25 social media instruments that consultants use to optimize their advertising
With more than 3.6 billion social media users worldwide, social media marketing cannot be ignored.
Savvy marketers know that social media is an integral part of any marketing campaign. For companies, every social media platform is an opportunity to get in touch with their target group.
Even marketing stars know that strategizing and managing a few social networks without the right social media management tools can be overwhelming.
Consider it:
How can you keep up with your Twitter account if you haven't even checked out Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok today? What about all of the new social media sites that pop up (or it seems like it) every other day?
How do you know which to choose for your brand and which to skip?
Take a deep breath.
Managing your social media shouldn't be overwhelming. Social media tools can help:
- Save time by doing the posting, social listening, and hashtag research for you.
- Save money by letting you assign resources to other tasks.
- Perhaps you can even save your brand's reputation by getting a negative review in a timely manner so that you can run glitch and fix the problem quickly.
I did the research for you and divided the top social media marketing into five categories. We start with tools to help with the four phases of social media marketing: discovery, creation, monitoring and planning, and analysis. Then I added a fifth category at the end.
If you are at a specific stage, just go to the appropriate section.
Are you ready to get productive, tweak your social media marketing, and become a skilled social media marketer?
Let's start.
Content research and discovery
According to Statista, users post 347,222 articles on Instagram and 157,000 share messages on Facebook every minute. It can be overwhelming to find value-added content in all that noise.
Let's take a look at the social media content curation tools that can help you filter meaningful content so you can find images, posts, and conversations that resonate with your audience.
1. Puzzle
This tool organizes stories shared by friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook and other social apps. It is available as a web, Android and iOS app.
It displays aggregated stories from your social media circle as easy-to-read links in a feed. You can also add influencers to your niche.
The Sort By option lets you get news from the past hour or go through the past week. You can also access content shared between your second-degree connections.
Finally, you can also curate content from your newsfeed in an email newsletter.
2. Feedly
Feedly rounds up the top content in your niche from industry blogs and other publications. Your AI bot Leo acts as a research assistant, learning your reading habits and delivering articles that you are interested in.
Each article is then "read" and provided with relevant summaries, analyzes and links to relevant content.
Leo learns from your behavior. When you save an article, it becomes more like you. If you click on "less so", Leo will remember and show you fewer articles on the same topic.
You can also set priorities within topics. Pick a subtopic and Leo will add these articles on the Priorities tab.
3. BuzzSumo
There are several reasons why I love this tool. In addition to content discovery, you can use it to search for keywords, track online trends, and even find influencers in your industry.
Use it to analyze your competition, understand your audience, and find content with most social network shares.
You can also do research while browsing with the Chrome extension. To do this, enter your keyword or phrase to determine the top performing content.
The filters allow you to customize your search based on language, time frame, country and a number of other parameters.
You can find out the popularity of content on a specific social network by using the Sort By feature.
You can also paste a blog URL into the tool to find top performing content items.
4th Tagboard
This is another great social media tool for monitoring and finding hashtags relevant to your industry and tracking brand names.
To start your search, enter the keyword and the tool will deliver content from multiple platforms.
Here are search results for #neilpatel:
You can reply directly to these screenshots right on the screenshots page.
The right sidebar gives you useful statistics on the frequency and mood of your hashtag.
Tagboard is especially useful for tracking conversations and engagements during conferences and live events.
Creation of visual content
According to Venngage, 49 percent of the surveyed marketers rated visual content as very important, but 43 percent said their biggest challenge was consistent production.
Social media has become undeniably visual, and having a presence on Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, and other visual platforms is paramount.
Here are some social media tools that you can use to create videos, images, charts, Pinterest boards, infographics, and more.
5. Canva
This is a simple graphic design web tool with pre-made templates for all kinds of social networking and uses.
It combines some of Photoshop's best elements with a drag-and-drop feature.
Different layouts, fonts and backgrounds are available for each template. And if you're having problems with a specific functionality, there are free tutorials available to help you design better graphics.
For example, if you're considering using your most shared content on an infographic, there's a tutorial on how to create simple infographics with Canva.
Here are ten websites where you can find free and top notch photos to use in your designs.
6th Biteable
Biteable lets you create videos, animations, motion graphics, and a host of other visuals for social networking, ads, and even presentations. You can use any of their templates to get started.
You can sync your marketing calendar with yours for tips and ready-to-use video templates for relevant seasons, holidays and events.
