Top Social Media Tools To Score Over Your Competitors
In this article, we will be exploring some of the top Social Media Tools that are available in the market today and how you can efficiently use them to the advantage of your business.
The immense popularity of Social Media sites has changed their status from mere communication platforms to business enabling platforms. Marketing today is focused majorly on digital platforms. The majority of the content created is available online. But with all the advancement of technologies, marketers are experiencing hardship in managing everything. From setting up social media accounts to using them to their advantage and taking care of customer needs, they seriously need help in orchestrating their strategies online. This is where Social Media Management Tools come into play. These tools help marketers set up an effective social media campaign and implement their strategies without much hassle.
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What Social Media Tools Do
Before we deep dive into the tools, let us examine some of the reasons why social media management requires the help of tools. To understand this, we have to know the workflow of social media content.
Content creation is the first step in social media marketing. The content has to be created according to the product and the industry, as well as taking into account the demographics and interests of the customers. You also have to consider the platform for which it is created. For example, YouTube and Twitter content varies drastically.
Once content is created the next step is publishing it to the respective site for which it is created. You have to determine the optimum time for publishing with regard to the engagement. After your content is published, you need to constantly monitor user engagement and provide timely responses to queries and feedback. And finally, you need to analyze the results and see what is going well and what could be better.
Social media management tools can be used at each of these steps. Some tools will help you in coming up with better-aligned content, automate publishing at the pre-set time, monitor user engagement and analyze the results and recommend corrective actions.
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Why Do We Need Tools to Manage Social Media?
Though we have seen what social media can do, you might still have doubts about why we need it. All the things that these tools can do, it can be done easily by people. But what makes these tools necessary for business growth?
Time-saving
The most important factor to consider when deciding whether to use tools is the time factor. As I said earlier, what these tools do can be done by us. But making use of tools can help save you time. What will take a person days to do can be done in a matter of minutes with some of these tools. Social media tools help in automating a lot of the process, which means that if you spend some time setting up the activity, you will have to spend minimal time repeating it. When it comes to productivity, this will help you a lot to get more things done in a short amount of time efficiently.
User Friendly
Let’s be real. Most of us are not that good when it comes to technical activities. Though most of the big businesses will have separate teams to take care of social media, the small business owners and freelancers out there still need help. Figuring out things on your own cannot be easy for everyone. Using these tools ensures that you understand what you are doing. Most of them have easy and user-friendly interfaces. All it would take is the click of a button to set things up for you. This would in turn help improve productivity as well as the outcome.
Human Errors are Avoided
Granted that people can do the job that these tools are doing. And some people do prefer human work instead of automating everything. But this has the additional risk of introducing human errors. These might be minute errors that would not be detected at the early stages and would be too late to correct. Automated tools help in avoiding these errors. Accuracy at each stage is guaranteed and mistakes, if any, will not be overlooked.
Affordable
Many of you might have a misconception that these social media tools are costly affairs. But that is not the case. A majority of these tools are affordable, and might even be cheaper than manual efforts. There are even free tools like TweetDeck, HootSuite, etc. If you are just starting in the social marketing scenario, you can make use of these free tools to get the hang of things. Once, you understand the workings of these tools and are comfortable financially using the paid ones, you can select from a wide array of excellent tools available in the market.
Increase Reach of Brand
Social media helps a lot in increasing the reach of your brand. This is not new information. Keeping that in mind, the tools you select should not only help do the same but also improve the reach significantly. As discussed, tools help save time and errors. They can also help in suggesting better content that is more aligned with your brand image. There are tools out there that can help create the perfect aesthetics for your social media presence. All these factors contribute to extending the reach of your brand.
Keeping it Organized
Another important reason why social media tools are a necessity is the fact that they help you stay organized. You can get overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes behind each post. Though you might not understand it before starting on the work yourself, creating and maintaining a successful online presence is not easy. It requires constant monitoring, modifications, and strategy change at each turn. You need to know how to get people’s attention and keep it on yourself. You need to plan out the content, the publishing schedule, the number of likes, comments, and so on. These tools can help you keep your sanity by keeping count of all these factors and more for you.
Types of Social Media Tools
The vast number of social media tools can primarily be divided into three types – listening, publishing, and competitive analysis tools. Each of these tools focuses on different aspects of social media. A combination of some of these tools can attend to all your social media needs.
