Stay Relevant With Social Media Marketing Tools in 2023
Last update: 17 May 2023 at 10:14 am
5.00/5Social Media has become an integral part of most people’s lives over the last few years. Businesses have had to adapt their social media management strategies, and this landscape has rapidly evolved and developed with the advent of the Covid-19 epidemic. As more companies are embracing remote working, the time has increased that people spend on social networks. Many businesses are focusing on their social media strategies to promote their products and services. Take a look at how your business can keep up with these rapidly changing times with some social media marketing tools in 2022!
Social Media Management
Successful social media needs a clear strategy, which needs to be managed on an ongoing basis. It will help if you stay up-to-date with social media marketing tools, practices, and trends.
Why Manage Your Social Media Accounts?
Social media management will form part of your business marketing strategy. Because you are involving, creating, and publishing content on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram you’ll also need to analyze the effectiveness of your social media posts using an Instagram analytics tool. As a result, you will be able to engage with potential customers and other users on social media.
The social media posts’ effectiveness also needs to be analyzed (such as Instagram), and you can engage with social media users and potential customers.
You also have the option of having a social media agency manage your accounts.
Benefits of Managing Your Social Media Accounts
- You can join social media networks without spending money, post your social media content and respond to comments from users. Advertising on social media is also a cost-effective way of building a following and reaching potential customers.
- You can connect with people across the world. Traditional advertising and marketing can’t offer you the same reach.
- Social media as part of your business marketing strategy allows you to align your marketing initiatives with users’ behaviour, e.g. a large percentage of people now get advice from social media for their future purchase decisions.
- Social media allows you to build your brand and generate leads and sales, e.g. many B2B marketers are earning clients through Facebook.
How to Recognise a Good Social Media Management Tool
- Consider the following criteria when you select a social media management tool for your business.
- Try a few different social media tools before you make your decision. Most social media managers offer free trails.
- You should be saving time. The social media tool should allow you to schedule future social media posts and updates, in one or two blocks a week.
- The social media platform should support a wide range of different social networks, allowing you to control your online presence in one place or it should provide a powerful solution for one social media network.
- The social media management platform needs to provide social media performance analytics on your updates so that you can see what’s working and what doesn’t work.
- Social media platforms with social listening features are useful as it allows you to analyze what people are saying about your business, and keep track of your competitors.
- It should be cost-effective, especially if you’re running a small business.
Tools for Managing Social Media
Several tools such as Sprout Social, Sendible and HootSuite can help you manage social media for your business.
Other handy tools include:
- Biteable – You can use this tool to create content.
- Buffer – A social media dashboard.
- Buzzsumo – a social media research tool.
- Visme – Create stunning infographics, make interactive presentations using Visme templates.
Sprout Social
Sprout social is a user-friendly all-in-one social media management tool used by medium-sized businesses and agencies. This tool makes it easier to manage and monitor conversations on social media. You will also be able to see which of your marketing actions have been effective.
It integrates with the following social media channels:
- Google+
Features
Instead of working with individual profiles, Sprout Social allows you to manage multiple social media accounts. This useful tool can manage anything from publishing content on social media to analytics.
It has the following useful features:
Smart Inbox
A Smart Inbox allows you to view all the messages from your social media accounts in one inbox. You can mark messages as complete and monitor content for keywords and hashtags.
The Inbox also has a quick statistics panel, which allows you to keep track of the new items appearing in your inbox for the last 90 days.
Automation
- Sprout Social’s automation tools help you interact with your customers more effectively.
- The Bot Builder helps you create social chatbots with preapproved responses to direct messages on Twitter and Facebook Messenger.
- Sprout Queue allows you to set scheduled items to go live when your audience is most engaged.
- ViralPost analyses engagement to ensure you post content when audiences are most engaged.
- Advanced Twitter Automation has suggested replies to Tweets and Twitter feedback. It also measures your social media performance and streamlines your conversations.
Collaboration Tools
You can delegate the work of managing your major social media profiles to your teammates.
