Best Tools For Social Media Marketing

Shivam Singh- Marketing on social media can sound very complicated, but there are a lot of social media marketing tools that can make our lives much easier and help us be more productive.

A lot of small businesses fail at social media marketing for a number of reasons:

• Lack of time and consistency
• No budget
• Lack of engagement
• Weak content
• ZERO HELP

I emphasized zero help because it is the most relevant reason why social media for small businesses fails.

Most business owners don’t know what to do with their social media marketing and they end up hurting their online presence.

Inexpensive social media marketing tools are available online and a lot of them are either free or offer a free trial to get started. Let me show you some of these helpful tools now…

All-In-One Social Media Management Tools

Buffer is at the top of my list because its usefulness is just unbelievable. We use it a lot in our own social media marketing tasks. Some of the features are:

• Fast and Easy Content Scheduling
• Multiple Social Media Accounts Management
• Instagram Integration
• Content Inbox Ready for Sharing
• Useful Analytics Feature for all Social Media Activity

Pricing: They have a free plan and the next plan up is $10 a month. Their business plans start at $99 a month, but most small businesses will be fine with their free or $10 a month plan.

Hootsuite is a great tool for all your social media management needs.

1. For scheduling:
2. - Upload and schedule hundreds of messages at once.
   - See your social content schedule at a glance using the content calendar.
   - Manage scheduled content on the go via Hootsuite mobile app.
   - Schedule posts as you surf the web using the Hootlet extension.
3. For content curation:
   - Create search streams by hashtag, location, or keyword to find and share relevant content.
   - Organize all your content via the content library.
   - Grab and share content from the cloud content.
4. For analytics:
   - Analyze trends and growth with its no-setup required analytics feature
   - Use Hootsuite reporting templates to learn more about your followers.
   - Export reports for ROI analysis.
5. For monitoring:
   - Use monitoring filters for social listening. Find and filter conversations by keyword, hashtag, and location — in multiple languages.
   - Respond to comments quickly as a team.
6. For team management and account security:
   - Your accounts are safe by managing access without sharing passwords.
   - Set custom permission levels to avoid errors and rogue posts.
   - Get immediate security alerts if there’s suspicious activity.

Pricing: (All plans come with a 30-day trial)

Single User — $19 a month which includes 10 social profiles and unlimited scheduling.

Team of 3 — $99 a month which includes 20 social profiles and unlimited scheduling.

Team of 5 — $499 a month 50 social profiles and unlimited scheduling.

Basic Features:

1. Base Features include tweet scheduling, keywords tracking, save and reuse drafts, URL shortening, view @mentions & retweets, DM inbox purge, Twitter Tweets purge, safe Twitter access, and connect up to five Twitter accounts for free.
2. Follow-back features to build quality list on Twitter
3. Facebook features include unlimited Facebook accounts, schedule status updates, schedule page wall updates, schedule group updates, schedule photo uploads, and safe Facebook connect access.
4. Pinterest features include unlimited Pinterest boards, schedule photo uploads for Pins, and safe Pinterest account access.
5. LinkedIn features include unlimited LinkedIn accounts, schedule shares, and safe LinkedIn access.
6. Plurk features include unlimited Plurk accounts, schedule updates, secure Plurk access.
7. Create automated social updates from RSS feed entries.
8. Submit social updates via email.
9. Schedule & publish blog posts and pages.
10. Private tweet interests channels.
11. Manage Many Accounts with TweetCOCKPIT

Pricing:

Sign Up for Free to get Basic Features.

Twitter Unlimited is $6.97 paid every 2 weeks
Professional $17.97 paid every 2 weeks

Oktopost is a platform for B2B or Business-to-Business marketing. This social media marketing tool is perfect for both small businesses and large enterprises.

Key Features:
Social Publishing — social campaign management, editorial calendar, automation, content queues and the Oktopost social publishing app.

Social Analytics — acquisition & lead attribution, social engagement, audience analytics, content analytic, and data portability.