Listening Tools
As the name suggests, this kind of tool listens to or monitors different social media platforms to get information about your brand. They will also give you details on the latest trends and news of your relevant industry. Listening-type tools also help you in creating relevant content; it shows you what your audience is looking for. This means that your content reaches the right kind of audience at right time.
Publishing Tools
Publishing Tools help you to publish your content to social media sites. They help orchestrate the entire process. Some tools provide options to share the same content across multiple platforms, and you can have it posted at the time you require by setting the posting schedule. These tools help in saving time and effort and also let you optimize your content.
Competitive Analysis Tools
These analysis tools help you to focus on your growth metrics. They help you to analyze the performance of your account, the reach of your content as well the performance of your competitors. You will get a strong sense of what is trending in your current industry niche and what cost of content would work for your target audience. You can draw inspiration from the trending content as well as explore potential untried niches to your advantage.
You might also be interested in the different Content Marketing Tools to help in your writing endeavors.
Top Social Media Tools in 2022
Here is the list of a few of the crowd’s favorite social media management tools that you can use in 2021. Like any such list, this is not final. Let us know in the comment section if you have been using any other tool that could help other social media users in their business.
BuzzSumo
This tool helps you find the current trending content and people. It will give you details on the type of content that would work best for the industry you want. Enter the relevant keyword. This helps you in the content creation stage. You are able to create better and relevant content that is bound to reach the audience faster, as they are already searching for it. It will show you the results of your content engagement, breaking it down by different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. This helps you not only understand your audience better and create content specific to their needs but also helps save the time you would require to monitor different platforms separately.
The pricing for these tools starts at around 80$ per month. Ahrefs, Meltwater, Mention, etc. are other tools similar to BuzzSumo providing the same functionalities.
Google Trends
Google Trend is a free product from Google that lets anyone research the trending topics in your industry. You can search for the most trending long tail and short tail keywords for your topic if you are a content creator. You can also get to know the latest news and trends in various industries across the world. You can also keep a tab on your niche by following the trend of certain keywords or news.
Though it is a free tool, Google Trends is a tremendously popular Google product among online marketers and content creators. Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, WordStream are other tools that provide similar features. You can choose from all these different tools based on your needs.
Buffer Publish
Buffer provides a brand-building tool suite rather than a single tool. It helps you in scheduling and posting your content, monitor and analyzing your engagement as well manage different social media accounts from a single place. Buffer Publish is a part of this toolset that allows you to schedule social media content. You can add the posts and contents to the Buffer queue and schedule the time at which you want them to be posted. This tool is available as a Chrome extension, in addition to the Android and iOS apps.
Buffer has free as well paid versions. The free version may not contain all the features that the paid one comes with. Choose wisely depending on your needs. Tools like Hootsuite, Falcon.io, Sprout Social, etc., can also be used instead of Buffer Publish to schedule and post your content.
Canva
Social media posts are not just about textual content. You have to add visual content as well to engage your audience. Canva is a fantastic tool that allows even amateurs to create professional images. You do not have to get expensive designers to design your logo, profile pictures, promotional posters, or other content. You will have access to ready-made templates that you can edit to your like, without doing much of the actual design work. You have a huge library of pictures, icons, templates, font styles, etc. that you can just drag and drop to create great social media graphics.
Canva is available as a free tool and also has a paid version for professionals that start at around $12.95 per month. If you are looking for similar tools for graphical purposes, you can check out Crello, Buffer Stories Creator, Bannersnack, etc.
Unsplash
Another tool in the graphic and design area, Unsplash provides free professional photographs for your digital use. If you are not someone who can design even the smallest of things, then this is for you. Unsplash will provide professional, polished images with numerous collections to explore. You can find relevant images that match the overall aesthetics and brand image of your social media presence.
This is a free tool that lets you access all this content for free. Similar tools like Pexels, Storyblocks, Videvo, etc. can also be used based on your needs.
Animoto
This is a tool that allows you to make stunning marketing videos. Animoto helps to turn your photos and video clips into video content in seconds. It is described as “fast and shockingly simple”. Videos are an extremely efficient form of content. Short videos with the right kind of content can push the reach and engagement of your social media accounts. But it is not easy to create such content without any expertise. That is where Animoto comes into the picture. It helps to bridge the gap by making it relatively simple and user-friendly to make videos.
