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10 Tools That Make Managing Social Media Marketing a Breeze
There’s no denying the potential of social media marketing, but it comes at a steep cost of time and energy. By 2020, it’s estimated that an incredible 2.95 billion people will be using social media. The sheer growth here is unprecedented, and that’s exactly why today’s businesses are jumping into social media marketing.
Since time is quite literally money in this industry, today we’re going to look at ten social media marketing tools that enhance your message, save you time, and ultimately increase the ROI for your marketing efforts.
10 Social Media Tools to Streamline Your Marketing Efforts
Today’s businesses will spend their times managing various social media platforms that pertain to their audience. It can be a chaotic effort, which is why tools like these are required to ensure everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Let’s take a look at ten tools social media marketers cannot live without:
1. Leadpages
Designing a website or blog isn’t easy, but creating high-converting landing pages is arguably even more difficult. Thankfully, Leadpages makes the latter process much easier to design, publish, and measure.
This tool includes a drag-and-drop builder to easily create attractive landing pages for your website and for social media. It has the unique ability to also capture leads and contact information through a variety of options. Here are some of the most notable features on offer for Leadpages users:
A perfect example of how this can be used in your social media efforts, is through Leadpages’ Facebook integration. Using this tool, you can create landing pages that seamlessly integrate into your strategy.
Users that click the Call-to-Action are immediately greeted with a Leadbox that appears to capture their information. All of this happens without the need to leave Facebook. Other platforms will allow you to direct leads from social media to your landing pages as well.
2. Buffer
Buffer is common among social media marketers, but if you haven’t uncovered this gem yet, now is the time. The concept behind buffer allows you to easily schedule and automatically publish posts to your social media platforms.
Your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and even Google+ pages can be linked into this one tool. You can create posts and tweets in your queue and schedule when and where you want them posted.
This is all further enhanced by the ability to add posts to your queue from anywhere else on the internet. If you found an excellent blog post you want to share with your followers, you’ll find a Buffer icon nestled in with the other social media share buttons.
All of this convenience also comes with tracking tools that allow you to monitor the success of your posts. The ability to not only automate your social media activity, but also track it, is what makes Buffer so integral to any social media strategy.
It frees up your time to work on the elements of your website and provide focus to other areas of the business. It also means that anyone, even those just starting out with a website, can easily enter the social media scene without sacrificing valuable time and energy.
3. IFTTT
The funny acronym above stands for “If This, Then That.” This tool has a huge amount of uses for social media marketers, but it requires a little bit of elbow grease to truly shine. Essentially, you’ll create processes called “recipes” that trigger when certain events happen.
Let’s look at an example:
If I schedule a social media post in buffer (this)
Then the time and date should also appear in my Google Calendar (that)
You’ll need to connect the proper accounts for a process like this to work, but you’ll find that you can create your own recipes, or use ones that others have made. The possibilities are incredible for streamlining and automating elements of your social media marketing.
4. Canva
Canva is one of my favorite tools because it takes something complicated like graphic design, and boils it down to a tool that anyone can use. Whether you need infographics, banner images, or simply a unique twist on a current graphic, Canva is right for you.
This free tool provides access to a drag-and-drop builders and a variety of free icons and backgrounds. You can even upload your own images and use them. Canva also provides a number of size templates for various social media platforms such as a layout for the ideal Pinterest image size.
It’s a tool I never blog without, and neither should you.
5. Quuu
In social media marketing, it’s important to keep a steady flow of content, but it’s not realistic to expect all that content to come solely from within. Instead, today’s marketers curate useful content from other sources to keep their pages active while they create content of their own.
Curating content is a great way to keep your audience engaged, but finding the right content is far easier said than done. This is where Quuu comes in. This is a tool where you are provided with hand-picked content for your social media profiles.
Quuu connects with your Buffer account to automatically schedule these curated posts and ultimately cuts out the need to research and find high-quality content to share with your followers. Curated content is important, but this tool saves you the legwork and time usually needed to find it.
6. Bit.ly
When we place links to our content on social media, it’s such a simple act. We never think about how that link can make or break our results. In the case of platforms with limited word counts like Twitter, the length of a link can eat up valuable space for other text.
Bit.ly is a tool that allows you to not only shorten your links, but also track their performance. This combination gives you a great insight into the performance of your social media marketing and makes this a simple, but must-have tool for your marketing efforts.
7. Meet Edgar
There’s an issue with social media that has been present since the dawn of it all: an overwhelming about of content. Users on today’s platforms are constantly assaulted with new items that fly through their feeds.