Content Curation — content discovery and custom RSS feeds

Social Listening & Engagement — streams, engagement, and social customer care.

Social Advocacy — social amplification, employee thought leadership, advocacy leaderboard, and closed-loop reporting

Social Management — team collaboration and roles & permissions.

Click HERE to request a Demo

Agora Pulse is another all-in-one tool for social media for small businesses that caters to all of your management needs at an affordable price.

Special Features:

1. Clean up your social media messages by putting all of them in one inbox aka “Inbox Zero”.
2. The Response Time dashboard lets you analyze how fast or slow you handle customer concerns.
3. Take advantage of unlimited report generation.
4. Facebook Competitors report lets you benchmark with competitors.
5. Use the built-in CRM to analyze your audience according to specifications.

Pricing: (All packages come with a 15-day free trial)

Regular monthly rates range from $49 to $299 but you can get a whopping 35% off if you sign up for their annual billing instead of monthly.

Content Scheduling Tools

The best word to describe MeetEdgar is “Library”. Just like a real physical library, MeetEdgar has a huge collection of content available at your disposal.

Features:

• An unlimited content library that you can shuffle and pause anytime.
• Color-coded categories to keep your content library organized.
• Upload and edit in bulk.
• Pull content from relevant sites with RSS Feeds.
• It supports Native video instead of video links from other sites.
• Shorten links and track clicks using Bitly, Rebrandly, or Edgar’s very own Meet Edgar | The Social Media Scheduling Tool That Manages Itself.
• Edgar browser extension is available to quickly save content from the web and schedule future posts in a few clicks.

Pricing: $49 a month that includes…

• 25 social media accounts
• Facebook (pages, profiles & groups), Twitter, LinkedIn (profiles & company pages)
• Account setup assistance plus social media strategy call

Everypost is a social media post scheduling tool that pulls and shares Visual Content from YouTube, Instagram, Flickr and RSS feeds. The company believes that visual content is essential to a strong and effective social media strategy.

Other Key Features:

• Post customization of images and videos for maximized reach on all social media platforms.
• Collaboration with roles and permission levels management.
• Convenient post scheduling.

Pricing:
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Monthly ranges from $10–100 a month. Yearly ranges from $100–1000 a year.

Tailwind supports post scheduling for Instagram and Pinterest. There’s not a lot of online tools that support these two platforms which makes Tailwind pretty unique at this point.

Tailwind promises to:

• Save Time by bulk image upload, drag-and-drop calendar, multi-board pinning, and hashtag lists built with a busy schedule.
• Maximize Reach by automatically optimizing Pinterest and Instagram schedules based on when your audience is most engaged.
• Measure Success by deep analytics and insights to see what’s working and what’s not.
• Professional and Quick Scheduling with Tailwind browser extension to easily create multiple posts from any site with one click. It even includes repins on Pinterest and regrams on Instagram.
• Reach the Right People with auto Instagram hashtags suggestions by Hashtag Finder.
• Be More Efficient by posting visual marketing content to Instagram and Pinterest from one tool with a single workflow.

Pricing:

Plus Account is $9.99 per month
(Available only for Small Businesses with < 100 employees)

Social Pilot features content and post scheduling on 9 social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, VK, and Xing.

It also offers:

• Analytics
• Calendar
• Bulk Scheduling
• Custom Facebook Branding
• Team and Client Management
• Content Curation and RSS Feeds
• Browser Extension

Pricing:
Plans start from $10 to $100 monthly and $100 to $1000 yearly.

Friends+Me’s tagline is “Sharing is caring” which makes it a great tool for scheduling posts on Google+, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Additional features include:

1. Link Shortening
2. Bulk Scheduling
3. Browser Extension
4. Mobile App
5. Desktop App
6. Zapier
7. Support

Pricing:
Friends+Me offers a FREE account with unlimited basic features. Paid plans start from $9 to $259 monthly. The prices are discounted if paid annually.

