Top 5 Social Media Marketing Tools

We’ve all been there. The sales team asks for new initiatives to drive leads on a daily basis. The team in the C-suite is anxious to figure when social media is actually going to result in measurable ROI. And the group of communicators and creatives on staff wants to knock the socks off people with messaging that engages and motivates.

What’s the solution to juggling all your internal audiences AND delivering results via social media marketing tools and methods?

Not surprisingly, the answer is multi-tiered. But with a little understanding and effort, you can create a strategy and action items that deliver on the social media promise of affinity-driven customers. To get rolling, let’s look at five top social media marketing tools, to make it effective, interesting and easy-to-implement.

1. Agorapulse

Best Use Case: Social Media Scheduling and Publishing

Every modern social media marketer needs a platform to schedule content. Agorapulse is my favorite because you can connect all your social channels and then manage everything from a single calendar.

There are other tools on the market that offer this, but Agorapulse is solid and easy to use for beginners. I also like the ability to schedule the same piece of content on multiple channels simultaneously, which just makes things more efficient.

2. Brand24

Best Use Case: Social Listening

Without the right software, it’s nearly impossible to monitor what’s being said about your and your brand online. But Brand24 simplifies this, by monitoring all of your brand mentions across social media.

You can get alerts straight to your inbox or access the reports from your dashboard.

They even provide you with things like sentiment analysis so you can see how your brand is being perceived.  What’s cool about Brand24 is that they go beyond the basic social sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can also track mentions across YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, and more.

3. Hootsuite

Best Use Case: Centralized Social Inbox

As your brand grows and you have a presence on multiple platforms, keeping up with comments and messages can be tricky. To simplify things, it’s much easier to use an all-in-one social inbox that sends all public comments and private messages to one place.

Hootsuite does this really well. So you can just use one dashboard to reply quickly, without leaving your customers waiting. It’s also great if you’re taking a collaborative approach to managing social media with your team. Anyone can respond, and it’s the same consistent brand messaging on the customer’s end.

4. Upfluence

Best Use Case: Connect With Social Influencers

If you want to leverage influencer marketing but don’t know where to start, try Upfluence. It’s a simple way to connect brands with influencers who have a following that’s relevant to your brand.

You can quickly vet potential influencers based on things like audience size, engagement level, demographics of their followers, and so much more. This helps eliminate lots of of the guesswork around influencer marketing, so you can feel confident about your campaigns from day one.

5. CoSchedule

Best Use Case: Project Management For Social Media

CoSchedule has some of the best built-in tools for staying organized and managing projects on social media. It’s great for high-volume brands or even agencies that need to manage calendars for their clients at scale.

It comes with intake forms, approval workflows, and even Kanban boards to help see each stage of the creative process. The tool also has tons of security and compliance-related features to help you manage access, which is crucial for large teams that are all collaborating.

What social media marketing tools do you recommend companies use to be successful in today’s tech-rich environment?