The fall of organic reach has compounded this problem, and it results in only a small percentage of your followers ever seeing any given update or post. To solve this problem, it’s not uncommon to repost content on social media in the hopes of getting more attention to it.
Similar to Buffer, Meet Edgar allows you to schedule posts, but here it’s for the purpose of reposting them. You can organize the options into categories that have different schedules. Eventually, when these categories run out of options, they restart from the beginning again and automatically share posts that haven’t been posted in awhile.
You’ll be able to use this tool on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
8. SocialFlow
SocialFlow is the secret weapon that many marketers use to conquer social media. This tool combines advanced analytics with powerful targeting features that combine to give you a unique glimpse into your audience.
The program is able to calculate when and how to publish content, based on data and rules that you put into place. The term they use is “optimizing” your publishing as opposed to simply scheduling it.
The real treat here is the social media advertising tools that SocialFlow offers. With advanced targeting options, you can reach your audience faster and more efficiently by narrowing down the scope of your campaigns to the ideal viewers. Combine this with the step-by-step ad builder and you have one of the most powerful advertising tools out there for social media.
9. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is the ultimate tool for finding content that performs on social media. The best way to use it for our purposes, is to put your competitor’s domains into the search bar. When you do this, you’ll instantly receive a layout of which content is most popular on their social medi pages, organized by the number of shares.
The same can be done with keywords to see which types of content surrounding those terms is working best on today’s platforms. It’s a simple, but powerful way to cherry-pick topics that are almost guaranteed to resonate with your audience.
10. Tagboard
Our last tool is one that will ensure you never miss an opportunity to interact with your followers. The goal of any social media marketer is to monitor and jump on scenarios where the company’s brand is being mentioned online. These opportunities for interaction are a great way to engage with followers or potential leads.
Tagboard is a simple tool that monitors hashtags on networks like Instagram and Twitter. Once you’ve put in the tags you want to monitor surrounding your brand and your industry, all you need to do is check once per day and you’ll be able to catch and reply to any mentions you find.
Final Thoughts
Social media marketing is a vital part of today’s online business world. As we move into the future, it’s vital that tools like these be used to avoid common mistakes and streamline our processes. Which tools do you favor on social media?
Matt Banner is a digital marketing specialist. He strives to help beginners learn how to start their own blogs. You can follow him on twitter @blastyourblog
Since time is quite literally money in this industry, today we’re going to look at ten social media marketing tools that enhance your message, save you time, and ultimately increase the ROI for your marketing efforts.
10 Social Media Tools to Streamline Your Marketing Efforts
Today’s businesses will spend their times managing various social media platforms that pertain to their audience. It can be a chaotic effort, which is why tools like these are required to ensure everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Let’s take a look at ten tools social media marketers cannot live without:
1. Leadpages
Designing a website or blog isn’t easy, but creating high-converting landing pages is arguably even more difficult. Thankfully, Leadpages makes the latter process much easier to design, publish, and measure.
This tool includes a drag-and-drop builder to easily create attractive landing pages for your website and for social media. It has the unique ability to also capture leads and contact information through a variety of options. Here are some of the most notable features on offer for Leadpages users:
- Mobile-responsive landing pages
- Social media integration
- Drag-and-drop customization options
- Built-in A/B testing and analytics
- Leadboxes and lead capture Pop-ups
A perfect example of how this can be used in your social media efforts, is through Leadpages’ Facebook integration. Using this tool, you can create landing pages that seamlessly integrate into your strategy.
Users that click the Call-to-Action are immediately greeted with a Leadbox that appears to capture their information. All of this happens without the need to leave Facebook. Other platforms will allow you to direct leads from social media to your landing pages as well.
2. Buffer
Buffer is common among social media marketers, but if you haven’t uncovered this gem yet, now is the time. The concept behind buffer allows you to easily schedule and automatically publish posts to your social media platforms.
Your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and even Google+ pages can be linked into this one tool. You can create posts and tweets in your queue and schedule when and where you want them posted.
This is all further enhanced by the ability to add posts to your queue from anywhere else on the internet. If you found an excellent blog post you want to share with your followers, you’ll find a Buffer icon nestled in with the other social media share buttons.
All of this convenience also comes with tracking tools that allow you to monitor the success of your posts. The ability to not only automate your social media activity, but also track it, is what makes Buffer so integral to any social media strategy.
It frees up your time to work on the elements of your website and provide focus to other areas of the business. It also means that anyone, even those just starting out with a website, can easily enter the social media scene without sacrificing valuable time and energy.