No one will do a completed job in error, as all team members receive live activity updates. There’s also an audit trail, so everyone will know who replied to a message or marked a message as complete.
Different team members can work on and save drafts until it is ready for publication.
Publishing Tools
The Compose window feature makes it easy to publish to your profiles. You edit content and approve content created by teammates, schedule items for later publication on social media, and add tags to your messages.
Sprout Social also comes with a handy visual calendar, which enables you to spread your content publishing. If there is too much content scheduled for a particular period, you can reschedule it for publication at another time.
Analytics
Sprout Social’s Reporting Suite gives you access to the following reports:
- Sent Messages
- Twitter Trends
- Engagement Report
- Instagram Profiles
- Facebook Competitors
Summary
Sprout Social is a low cost and user-friendly social media management platform for those who are only getting started with social media management. It is definitely worth considering if you want insight into how to improve your social media management. Apps are also available for Android and iOS.
For customer service and technical support, look at the options that are available in your user dashboard.
Sendible
Sendible allows users to manage their social media activities from a central place.
The social media tool also has a social listening capability, which allows you to track competitors, brands and industry terms across different social media channels. It’s an excellent way to identify social media influencers.
How Does Social Listening Work?
The social listening feature is on the Monitor Interface and can be accessed by clicking on New Monitor. Insert the keywords you want to monitor and set up your email notifications.
You can filter mentions based on positive, negative and neutral sentiments, as well as other filters. You also use the search feature to track Twitter trends, like, repost, comment and retweet without leaving the dashboard.
Collaboration
Sendible allows team members to work together when creating posts, planning content and adding to the content library. Colleagues can forward posts to each other before they go live, by using the Send for Approval button in the Compose Box.
Other features of content collaboration include:
- Content on a shared social media scheduling calendar is available to other users, which helps teams collaborate on content planning and social media strategy.
- When a user adds to the library, the content becomes available to other users.
- A shared inbox which allows users to access all messages from social networks in a unified inbox. Team members can follow-up on leads, add comments and respond to messages.
Integrations
Sendible can integrate with most social media platforms and blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr and Blogspot. Apps like Slack, Flickr, Facebook Reconnect and Facebook Page Leader work with Sendible.
Sendible also has a built-in Google Analytics report that allows users to analyze social media traffic to their websites or blogs.
Mobile App
Android and IOS devices support the mobile app. The mobile app allows you to respond to messages while you’re out and about.
The app will send you to push notifications and email alerts for keyword mentions. The sentiment analyzer helps analyze conversations on social media.
It helps users to keep track of all their social metrics across all social channels from their phones.
Summary
Sendible is one of the leading social media marketing tools today and a worthwhile option to explore, especially if you have clients or businesses that need to take their social media presence to the next level.
Hootsuite
You can manage many social media accounts with Hootsuite in a single dashboard. This useful social media management tool lets you reply to questions and comments across all your social platforms and analytics to monitor your social media strategy’s performance.
Hootsuite allows team members to collaborate, follow a social media calendar, schedule updates, and assign tasks. This social media scheduling tool’s features can integrate with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Google+.
You can integrate tools such as Storify, Tumblr and Reddit, which will help you gather more customer data and feedback. Hootsuite will also give you an in-depth breakdown of analytics.
An added benefit is that through Hootsuite Podium, you can complete free online social media courses to improve your social media marketing management skills.
Biteable
Biteable is a useful tool that allows you to create entertaining visual content for your social media platforms.
The platform has a host of video templates, music and animated scenes, allowing you to create studio-quality visual content without expensive equipment.
Biteable is user-friendly and easy to use. It is also one of the most affordable of these types of tools on the market, and you can get most of the features with the free accounts. An upgrade to the Premium version is cheap and allows you to add excitement to your social media accounts by posting short, exciting videos.
Buffer
Buffer has been around for a while, and its main aim is to schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you’re a free user, you can connect up to three accounts, including Facebook groups and pages.
This social media scheduling tool has the following useful features:
- It will automatically shorten links that you share.
- You can use the chrome extension to add content and articles from the Internet to your queue.
