Are you running a business and want to level up your social media presence? Do you want to increase your brand awareness with high conversion rates?
If your answer to all these questions is yes, then you are at the right place.
In the current digital age, social media is rapidly becoming one of the most crucial aspects of digital marketing. As of 2021, there are around 3.78 billion social media users worldwide and the number is going to continue to grow.
With some of the best social media management tools, you can reach your target audience quickly and cost-effectively. Additionally, it will also help you build trust, brand authority, and authenticity.
In this read, we will discuss the 7 best social media marketing tools as your marketing weapon.
Let's dig in.
Read also: 7 Best Social Media Management Tools of 2021
What is Social Media Marketing Tool?
Social media marketing tools help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms (currently trending) like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
For instance, if a business is concerned about what people are saying about its brand image, it can use social media tools to monitor social media conversations. There are specific tools for each type of task like advertising, analytics, engagement, etc.
Functions of Social Media Marketing Tools
When marketing social media tools were first used, they started with publishing. Businesses started sharing their content on social media to attract people and increase traffic and consequently sales.
However, gradually, social media tools started being used in multiple ways. Some major functions social media tools for marketing can perform are:
Social media engagement tools allow you to improve your brand’s visibility. They also allow you to streamline your social media management process through a variety of features like unifying messages from all networks, showing the history of users, notifying when a profile is tagged, etc.
Any business's most important goal is to create brand awareness and gain recognition. With correct publishing tools, you can publish relevant content online and generate conversation around your brand.
Listening to what consumers are saying about your brand can help you modify your engagement strategy. There are various spaces on social media platforms where people voice their opinions, for example, Twitter’s “What’s Happening” section.
With the right listening tools, you can identify the main points and cater to your customers in tandem with their needs.
Reporting and Analytics Tools
If your data is not accurate, your strategy will also never be accurate. With the right reporting and analytics tools, you can track the performance of all your social networks, gather relevant data, along much more.
Why is Social Media Marketing Tools Good for Your Business?
Statistics reveal that around 90% of consumers visit the brand’s website or app when they come across it on social media. This proves that social media marketing is good for your business. Some of its major advantages are:
- Creating brand awareness
- Driving traffic to your website
- Generating leads
- Building brand trust and loyalty
- Improve search engine rankings
- Enhance customer satisfaction
- Gain marketplace insights
7 Best Social Media Marketing Tools
Now that you have a basic understanding of what social media marketing tools are, let’s take a look at the top 7 in the game!
Trusted by over 30,000 world-class brands, Sprout Social allows its customers to embrace social media as an essential part of their overall business strategies. Designed keeping the whole business in mind, Sprout Social strives to decrease time spent doing manual tasks. It helps and allocates more time to reach out to audiences through relevant content and personalized experiences.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Monitor and engage | Smart Inbox – use a unified inbox to monitor messages for all social media platforms | All plans |
Conversation history – view complete conversation history of social media users and customers s | All plans |
Message tagging – keep your unified inbox organized by creating and applying custom tags | Professional and advanced |
Plan and publish | Unified content calendar – manage posts across all social platforms via one collaborative calendar | All plans |
Sprout queue – make a queue system for automated scheduling and posting | All plans |
Bulk scheduling – create and plan up to 350 messages at once | Professional and advanced |
Report and analyze | Group, Profile, and Post-Level reporting – report across all social media platforms simultaneously | All plans |
Google analytics report – integrate your social media account with google analytics and understand how to drive traffic to your site | All plans |
Instagram competitor report – benchmark your Instagram growth against other competitive brands | Professional and advanced |
Listen and inform | Query builder – build queries to track search results | Available as add-ons |
Listener dashboards – facilitate real-time and ongoing social listening by analyzing specific topics and trends | Available as add-ons |
Share and amplify | Amplification – gain exposure to new audiences by connecting your brand with social media accounts of your employees | Available as add-ons |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/month |
Standard | $89 |
Professional | $149 |
Advanced | $249 |
Buffer provides some of the finest social media tools in marketing to drive meaningful engagement and results. With Buffer, businesses can manage multiple social media platforms simultaneously and efficiently.
