It is important to choose social media marketing tools that are right for your business goals. 

3.78 million people use social media worldwide. That’s approximately 54% of the world population with an active presence on the various social media channels. This is a huge platform for marketers to drive engagement, build relationships, and create amazing customer experiences.

However, marketing isn’t a one-person show, and you are only as good as your tools. This is why social media marketing tools have been taking all the credits. They not only help marketers tell their stories but also get into the audience’s mind, and get them to take action.

But having an online presence in the crowded marketplace isn’t enough. Companies need to dig deeper to engage their audience before unleashing their social media marketing strategies. 

Luckily, social media marketing tools help you understand the market better and even align your strategies to your marketing goals so you can reach a broader market and target the right people.

How Can the Right Social Media Marketing Tool Help You? 

Nearly all businesses have a website and at least a Facebook page or Twitter account. However, best-in-class companies are stretching this further, supplementing their online visibility with social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Your online presence is crucial if you engage an audience, target potential customers, and even sell your products. But why will you need social media marketing tools? Here are some of the benefits.

1. It helps you target the right market. 

Manual targeting isn’t only hectic but also ineffective since you rely more on guesswork. Without social media marketing tools, it’s easy to target the wrong group of people who may not be interested in your products and services. 

The best social media marketing tools use advanced technologies such as data analytics and machine learning to gather relevant information about your audience for better targeting. It also gives you closer insights into their needs so that you can realign your marketing techniques.

2. It helps build a robust online presence and reputation.

Building your reputation online can take time. It requires consistency and accuracy. If you inform people on a given topic, say “Search Engine Optimization,” you need to regularly create accurate content.

This has two advantages: they will see you as a reliable and trusted resource and authority in the market. You are giving them practical and valuable tips, and you are always there to solve their problems.

3. It helps drive traffic to the business website.

By putting your content out there on the various social media channels and giving your audience a chance to visit your site, you drive traffic and build backlinks and help your site rank better on the search engines. 

4. It plays a vital role in leads generation and revenue creation. 

Perhaps, the bottom line of using the various social media marketing tools is to boost lead generation, drive sales and create more revenue. Without leads, there are no sales, hence no revenue, and the business will be out of the market.

5. It allows you to monitor and improve your marketing efforts  

Among the highly sort-after social media marketing tools are those that gauge your social media marketing performance and recommend better ways to boost your online market penetration. 

The truth about marketing is that not all the strategies will work. But you must test all of them before settling on the best. And without a means to track each technique’s performance, you are more likely to scale the wrong or a “not-so-effective” strategy.

6. It allows for effective account management 

There are several types of social media marketing tools out there, and each is designed for specific social media channels and to offer specific marketing services.  

7. It allows you to analyze your competitors. 

Some social media marketing tools allow you to conduct a competitive analysis to see what your competitors are up to. 

The benefit to this is that you can use what your competitors are doing as a guide to avoid repeating their mistakes or as a benchmark to borrow the social media marketing best practices. 

Social media marketing tools also save you a lot of time since most manual work becomes automated. 

Let’s now look at the various tools sorted into different categories.

Social media marketing tools by categories 

As a marketing tool, social media gives you the advantage of reaching a wider audience, targeting the right people, and customizing your products or services to a willing audience.

So, what are the best tools for social media marketing? 

Well, it all comes down to your marketing goals, marketing strategies, and the social channels you intend to use to promote your products or services.

But before you can effectively use social media as a marketing tool, you need to understand the various marketing tools in the market, what they do, how effective they are, and whether they work well with your social media marketing strategy.

That said, we’ve rounded up the best social media tools, marketing tips, and best practices to help level-up your social game. 

We have divided the social media marketing tools into 7 categories:

• Content creation tools 
• Content curation tools
• Graphics tools
• Scheduling tools
• Analytics tools
• Monitoring tools
• Lead generation tools

Let’s check them out. 