Social Media Marketing Analytics & Reporting Tools

Raven generates automated social media marketing reports for Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

Take advantage of the following:

• Create custom social reports using Report Builder
• Raven’s Reporting Engine enables marketers to download reports on mobile devices.
• Get direct and real-time stats from your social media accounts.
• Automate social media reports according to your schedule.

Pricing:
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Ranges from $109 to $479 a month and $1188 to $4788 a year.

Social Clout helps you analyze return on investment (ROI) by:

1. Comprehensive Database of Social Conversations
2. Keyword Search Analysis
3. Insightful Reporting
4. Engagement Workflow Analysis
5. Geography and Demographics Analysis
6. Automated Sentiment Analysis
7. Campaign Management and Social Lead Generation
8. Comprehensive Help, Support, and Documentation

Pricing:
​
Ranges from $49 to $99 a month.

​​​​Content Creation and Curation Tools for Social Media Marketing

BuzzSumo is your one-stop shop for all your social media content needs. It helps marketers find the best online content to drive better traffic. It also has a powerful content reporting tool that tells you what posts worked and what didn’t.

Features include:

• Content Discovery
• Brand Monitoring
• Influencer Marketing
• Content Curation, Insights, and Research and Planning
• Competitor Research
• Question Analyzer

Pricing: (All Plans Include a Free 14‑Day Trial)

Plans start from $99 to $499 monthly or get a 20% discount on yearly subscriptions.

Feedly stores all your favorite online content sources in one place. Whether it’s blogs, news sites, YouTube shows, podcasts, Tumblr blogs, or magazines — Feedly follows them all.

Features:

• Combine content into collections.
• Distraction-free mode lets you read content with zero distraction.
• Tag content as read-it-later for future consumption.
• Share stories on social media with no hassle.
• Discover fresh and trending content based on your interests.
• Team version lets you collaborate with your team.

Pricing:
Free plan for unlimited feeds, ability to organize feeds into collections, and Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook integration.

$65 a year Pro plan for faster sync, power search, third-party integrations, Dropbox backup, and premium support.

$145 a year per user Team plan for additional third-party integrations, enterprise logins for your team, and curation tools.

Visage is a visual content tool that lets you create effective graphics to engage audiences.

Features:

• Use Style Guide on your design to promote brand consistency.
• Resize multiple objects at once.
• Object pane lets you drag and drop to reorder layers visually.
• Set clickable links on any object including text.
• Google sheets integration so you can directly connect the data in your graphic to a spreadsheet.
• Integration with other 3rd party apps via Zapier to share content to WordPress, Hubspot, and Buffer.
• Resize graphics automatically.
• Consolidated Templates and Saved Graphics pages into a single screen.

Pricing:
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Plans range from $50 all the way up to $1500 per month depending on how many images you need to create a month.

Canva is a great social media marketing tool that lets you create and optimize graphics easily, even if you aren’t technically inclined. ​

Tools:

• Photo Editor
• Color Palette
• Font Combinations

Pricing:

• Basic Canva is FREE
• Canva for Work is $12.95 per user a month.

By the way, if you need a resource for getting images here are the best free stock photo sites.

Other Helpful Social Media Tools

Followerwonk is an analytics tool specifically for Twitter that lets you analyze your followers and connect with influencers.

Bitly is a URL shortener tool. It also has a URL customization and a tracking tool to make your tasks easier.

Tweepi is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered Twitter tool that helps you grow your Twitter audience.

Socedo automates B2B social media growth using artificial intelligence.

Brand24 is a great social media marketing tool for social listening.

CoSchedule is an online planner that helps you plan your marketing strategy.

With all the social media marketing tools out there, it’s easy to forget that social media is really about connecting with people. Without the ability to connect with people, these online tools are useless. They need us in order to function well by adding that human touch.

That wraps up our list of the best social media marketing tools that can make your life a lot easier. Social media for small businesses can be as easy as learning the alphabet with the right tools and strategies.

If you don’t have the time or skills to manage your social media marketing, hire a social media expert or an agency to do it for you. There’s nothing wrong with leveraging your time.