It’s no surprise that social media has become an essential digital marketing tool because of its uncanny ability to drive strong engagement among a variety of audiences. Today, almost 3.2 billion users are active on social media, which means these platforms are experiencing a huge amount of activity.
Every passing minute, users share around 2,460,000 Facebook posts, publish 277,000 tweets, and upload 216,000 photos on Instagram. And this offers an undeniable opportunity for brands and marketers.
The key to successfully managing various social media channels, whether you cater to a large following or not, is by choosing the right tools and automation systems to make marketing efforts more efficient. An effective toolset will help you find inspiration for shareable content, schedule your posts, measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, and much more!
So, if you’re ready to step up your marketing game, here are several social media tools to help you manage your accounts and optimize your engagement efforts.
1. Buffer
Buffer is a browser-based tool that helps you manage your social media content through post automation. It allows you to create, schedule for later, or publish posts immediately on a wide range of social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.
Its queue section helps you decide on the best time to publish your post, preferably the time when your target market is most active. Buffer also provides analytical reports on the performance of your social media efforts. Use these reports to gain insights about which strategies to scale, and which ones to drop.
Not only can buffer be installed on mobile devices and Chrome browsers, you can easily integrate it with other third-party tools like Zapier, IFTTT, and Feedly.
2. Planoly
If you’re in the retail industry, having an appealing Instagram feed plays a significant role in your brand’s reach, exposure, and trust. That’s where Planoly comes in. Use this social media tool to help you achieve those #feedgoals for your business!
Planoly lets you draft your designs until you’re ready to publish them. It gives you an overview of how your Instagram feed and your stories will look with the content you made. The overview also lets you see if you’ve chosen the right color palette and provided catchy copy to increase your feed’s aesthetics and relevance.
Its calendar system can help you schedule posts for the week, month, or year, giving you plenty of time to decide what content best suits your brand.
You can also check out the app’s analytics page to track the performance and reach of your posts. Planoly can help you uncover trending topics, measure follower growth, and track overall performance. Keep in mind that social media posts take about 24 to 48 hours to generate traffic, so don’t expect immediate results.
3. Mention
Mention is a brand monitoring app that performs social listening, which is the process of sending users alerts whenever their keyword or brand is mentioned online. You can use social listening to track your social media channels in a single place, find influencers to endorse your brand, turn a brand crisis into an effective PR strategy, and create a stronger online branding campaign.
Aside from that, the app allows you to monitor social engagement in your brand’s industry for effective competitive analysis insights. With this, you can accurately track your competitors’ social engagement, customer sentiment, active influencers, and overall social media strategies.
4. Adobe Spark Post
Adobe Spark Post is a cross-platform app that allows you to edit images and animated videos from your smartphone and other devices in just minutes. Its easy-to-use features make it one of the most popular social tools among those without graphic design backgrounds.
What makes it different from all other photo and video editing apps is its broad set of typography fonts, tons of fantastic stock photos, and professional themes to choose from.
No need to worry if you forget your phone or tablet at home. Adobe Spark Post automatically syncs your photos to your other devices so you can continue working on your designs wherever you are.
5. Sprout Social
This social media marketing tool provides easy navigation and multi-level access that allows you to delegate tasks to your employees and map out your social calendar. It can help you create a well-coordinated schedule for your business and establish a consistent relationship with your target audience, other brands, and well-known influencers.
Because Sprout Social lets you delegate tasks to your team, you can get a more comprehensive view of scheduled messages and drafted posts, giving you time to make any changes to the existing content.
Your team can use Sprout Social’s analytics suite to access content performance stats, cross-network insights, and competitive benchmarking to track the performance of your social media channels. Additionally, you can easily track referral traffic, lead conversions and marketing campaigns from your social media channels using Google analytics, UTM, and custom URL tracking.
6. Sprinklr
Claiming to be the ultimate cloud software every entrepreneur needs to boost their business, Sprinklr lets your entire team have real-time access to your website and other accounts, making content planning easier and client management more efficient.
It also serves as a place for brands to list down content plans, publish posts, and create analytical reports for their social media channels on a single platform.
Sprinklr helps increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns based on first-party data. It also automatically improves segments and polishes campaigns through centralized audience data and analytics reports.
Using this cloud software, you’ll get to collaborate with an active community of partner agencies to come up with innovative new tactics and improve your campaigns. Conclusion
With such a large number of people actively using different social media channels, it’s no wonder why businesses are now taking social media marketing more seriously. As tight as the competition is in your industry, choosing the right tools can help you improve your social media management game.
To optimize your social media content and maximize engagement rates, you can check out our article and learn more about how psychology can help improve your social media engagement.