Content creation tools 

1. BiQ Cloud 

BiQ Cloud is our comprehensive SEO tool that allows you to target your audience with better content while boosting your odds of ranking higher on the search engines. 

BiQ cloud features several useful tools, such as Keyword Intelligence, which help you pick the right keyword to target your posts. Data such as keyword volume, trend, and value allows you to plan your content to meet your audience’s needs.

Another critical feature is our BiQ’s Content Intelligence that helps you write an SEO-friendly draft covering the key topics relevant to your audience. 

You can also use features such as content grader to check your article’s relevancy and even see if you have content that has the recommended keyword density.

2. Google Trends 

Google Trends gives you real-time data for a quick understanding of the trending topics. You can also use it to source keywords and related keywords for more in-depth content creation and development. 

3. Grammarly

Grammarly ensures your content delivers the right message without grammar or spelling mistakes. You can also use this tool to check your content’s readability so you can better communicate with your audience.

Use a content calendar to help you keep track of your content marketing strategies. A content calendar will not only help you notice gaps in your content but also brainstorm for great content ideas as well as maintain your campaign’s consistency.

Content curation tools

Unlike content creation, content curation involves collecting specific content from various sources and adding your personal touches to give it a new or better context. Here, you are not creating content from scratch but compiling relevant content created by other people.

Since this process doesn’t involve a high level of creativity, you can use social media marketing tools. We’ve highlighted the best three below:

1. FlipBoard

This is a free mobile and desktop app used by marketers and content curators to create “mini-magazines” with links to their favorite blog posts, news sites, online resource hubs, etc.

You can choose to create your own magazines and set them to public so that others can use and even share them on social media channels. Or, you can just create a Flipboard account and browse the site to find the best magazines to share.

2. Pocket 

Pocket is an online platform that allows you to accrue the best content and save it for later use. This software comes with exciting features where you can save links, images, videos, and text.

Using pocket, you can search and group posts with tags. And the best part? It integrates with several other apps, such as Evernote.

3. Scoop.it 

This is one of the social media marketing tools that give you the freedom to search, view and share the most relevant content with your audience. This tool integrates with different social media platforms, but the free version is only limited to two social media accounts. 

Refer to our content curation guide for more tips and learn how to use the above tools to increase your brand’s credibility and exposure.  

Graphics tools

Images and graphics play a critical role in social media marketing. In fact, 74% of marketers surveyed said more than 70% of their content contained visuals. 

These visuals help attract and engage your audience in a unique and personalized manner. Below are the three best social media marketing tools for graphic design.

1. Canva

Canva is a template-based graphics design tool, best known for its striking infographics. It is one of the social media marketing tools you can use to create compelling visuals. 

2. Adobe Spark

Adobe spark is freemium software and one of the social media marketing tools that offer more than just graphics and templates. 

A mobile version of this app, the Adobe Spark Post, comes with built-in features that allow you to edit photos with visual effects to convey your brand message accurately. 

3. Pablo by Buffer

This is a minimalist social media marketing tool used for placing text over the top of brand images. The easy-to-use interface and the simplistic design leaves a lot to be admired. You don’t need any prior knowledge to work with this app. 

Pablo is also one of the tools for social media marketing that’s free and doesn’t require you to create an account. You just need to visit the site, pick an image from Unsplash or click to upload your own, and you’re good to do.

Scheduling tools

Scheduling tools are some of the most common social media marketing tools among marketers. These tools not only save you time but ensures you are up to date with your content creation and publishing. 

Below are the best social media marketing tools in this category: 

1. Sprout Social 

If you want to publish content across social channels simultaneously and even monitor the performance, such as reach and engagement, sprout social is the way to go. 

This software allows you to effortlessly plan and organize content and even schedule and publish using calendar and scheduler tools.

2. Co Schedule 

Co schedule integrates with business blogs via WordPress, allowing brands to publish content and push it to social media simultaneously. The software comes with a “top content report” that documents the level of engagement and social shares. 

