Social media has become extremely competitive for businesses and marketers, so in order to keep growing, you need to leverage all the different opportunities you have and be more proactive with your strategy. Thankfully, there are a plethora of useful tools that you can use to not just save time but actually boost your results.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about the 5 types of social media tools that will help you become a better marketer.
What types of tools do you need?
The first tool you need is, of course, a social media management tool; a tool that allows you to fully manage your social media presence, respond to mentions and comments all from one place, monitor your brand and other keywords, and collaborate with others when managing your accounts.
Beyond social media management, there are a few other essential types of tools you need:
- Social listening tools: these tools help you understand your niche and audience better, discover new opportunities and potential leads, find out who the top social influencers in your niche are, and gain a better understanding of what content works best with your audience
- Content curation: by curating content you not only get to save some time creating new content yourself, but you’re also helping grow your profile by publishing interesting and quality content that your audience loves. It also helps you get more fans and followers and boost your engagement rates
- Content creation tools: text updates are alright, but it’s visuals that drive the best results so it helps to have an easy to use tool that allows you to create beautiful social media posts quickly and easily.
- Task management and team collaboration: if you work as part of a team, managing your social media can become quite confusing if you don’t have a good system in place. A good collaboration tool for teams allows you to assign tasks to the right parties, keep track of what your colleagues/employees are doing, and make sure your social media is in hand at any moment in time
Here are some of the best tools for each category:
For social media management: Social Report
Social Report is a full-suite social media management tool with a wide array of management features – everything you need to manage your social media account from analytics to scheduling.
Let’s start with the smart inbox; this is where you can see all of your social media mentions so you can save time responding to them. Plus, it also has team collaboration tools so you can share your workload with others.
To find other relevant mentions (of your brand, of different relevant hashtags or keywords, and so on) you also have access to social media monitoring tools.
What I’m really excited about though, are all the time-saving automation options that you can set up with Social Report; for example, you can automatfavoritevourite updates or flag them, you can like a mention or delete from your inbox, and you can even follow/unfollow users automatically and reply to their mentions.
And finally, I also want to mention the analytics; analytics are extremely important because they allow you to understand what works and what doesn’t and optimise your campaigns to improve your ROI.
For social listening: Brand24
Brand24 is a pro social listening tool that allows you to fully monitor social networks as well as other sources on the web, such as blogs, news sites, and forums.
You can set up searches for any keywords you want, choose locations and language, and track only the sources you want. Not only will you be able to see all of the mentions, but you’re also going to have access to detailed analytics to help you interpret all of these results.
There are a lot of ways that you can use it to your advantage; most notably, you can:
- Understand your audience better: find out where they are most active, what they’re talking about, what their needs and interests are, and what types of content they prefer based on their conversations and their shares – this then helps you build a better content strategy that yields better results
- Track your brand: not everyone is going to tag your brand they mention you, so this way you can stay on top of each and every mention of your business
- Find social influencers: find out who the most consistent influencers are in your niche and who gets the most engagement and shares. These are the ideal social influencers that you should work with
Basically, social listening is a way to learn more about your audience and niche and use that information to improve your marketing strategies.
For content curation: PostPlanner
PostPlanner is a content curation tool designed for social media; it’s one of the easiest ways to curate quality content consistently, while also personalizing your updates.
To start with, PostPlanner helps you find quality content; it’s all separated into categories (or you can use the search bar to look up keywords or certain social media users that you know have great content) and each piece of content is rated from 1 to 5 stars based on engagement levels, to help you understand its success.
You can also set up scheduling times so that when you find a post to schedule, it will be automatically added to your queue.
And when you share something, you have the option to customize it – not just the text update but you can also use the Canva integration to create a bespoke image for each of the posts you share.
For social media content creation: Canva
When it comes to creating images for social media, Canva is one of the best options; not only is it very quick to create something beautiful and compelling, but it’s also free to use and it has a plethora of templates that you can use as a starting point.
As you can see above, there are templates (all with the right sizes) for most any occasion: Facebook posts and apps, Instagram posts, infographics, Twitter images, and so on.
All you have to do is click on the one you want, use one of the multiple templates and customize it, or build your own image from scratch.
You also get access to a large library of free and paid stock images, as well as all kinds of design elements to help you create visuals that stand out. Plus, you can add your own logo and colours and add any text you want onto your images.
For task management and team collaboration: Slack
When it comes to task management/collaboration tools, Slack is a big favourite on the market. It’s very intuitive to use (which is so important which these types of tools) and you can use it not only to list tasks and assign them, but also to hold all conversations among your team and upload files.
This makes it so much easier for everyone to find the information they need since all conversations are in one place and you can easily search through them.
Additionally, you can also call people (including video calls) within the same platform and you can integrate your Slack with the other tools you use, such as Dropbox, Zendesk, and Salesforce.
Conclusion
All of these tools help in 2 ways: they help you save time and if used right, they also allow you to be more productive and generate better results for your social media marketing efforts.
What are the must-have social media marketing tools that you can’t live without?