weekdays.”
You can also evaluate previous posts and identify which one is most effective.
Buffer comes with a browser extension that lets you buffer images, websites, or pages on the fly. It also offers analytics and allows you to track information on any of your posts – track comments and republish an old post that performed well.
Hootsuite is another simple but robust tool for anyone looking to promote their business on social media. Just like Buffer, you can use Hootsuite to schedule posts ahead of time on several different social platforms where you have an account. You can measure content engagement using the built-in analytics tool, which gives you an understanding of how your campaign performs.
Hootsuite is designed for all types of businesses. Although Hootsuite can be expensive compared to Buffer, there are relatively inexpensive paid options for small businesses.
Hootsuite has a free plan that allows you to manage up to 3 social media profiles.
The tool also makes it easy to integrate your account with Salesforce, Marketo, and SocialFlow.
Awario is a popular social media listening tool designed to fit all business levels from individuals up to enterprises and agencies level.
Awario covers all the major social media platforms, including blogs and news publishing websites, with all the essential features you’d find in a social listening tool.
Awario has some interesting features, which make it one of the go-to tools for individuals or companies looking to monitor performances on social media. It has:
The Leads feature helps you identify potential leads on social media, especially when asking for recommendations.
With Awario, you can track your competitors, and use sentiment analysis to look into their audiences to see those who are unhappy with them in some way, so you can pick up where the competition has left off.
Using the Leads tool is simple. All you need to do is set up a Project, add your brand name, product or service descriptions, and start monitoring.
Another social listening tool is Brandwatch. It offers:
With the billions of conversations happening online every day, Brand watch watches for your brand and product mentions.
It provides key consumer insights allowing you to create product innovation and stay ahead of the competition.
With Brandwatch’s audience analysis features, you can:
Brandwatch has a custom pricing plan, and you can book a meeting with the company on their website to negotiate a pricing plan for your subscription.
SocialFlow uses real-time data to help you engage with your audience. It allows you to schedule your posts based on when your audience are active and are most likely to engage with your content. It does this by using a data-driven approach to schedule your social media postings.
All you need to do is upload your content to the queue, and let SocialFlow use AI to determine when to publish them. It’s a great tool that takes all the guesswork out of social media marketing for you.
That way, as a business owner and social media manager, you can focus on content creation and strategy, leaving SocialFlow to do the posting optimization and other big data-driven decisions that’ll grow your social media profile.
You can request a demo to get a personalized pricing structure that will fit well for your business and still within budget.
Soci is another social media scheduling app with awesome features similar to that of post planner, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social, but they offer something a little bit different.
One of the unique features of SOCi is the Content Center; it uses its unique algorithm to score the Social Web and tell you what social content is engaging and which one is not. SOCi uses this algorithm to provide recommendations to you on what to post on your social media accounts.
Soci is another tool designed for all types of businesses and when you request a demo, the company will work with you to determine a pricing structure that works well within your marketing budget.
Post Planner is a social media content tool with a very simple interface. You can search by topics, keywords, and hashtags to see the type of content being shared around a specific person or subject.
When you search, the Post Planner lets you set recommendations based on your industry and interests, and uses the data to generate new content ideas.
There’s also a custom algorithm in Post Planner, which helps determine whether a post is worth sharing. It uses engagement scores to rank the content by collecting data from past reviews and predicting future engagement.
Socialbakers is an excellent tool every business owner should have in their arsenal.
SocialBakers is the right tool to log into daily to know everything about your social profiles when you want more out of social media beyond post scheduling.
This tool helps you to monitor your profiles on LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. You can track engagement, see social advertisement results, and share reports on a single platform.
Beyond analytics, you can track and compare the performance of up to 10 competitors’ social media profiles or industries at a time.
Bitly is a link shortener that takes lengthy URLs and shrinks them into much shorter ones.
It is an essential tool for content sharing on social media, especially on Twitter, where there is a limit on the number of characters you can use.
It reduces the length of the links and makes them easier to remember.
Apart from shortening the links, it helps you track your campaigns’ performance, such as traffic to the site, the number of leads captured, and conversion metrics.
Bitly tells you who clicked on what, when, and where. This means you can use the tool to track clicks, view site referrals, and even geographical locations with the most clicks.
Its powerful features are why Google has built it into their Campaign URL Builder to help users shorten links and track campaign performances.
So you are a one-person band responsible for evergreen content creation, tech support, and design – and you need a campaign manager. MeetEdgar is here to help!
MeetEdger is a social media management tool that keeps your social channels populated with posts, handles the resharing of your content, and optimizes your social traffic. If you want to automate content posting on social media networks, MeetEdgar can be your automated content manager.
With just a web plugin, you can manage your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter profiles. You can select and schedule content to be reshared, and monitor traffic while also optimizing engagement with your social profiles and your ROI.
By posting original and evergreen content regularly, you can boost your traffic and engagement.
With an automated content resharing tool like MeetEdger, you can never run out of regular posts.
You can always use the category-based scheduling tool to mix different content types, so your audience never gets bored with your posts.
Just like Bitly, MeetEdgar also has a URL shortener with in-app tracking, which you can use to track click data.
Creating rich and visual content is an essential part of improving online presence on social media. Visual content gets 3X more engagement on Twitter than ordinary text. Creating videos can be very expensive, but thanks to Biteable, creating videos becomes an easy, fun, and inexpensive thing to do.
Biteable makes it easy to create studio-quality videos without buying expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment. It comes with a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes.
With Biteable, you can engage and entertain your audience with informative, short videos you share on social media.
Biteable offers you endless possibilities of spicing up your social media profiles with content that attracts users the most. Short videos are super-shareable. They increase engagement.
The most important features on Biteable are all available in the free subscription plan, and you can always upgrade your account to get more features.
The Facebook IQ Audience Insights tool is what you need to understand your audience and community better, and to create targeted social media marketing campaigns.
If you use Pinterest a lot, we highly recommend Tailwind, it’s a tool for scheduling posts on Pinterest.
If you’re a heavy user of Twitter, consider using FollowerWonk. It gives you an in-depth look into your followers using analytics. FollowerWonk is part of the Moz toolkit, and if you want to know more about who your followers are, their locations, and the other influencers they follow on the platform, this tool is definitely worth having a look at.
With so many different social media management tools available, we’ve covered the Top 13 tools that we think will help you effectively manage your social presence online.