7th Pixlr
Pixlr is a freemium service with many of the features of Photoshop.
The free services include Pixlr X (for Express) with essential tools for quick editing. Pixlr E (for the editor) has a wider range of tools for the more sophisticated content creation and Remove BG, an AI-based tool for removing the background.
If you need even more photo editing features, they offer a subscription-based plan that also includes more stickers, overlays, and visual effects.
Pixlr also offers templates, some of them free and some as part of the subscription service.
Pro tip: One-pixel Pinterest image
The images you share on Pinterest should be oriented vertically. However, putting a large picture right on a blog post will take up a lot of space.
The solution is to upload the large Pinterest image under the first image of your post. Then change the height and width to one pixel each.
The image will now appear when you click the “Pin it” button to share it on Pinterest. The alternative text of the Pinterest image is automatically used as the caption for the image.
Monitoring and planning
It's impossible to manage your brand's social media accounts 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, the world of social media does not turn off at 5:00 p.m.
Social media tools for monitoring and planning can be helpful. They can save you hours every week by combining your branding activity from multiple social networks into one dashboard.
8. Hootsuite
Hoot is a full-service social media management tool that allows you to track mentions, engagement, and other metrics across all of your social platforms. You can schedule and track posts using their analytics tools, and respond to mentions through your dashboard.
9. buffer
This is an amazing app that allows you to schedule updates to your social network accounts at the times that are best for your brand.
It works a lot like Hootsuite. You can create and schedule social posts and then track them based on their analytics.
Buffer also prioritizes social mentions for you so you can respond to the most urgent ones first.
10. Hopper HQ
Hopper HQ connects your brand with top content creators in your industry. Once you've chosen from a list of recommended creators, they deliver content that you can share in posts and paid ads.
11. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a simple, built-in calendar for social media and blog posting.
It also includes a range of social media, branding, work, and content organization tools. Schedule your blog posts, collaborate with different authors on one post, and assign specific tasks to different people.
It also has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.
In the calendar view itself, you can also keep track of the most frequently shared and content-engaging content.
12th IFTTT
If This Then That is a fantastic social media tool for connecting apps and automating social actions. IFTTT offers a number of applets that you can use to connect platforms and optimize your work.
For example, you can send your Instagram to Twitter as native tweets. You can also receive a weekly notification email with everyone who has followed you on Twitter. You can also archive tweets in a Google spreadsheet.
You can create your own applet from scratch by selecting a trigger and attaching an action to it.
You can also use applets that other people have created.
In this article, Kristi Hines explains a killer recipe that will allow you to schedule social media updates right from your Feedly account.
You can schedule the articles you want to read later in Feedly using Buffer in your social network accounts. You only need gmail and buffer accounts to set up this applet.
Social Media Analytics
The best way to find the most effective social network for your business is to track your marketing efforts on social media.
With the right data, you can calculate the ROI from your social media marketing campaigns. This will help you find your top performing content so you can optimize your campaign and optimize your marketing efforts.
Let's take a look at some social media tools that you can use to measure and analyze your social activity.
13th Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most widely used analysis tools for tracking user behavior on websites. However, you can also track social reports from the Reporting tab.
Sign in to your Analytics account to access your social network. Then switch to the Reporting tab. Click Acquisition> Social.
Set up goals in Analytics to access these social reports. Analytics has standard templates that you can use to set actionable goals for your social media marketing campaigns.
If you get stuck, use Google's official step-by-step guide to set goals.
There are eight reports you can view under Social Analytics: Overview, Network Referral, Data Hub Activity, Landing Pages, Trackbacks, Conversions, Plugins, and Visitor Flow.
Once you've set goals, you can see the impact of your social media in the overview.
The most important report is conversions.
You can break down your social media campaign by network and find out the most successful platform.
If you're interested in user behavior – the "Like" and "Share" buttons that your visitors click – you need to set up social plugins.
While this report can take some time to produce, the end results are well worth the effort:
A clear picture of the social network that has the best ROI and the type of content you should be creating for it.
14th HubSpot
HubSpot has a range of tools, from marketing automation to a full content management system. Their Marketing Hub allows you to create and manage social media posts, social media videos, and conversations from their platform.
15th Followerwonk
For the best results on a real-time social network like Twitter, you need to be active when your followers are online.
Followerwonk analyzes your Twitter followers and lets you know when your followers are most active.
You can also use it to find influencers in your niche and discover relevant people to follow.
You can also track your followers based on demographics like age.