Animoto is not a free tool. The paid version starts at $5 per month. But every penny is worth it. You can also use tools like PowToon, Adobe Spark, Crello, etc. to create marketing videos for social media.
Feedly
How many times have you felt like you are missing out on the best posts from the accounts you are following? You visit each page to make sure that you are all caught up. That is quite a strenuous task. Feedly comes to your rescue in such cases. It allows you to add all these RSS feeds to it and explore them from one place. It ensures that you are not distracted by unwanted content from the plethora of sponsored social media content that shows up in your various social media feeds. This helps to save your time as well as to ensure that you have everything in a single place to refer to when you need this content.
This will also help you when it comes to content creation. You can use your Feedly feed for ideation and come up with relevant industry topics and marketing strategies. You can even publish directly from Feedly to your various social media accounts via the Buffer Publish integration feature that it offers. How amazing is that?
While the tools do have a free version, we prefer the paid versions that comes with additional features. Paid plans start at around $5 a month. Flipboard, Quora and Pocket are some of the other tools that offer similar features.
Buffer Reply
This is yet another tool from the social media tool suite provided by Buffer. It makes engagement easier for teams involved in marketing and support. This tool is designed for people who need to respond to conversations on social platforms. What Buffer Reply does is gather all the conversations from different platforms and sites and provide them all in a single inbox.
Some of the conversations that will show up in Buffer Reply involve tweets that mention your handle, direct messages or keyword searches on Twitter, comments on posts, private messages, posts, etc. on Facebook, and the same for Instagram and so on. This makes it easier for the business teams to respond timely to the customers as well as ensures that the customers are always satisfied by the response they are getting. There is no better way to ensure customer engagement than by improving their customer experience.
Though the pricing starts at 50$ per month, the money is worth the service it offers. You can also make use of other tools like HootSuite, which is free, Mention, Sprout Social, etc. to get the same services.
Native Analytics
Most of the Social media platforms of today come with their own analytics now. The most important ones are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Facebook Analytics
Facebook analytics is available under the Insights tab on your Facebook page. It provides all the details that you want to know about your Facebook posts like the engagement, number of likes, number of followers, how your posts are doing, and how your posts are doing compared to the other pages as well. If you have a Facebook group, you can also get insights into your group. This way you can know which of your posts are doing well and which are not so that you can focus more on the type of content you want to publish.
Instagram Analytics
Similar to Facebook Analytics, Instagram Analytics shows your user engagement, how users are following your content, the number of likes and followers, how your posts are faring compared to the others, and so on. You can also get to know the demographics and usage patterns of your users as well.
Twitter Analytics
This is also similar to Facebook and Instagram. It will show you details on how well your users are engaging with the content, how each tweet is retweeted and liked, and how well your content is performing overall. You can learn more about your users and their interests.
You can also make use of Google Analytics or Buffer Analyze to follow the performance of your social media accounts. These tools, unlike the native analytics feature, helps to keep everything in one place.
Todoist
When it comes to Social Media, productivity is an important factor. With a huge number of detailed steps to undertake, it is difficult to track everything. All of us make to-do lists to keep track of our tasks. Todoist is a digital to-do list makes that offers a wide range of other features as well. For example, you can integrate with Buffer from Todoist to create Social media calendars that ensure that content is posted on time. If you have a team, or if you use multiple devices for managing your social media, Todoist makes it easier to come together or sync your list of tasks.
Todoist comes with a free version as well paid versions that start at $3 per month. There are other tools like Wunderlist, Trello, Any.do etc. some of which provide desktop applications as well for creating your to-do lists digitally.
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Final Thoughts
The digital world is a difficult place to navigate through. Any small help will greatly help you to master the ever-changing digital landscape. All the tools that we have discussed and provided for you to explore will help you with the same. But using the only tools and expecting huge changes immediately is the wrong move. You need to use combinations of tools based on your accounts to get the required result sometimes. Also, the financial aspects should be considered when choosing tools. Moreover, these social media tools can only help improve the quality that is already present in your content. Ultimately, the responsibility of creating quality content falls on you.