- Upload videos and photos and can also pull the from articles you’ve shared.
- Analytics can measure the performance of your content.
- You can spread your posts throughout the day by creating a schedule.
Scheduling updates
It’s easy to schedule updates with an intuitive dashboard. This social media management tool will create a schedule for you when you first connect a social media account. Buffer creates four slots per day – morning, noon, late-afternoon and later in the evening.
You can change your settings on the posting schedule by deleting or adding time slots. You will need to schedule updates for all your slots. Mobile apps are available for iOS and Android so that you can schedule updates from your phone. The social media posting schedule, sent posts and queue are all available on the app.
Minimal Analytics are available, such as some insights into post performances, including the number of clicks on links, shares, comments etc. Buffer Analyze offers more analytics into demographics, organic vs paid posts etc., but it will cost you around an additional $35/month.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a social media marketing research tool that will help you understand if your content is doing well and how you can do better than your competitors.
This tool can help you increase the success of your social media content.
Buzzsumo’s features include:
- Helps you find influencers relating to certain topics on social media.
- Enter your own or someone else’s domain and see what content has been shared most on social media.
- Analyze competitors’ content.
- Receive alerts based on author name, keywords, brand name, links or domain.
- You can find interesting posts to share and find trending topics and research keywords. Find out what content ideas are doing well.
- If you can afford to upgrade to Buzzsumo Pro, you will find it is beneficial for competitor research.
Bitly
Bitly is a useful link shortener that shrinks long URLs into much shorter ones.
Long URLs are often difficult to remember and share, while short ones are easier on the eye and also to remember.
Bitly is also a powerful social media management tool for viewing site referrals, tracking clicks and finding geographical locations with the most clicks.
Platform Specific Tools
Some useful platform-specific social media management tools can give your social media marketing a boost.
Facebook Audience Insights
This social media marketing tool will help you create spectacular social media marketing campaigns and also to understand your audience better. It tells you more about the people who are interested in your business.
You get information about people on Facebook and those connected to your Page, which helps you create content that resonates with your audience and helps you find more potential audience members.
Facebook Audience Insights also gives you an overview of audience demographics – age and gender, education, relationship status, job titles etc. You can also learn about people’s lifestyles, as well as their interests and hobbies.
Although billions of us use Facebook on a daily basis, we are not as many who use it for our businesses. It can be hard to navigate the business side of this social media platform but thankfully, agencies specialised in Facebook Ads in the UK or other countries for example are here to help!
Twitter’s FollowerWonk
This tool provides regular Twitter users with in-depth analytics.
FollowerWonk has these useful features:
- It allows you to see which activities gain and lose you, followers, so that you can adjust your content according to your current and potential followers’ preferences.
- You can search for bios and connect with users.
- Analyze your followers according to their locations, who they follow, their bios etc.
- The tool allows you to find influencers by comparing Twitter accounts and finding overlaps.
- You can contrast your relationships with your friends and competitors.
Tailwind
This tool is handy for dedicated Pinterest users. It allows you to create impressive pins fast and then schedule them for sharing at the best time for engagement. This social media management tool can help you create and schedule your entire week’s pins in about 30 minutes.
Tailwind provides you with useful Pinterest Analytics; you can see if your posts are working by looking at the Top Pins Report, Board Insights or Pin Inspector.
With Tailwind create, you can even transform your photos into Pins. It also lets you set your fonts, logo and colours and then applies your brand style to your visual content.
The supply of designs is also updated often, and you will never run out of options. Keep on trying different designs until you find one that suits your style. It’s so easy to switch between colours, layouts and photos.
Final Thoughts
For your business’s continued success, it has become essential to educate yourself about social media marketing tools, and the platforms that will advance your business needs.
As people are spending more time on social media, it is crucial to use these tools to get your products and services seen. There are many excellent options, with new ones becoming available often.
Find social media marketing tools that will support your marketing efforts and spend time to get to know them as well as possible. Keep your eyes open for new tools and don’t discard tools that have worked well for your business in the past.