3. IFTTT
The funny acronym above stands for “If This, Then That.” This tool has a huge amount of uses for social media marketers, but it requires a little bit of elbow grease to truly shine. Essentially, you’ll create processes called “recipes” that trigger when certain events happen.
Let’s look at an example:
If I schedule a social media post in buffer (this)
Then the time and date should also appear in my Google Calendar (that)
You’ll need to connect the proper accounts for a process like this to work, but you’ll find that you can create your own recipes, or use ones that others have made. The possibilities are incredible for streamlining and automating elements of your social media marketing.
4. Canva
Canva is one of my favorite tools because it takes something complicated like graphic design, and boils it down to a tool that anyone can use. Whether you need infographics, banner images, or simply a unique twist on a current graphic, Canva is right for you.
This free tool provides access to a drag-and-drop builders and a variety of free icons and backgrounds. You can even upload your own images and use them. Canva also provides a number of size templates for various social media platforms such as a layout for the ideal Pinterest image size.
It’s a tool I never blog without, and neither should you.
5. Quuu
In social media marketing, it’s important to keep a steady flow of content, but it’s not realistic to expect all that content to come solely from within. Instead, today’s marketers curate useful content from other sources to keep their pages active while they create content of their own.
Curating content is a great way to keep your audience engaged, but finding the right content is far easier said than done. This is where Quuu comes in. This is a tool where you are provided with hand-picked content for your social media profiles.
Quuu connects with your Buffer account to automatically schedule these curated posts and ultimately cuts out the need to research and find high-quality content to share with your followers. Curated content is important, but this tool saves you the legwork and time usually needed to find it.
6. Bit.ly
When we place links to our content on social media, it’s such a simple act. We never think about how that link can make or break our results. In the case of platforms with limited word counts like Twitter, the length of a link can eat up valuable space for other text.
Bit.ly is a tool that allows you to not only shorten your links, but also track their performance. This combination gives you a great insight into the performance of your social media marketing and makes this a simple, but must-have tool for your marketing efforts.
7. Meet Edgar
There’s an issue with social media that has been present since the dawn of it all: an overwhelming about of content. Users on today’s platforms are constantly assaulted with new items that fly through their feeds.
The fall of organic reach has compounded this problem, and it results in only a small percentage of your followers ever seeing any given update or post. To solve this problem, it’s not uncommon to repost content on social media in the hopes of getting more attention to it.
Similar to Buffer, Meet Edgar allows you to schedule posts, but here it’s for the purpose of reposting them. You can organize the options into categories that have different schedules. Eventually, when these categories run out of options, they restart from the beginning again and automatically share posts that haven’t been posted in awhile.
You’ll be able to use this tool on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
8. SocialFlow
SocialFlow is the secret weapon that many marketers use to conquer social media. This tool combines advanced analytics with powerful targeting features that combine to give you a unique glimpse into your audience.
The program is able to calculate when and how to publish content, based on data and rules that you put into place. The term they use is “optimizing” your publishing as opposed to simply scheduling it.
The real treat here is the social media advertising tools that SocialFlow offers. With advanced targeting options, you can reach your audience faster and more efficiently by narrowing down the scope of your campaigns to the ideal viewers. Combine this with the step-by-step ad builder and you have one of the most powerful advertising tools out there for social media.
9. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is the ultimate tool for finding content that performs on social media. The best way to use it for our purposes, is to put your competitor’s domains into the search bar. When you do this, you’ll instantly receive a layout of which content is most popular on their social medi pages, organized by the number of shares.
The same can be done with keywords to see which types of content surrounding those terms is working best on today’s platforms. It’s a simple, but powerful way to cherry-pick topics that are almost guaranteed to resonate with your audience.
10. Tagboard
Our last tool is one that will ensure you never miss an opportunity to interact with your followers. The goal of any social media marketer is to monitor and jump on scenarios where the company’s brand is being mentioned online. These opportunities for interaction are a great way to engage with followers or potential leads.
Tagboard is a simple tool that monitors hashtags on networks like Instagram and Twitter. Once you’ve put in the tags you want to monitor surrounding your brand and your industry, all you need to do is check once per day and you’ll be able to catch and reply to any mentions you find.
Final Thoughts
Social media marketing is a vital part of today’s online business world. As we move into the future, it’s vital that tools like these be used to avoid common mistakes and streamline our processes. Which tools do you favor on social media?
Matt Banner is a digital marketing specialist. He strives to help beginners learn how to start their own blogs. You can follow him on twitter @blastyourblog