16. Olapic
Olapic is a great tool to add to your visual marketing arsenal. The tool allows you to discover, curate, and schedule user-generated content on Instagram, Pinterest, and all of your other social accounts.
Use it on your website, in your social ads, and in your emails to drive engagement and increase conversions.
17th keyhole
For Instagram and Twitter, a good hashtag analyzer can go a long way. Keep up to date with hashtags relevant to your industry with Keyhole.
The tool also uses machine learning to predict whether your campaigns will achieve their goals.
Finally, Keyhole tracks and monitors the influencer's performance. You can use it to compare influencers to see who is most effective for your brand.
18th Semrush
Semrush not only lets you create, schedule, and track your own posts, but also track and analyze your competitors' posts. You can also use it to optimize your social ads.
SEMRush is also helpful for general keyword and content research in your industry (or you can use Ubersuggest for this too).
Various tools to increase social engagement on your website
You are already armed with the best social media tools to research, curate, plan, plan, monitor, and analyze your social media marketing efforts.
What about social engagement on your website? The end goal of most social campaigns is to increase your website engagement and traffic.
Below are some tools that you can use to power your website and encourage interaction with social media.
19th ClickToTweet
An easy way to increase the number of tweets on your blog post is to add a link to each actionable comment. When a reader clicks the link, they'll automatically add a tweet to their Twitter account.
You can keep track of all embedded links from the dashboard.
You can also analyze their performance using their analysis tool.
If you work with WordPress, there is an easier alternative: Better click-to-tweet plugin.
20th Share buttons from AddToAny
According to BigCommerce, floating share buttons can either aid or detract from your engagement and conversions. For example, sharing buttons with counters can hurt conversions when the number of shares is low, while adding share buttons to product pages can actually distract users.
The best way to find out when and where to use share buttons is through extensive testing.
If you work with WordPress, you can start with the share buttons via the AddToAny plugin. There is an option to activate share buttons in the sidebar as well as above and below each content element.
You can also customize the number of social networks you want to show your visitors.
I recommend experimenting with two or three social media sharing buttons and sticking to the social networks your audience is on.
21. Snip.ly
Feel like you are losing time curating and endorsing other publishers' content?
Snip.ly can give it back to you. It's a link shortener with a great add-on: a custom call to action for each link you share using the tool.
You can use it to drive direct traffic to your website by adding a non-intrusive, custom CTA at the end of every post you share.
The CTA can contain custom messages, colors, images, and themes.
In addition to direct traffic, you can control app downloads, email list subscriptions, and event registrations.
You can track the number of clicks and conversions via the analytics dashboard.
22nd Onalytica
Influencers are a trusted source of information for your customers. A recommendation from them can increase your product sales and brand visibility.
But how can you find influencers who are interested in your contribution, service or product?
This is where Onalytica comes in. It finds relevant influencing factors for your brand based on your article link or your uploaded file.
It scans an article and then generates a list of target influencers in less than a minute. After reverse engineering relevant influencers, you can connect and build a relationship.
23 CoSchedules Headline Analyzer
Headlines play a key role in engagement. No wonder Upworthy wrote 25 headlines for each post.
CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer is a great tool for making sure headlines get attention – and click.
It's easy to use:
- Visit www.coschedule.com/headline-analyzer.
- Add your headline to the "Enter your headline here" bar.
- Click the Analyze Now button.
You'll get an overall rating for your headline and a grade for the variety of words you used, the top keywords in your headline, and the mood your headline evokes
24 KingSumo
KingSumo helps brands manage social media giveaways that can help get emails to sign up for signups and followers.
To create a giveaway, create a title, description, start and end dates, and the number of winners. Then post it straight to your social accounts.
You can manage and track all of your freebies from a single dashboard.
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25th Facebook comments plugin
If a large chunk of your audience is hanging out on Facebook, enabling Facebook comments on your website can increase engagement and bring you closer to your social media marketing goals.
But beware. There is a risk of comment fraud that can easily bypass spam filters. You need to stay up to date via the comment moderation.
Conclusion
Social media can become a huge distraction even as it powers your business. Manually logging in to post blogs and business updates can be valuable time that you can spend creating a new product, processing supplier orders, or handling customer concerns.
Add the above tools to your armory to automate repetitive tasks and stack your social media posts.
They save you time every week. You will also improve your ROI through social media marketing and your bottom line.
Did I miss one of your favorite social media marketing tools? Can you share your social media productivity secrets? Please let me know in the comments below.
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