Additionally, Buffer continues to periodically introduce new features for its customers like suggested media, direct scheduling, and much more. It also allows you to work flexibly on the go through its Android and iOS mobile apps.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Publishing | Direct scheduling – plan and schedule your posts directly to Instagram | Free |
Reminders – plan a post and set a reminder for posting | Free |
Shop grid – use Instagram bio to drive traffic and sales | Free |
Analytics | Boosted post insights – compare paid vs organic results of boosted posts | Free |
Audience demographics – check whether you are reaching the right audience | Free |
White-label reports – add your logo, title, and description to each report | Essential |
Engagement | Prioritize important conversations – know immediately if a post questions, negative response, positive comments, etc. | Free |
Simple dashboard – view all unanswered comments in one simple dashboard which can be added to your desktop | Free |
Apps, Extensions and Extras | Canva – create and import images directly from Canva | Free |
Zapier – push content from more than 400 apps to buffer automatically |
WordPress – publish posts directly from WordPress blog |
Microsoft – streamline regular tasks with Microsoft power automate |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/month/channel |
Free | $0 |
Essential | $5 |
Hootsuite is an amazingly useful application and provides some of the best social media tools for marketing. It enables users to view and manage multiple social media platforms together. With its excellent social media listening tools, you can connect with your customer base instantly and cater to their needs appropriately.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Publish | Schedule posts – schedule your content in advance across all social platforms | All plans |
Seamless collaboration – get insights and edits from team members before drafts go live | All plans |
Monitor | Assign posts and comments – for better monitoring assign posts and comments to team members | Team, business, and enterprise |
Team performance report – monitor the performance of your team members and employees through monthly reports | Enterprise |
Advertise | Multi-channel analytics – see a complete picture of your performance across all social media platforms | All plans |
Deeper organic engagement – let the audience know your brand at every stage of their customer journey | All plans |
Hootsuite social advertising – analyze performance and engagement metrics for individual ads and campaigns | Enterprise |
Support | Get 24/7 priority support | Business and enterprise |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/ month |
Professional | $49 (10 social accounts) |
Team | $129 (20 social accounts) |
Business | $739 (35 social accounts) |
Enterprise | Contact for pricing (50+ social accounts) |
Agorapulse provides some of the best social media tools to easily manage your social media platforms for social media marketing. Some of the top features of Agorapulse are a unified social inbox, insightful analytics report, intuitive publishing, and much more. It is available at affordable prices and comes with the added benefit of availing of a free demo and trial.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Social listening | Boolean operators – listen and focus on what is important and drill down on specifics | All plans |
Label important content – organize content by labeling what is important and on priority | All plans |
Insightful analytics | Measure teams’ performance – easily monitor the response time of each time member to ensure customer satisfaction | Enterprise |
Power reports – create custom reports based on metrics and data range of your choosing across all social media platforms | Premium and enterprise |
Intuitive publishing | Easy communication and collaboration – share notes and comments with your team members in real-time | All plans |
Big picture content overview – share a big picture content overview by accepting, rejecting, or giving feedback on individual posts | All plans |
Rescheduling – maximize content potential by rescheduling content more than twice | Premium and enterprise |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/ month |
Pro | $79 (10 social profiles) |
Premium | $159 (20 social profiles) |
Enterprise | Contact for pricing (40+ social profiles) |
Sendible is one of the best social media management platforms which will benefit your business majorly. It will allow you to bring all your social media networks to a centralized hub that is easy to navigate and manage. With its top features and easy user interface, you and your team members will save a lot of valuable time.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Publishing | Schedule posts – save time by scheduling posts in advance | All plans |
Scheduling with queues – schedule with queues to make promoting easy and consistent | All plans |
RSS feeds – seamlessly share quality content with RSS feeds | Scale and Expansion |
Collaboration | Limit access – you can limit access to certain users with customer hierarchies and permissions | Expansion |
Approve posts before scheduling – create user workflows for clients and team members to approve content before publishing | All plans |
Mobile | One app – manage all your social streams through one mobile app | All plans |
Respond from anywhere – respond to message from anywhere and anytime and enable message notifications | All plans |
Analytics | Email reports – keep your clients in the loop by sending them regular automated reports daily, weekly, or monthly | Expansion
|
Google analytics – get deeper insights by integrating Sendible with google analytics | Expansion |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/ month |
Creator | $29 (6 social profiles) |
Traction | $89 (24 social profiles) |
Scale | $199 (49 social profiles) |
Expansion | $399 (105 social profiles) |
Founded by Thibaud Clement and Noemie Clement, Loomly is a leading social media management platform used for social media marketing. Through its innovative and intuitive features, you can reach your social media customer base promptly and competently.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Dashboard | One platform – manage all your social media accounts through one platform | All plans |
Calendar view – enable calendar view for viewing schedule posts and other tasks across all platforms | All plans |
Publishing | Post ideas – get ideas based on trending topics through RSS feeds and Twitter trends | All plans |
Unsplash and Giphy integration – make your posts more interactive and fun with integrations | Advanced, premium, and enterprise |
Analytics | Analytics for all posts – access analytic reports for all posts, even for those not published via loomly | Enterprise |
Account, post, and URL metrics – identify immediately which content audience is most interested in | All plans |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/ month |
Base | $26 (10 social accounts) |
Standard | $59 (20 social accounts) |
Advanced | $129 (35 social accounts) |
Premium | $269 (50 social accounts) |
Enterprise | Quote on request (51+ social accounts) |
Falcon.io is a reliable SaaS platform for social media marketing and monitoring. All its social media tools are extremely beneficial and intuitive. This platform will allow you to deliver a more personalized experience to your customers and clients.
Features
Function | Feature | Plan |
Publish | Share and reshare – save time and energy by keeping a shared content library | All plans |
Content pool – store content for repurposing and editing | Full suite |
URL shortener – build custom links | All plans |
Advertise | Smart labels – with smart labels and other automated features boost your posts organically with a few clicks | All plans |
Cross channel advertising – schedule advertising posts for all networks | All plans |
Benchmark | Identify brands strengths and weaknesses with benchmark features | All plans |
Measure | Real-time metrics – track and access metrics of all platforms through a single customizable dashboard | All plans |
Custom reports – schedule automated reports to be sent via emails | All plans |
Pricing
Plan | Pricing/ month |
Essentials | $108 (5 social media channels) |
Full Suite | Request for quote (unlimited channels) |
Things to Keep in Mind
It is very important to keep in mind that there cannot be one best social media management tool. You must decide to keep in mind the needs of your business. It is advisable to check out multiple social media management platforms, avail the benefit of a free demo and trial period, and then make an informed decision.
Some things you should keep in mind are:
- Is the price affordable for you?
- Is the platform offering a free demo or trial period?
- Is the platform offering the integrations you require necessarily?
- Is the customer support team quick and efficient?
Conclusion
Each social media management platform offers basic features. All these include the likes of publishing tools, listening tools, reporting and analytics, advertising tools, monitoring tools, and engagement tools.
It is important to understand each of these tools in depth before deciding your pick. Research carefully and patiently to identify the best social media management tools and invest accordingly.
We wish you good luck in finding a platform best suited for you. Don't forget to share your opinion in the comment section below.