Unlike the other social media marketing tools in this category, Co Schedule focuses on content vs. social performance.

For instance, the “ReQueue” Bucket feature allows marketers to schedule and recycle their best-performing messages and marketing phrases automatically.  

3. Airtable

Airtable is another powerful tool that brings together content planning and social media scheduling. The app allows individuals and teams to cooperate on projects, set targets, and map future content ideas.   

Analytics tools

Social media analytics tools allow marketers to track their marketing efforts to improve and ensure success and better ROI. Below are the three social media marketing tools with the best tracking and reporting capabilities.

1. Hubspot

HubSpot is one of the industry leaders in this niche, thanks to its comprehensive analytics features that compare social media performance to revenue and business growth.

This software can also compare the performance of various social channels to gauge campaign performance.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a social media marketing tool you can use to analyze the social engagement level of any piece of content across the web.

This is one of the social media tools that give you a comprehensive report of how many shares, likes, etc., your latest post received on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. 

You can also monitor your competitor’s performance on the same social channels and then use the data to inform your content marketing campaigns. 

3. Sprout Social 

Sprout Social captures the performance of either a single social channel or all your social media platforms based on your preferences. It’s also one of the social media marketing tools that offer templated and customizable reporting options. 

This means you can gather all the social performance metrics or only a few you genuinely understand and care about. 

Monitoring tools

Social media monitoring tools are used to track and report information mentioned across the internet that’s relevant to your brand or business. Some of such information include:

• Brand mentions – you can track your own brand mentions or that of your competitors
•  specific hashtags – use to track hashtags relevant to your niche 
• Trending topics, particularly those related to your industry 

Below are the best three social media tools in this category.

1. HootSuite 

Hootsuite comes with a search stream that allows you to monitor social conversations relevant to your business, industry, or products. Here you can monitor what people say based on their location, hashtags, keywords, etc. 

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free offering from Google that allows you to monitor the entire web for mentions of your brand, keywords, or any other relevant topic.

You just need to sign in to your Google account, head to the Google Alerts page and type in the keyword or phrase to monitor.

If there are matching mentions across the web, Google will email you the results. Remember, you can set alerts for specific languages, regions, topics, etc. 

3. Talkwalker 

Talkwalker is one of the social media marketing tools used by marketers to analyze engagement, comments, reach, and brand sentiment. The software uses more than 50 filters to track and monitor conversations across millions of data sources. 

Lead generation tools

Lead generation can be challenging if you don’t have the right social media marketing tools in place. In fact, 61% of marketers consider generating traffic and generating leads as their biggest challenge. 

That said, a lead generation tool shouldn’t only capture the right people but ultimately communicate your value in an authentic, authoritative and precise manner.

You want your leads to connect with your brand and see the value even before using your product or services.

Below are the three social media tools you can use for lead generation:

1. Optimonster 

Optimonster is a lead generation software that allows marketers and business owners to capture and manage leads. It’s one of the social media marketing tools that integrate with major CRM and email marketing platforms.

Optimonster allows you to target leads by location, activity/inactivity, and even device type, besides the other advanced targeting tactics. 

2. HubSpot

HubSpot does a lot in the marketing niche, and lead generation is one of its strongholds. HubSpot’s automated workflows and email campaigns make lead generation an easy task for businesses, large and small.

3. Discover.ly

Discover.ly is a simplistic social media marketing tool that allows you to find new leads without navigating through individual networks quickly. This Google Chrome Add-On tells you who your audience is connected to on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 

When choosing social media marketing tools to capture new leads, make sure they are customer-centric. They should also be effective in creating connections and soliciting responses.

You can refer to the common lead generation mistakes to guide you when picking a lead generation software. 

Final thoughts

Remember, all the tools for social media marketing discussed above have their own competitive advantages, but you need to keenly align your marketing goals with the right tools and social channels to ensure success.

Which social media marketing tools are you going to try first? Let me know in the comments below.