Managing your social media marketing can be a full-time job. You need to do it, but you may not have the time or resources to do as much as you need to do to meet your goals.
Instead of waiting until you have the budget to hire more staff to get serious about your social media marketing, you just need to find the right tools. There are plugins, software and services that can do everything from schedule your social media posts to give you detailed analytics about your user engagement and other successes.
Instead of spending too much of your valuable time sorting through the dozens of available tools, just check out these top 5 social media tools for 2017:
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has been around for a while now, but it deserves to be at the top of the list for 2017 because it is one of the best social media tools out there.
Hootsuite has grown to support numerous social networks. You can use it to manage Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and WordPress. Toggle between the networks to see a single dashboard that shows your news feed, your mentions, your messages and more. You can customize the feed to show the items you deem most important.
One of the best benefits of Hootsuite is that it allows you to publish your social media posts. You can schedule everything for the week or even a month, depending on how ambitious you are.
2. EveryPost
EveryPost is similar to Hootsuite, but it opens up your options a bit. It supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox and email. It allows you to curate content from YouTube and Flickr, and to automatically share to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
The software allows you to schedule posts, curate content, follow influencers, and track your analytics, among other things. You can choose from several different plans to suit your needs, and you can add up to five users that you can also manage.
You can download EveryPost as an app, and use it as an individual or as the social media manager for a larger company.
3. Crowd Booster
Make the most out of your social media presence with the analytics provided by Crowd Booster. This tool automatically updates your analytics and sends you important notifications. You can tweak your social media marketing strategy in real time based on how you see the audience is reacting.
If you are a social media manager for other brands, you can use Crowd Booster to create custom reports for clients. You can show clients the impact your work is making so you can justify your fees and attract new business.
Crowd Booster also lets you schedule posts to Twitter, but not to other social media channels.
4. Tailwind
Pinterest remains one of the major players in social media, but because of its unique platform, not a lot of the other social media tools support it. Pinterest is all about searching for and sharing content, which is much different than composing your own status or tweet.
Tailwind is one of the few tools available that supports Pinterest, and it saves you the time suck that you fall into when you visit the site itself. You can create pins with the software, perform bulk uploads, find out the best time to post pins and more.
The software is set up to support social media teams, so you can manage multiple users on your account.
As it has grown, the software has evolved to include support for Instagram as well.
5. Oktopost
Many social media management tools focus on giving you the ability to publish posts or to easily oversee all your activity on a site in one place. With Oktopost, the focus is on actually generating leads and revenue for your brand so that you can increase your ROI.
Oktopost focuses on B2B brands, which have traditionally had a harder time making connections on social media. It allows you to schedule and publish content like other tools, but it also allows you to measure the impact of a post, collaborate with industry influencers, stay on top of trends, and amplify your reach.
You can export data to share with other platforms and project management systems, allowing you to easily coordinate your efforts amongst your social media marketing team.
There are dozens of other social media management tools out there, and you can easily spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month on them, depending on how big your team is and what kind of features you need. It’s worth it to start small with the tools that can get you results without requiring you to spend a fortune.
Try out these social media tools for 2017 and get more out of your social media marketing campaign. You’ll improve your ROI while also reducing the investment you put in in the first place.