Social media marketing is about crafting engaging messages, curating relevant content, responding to questions and comments, listening to online conversations to identify opportunities, analyzing efforts, and repeating day in and day out. Are you sweaty from just reading the previous sentence?
Thankfully, these social media management tools lift a lot of work of your shoulders. Better yet, these tools are some of the best propositions in the market.
5 Content Curation Tools
While Pocket’s primary intention is to help you save interesting articles around the web to read later, it will also send you notifications when stories you might find relevant are trending and enjoy increased popularity. So, save up a few of interesting, industry-relevant articles to get more suggestions. In addition, you could integrate IFTTT recipe where each article saved to Pocket, will automatically tweet out on your handle.
Pocket is one of the most highly recommended content curation software in the industry. Also, @PocketHits is a great source of trending content, as they tweet out an average of five articles a day.
This website aggregates a wealth of interesting articles on a stunning variety of topics. Guy Kawasaki, the founder of Alltop, is one of the most famous social media users, who tweets upwards of 50 tweets each day and enjoys a Twitter following of millions of people. Quite impressive, right?
Alltop displays a list of articles from a variety of sources all on one page (this page can look quite overwhelming at first). Besides most popular stories from around the Web, you can also select relevant topics by clicking on “Topics” section. This is also a great tool to look for inspiration and ideas for your next blog post or social media update.
BuzzSumo is a very powerful content curation software that provides in-depth analytics for content professionals. It has an amazing formula to calculate the virality score of any given piece of content. Plus, it ranks the most popular content by displaying lots of statistics that can even be separated by popularity on a specific social media platform, specific date, and even media type (like video, photos, articles, etc.) BuzzSumo is one of my top sources for great engaging content.
Scoop.It is not only a user-friendly tool with a beautiful interface, it’s also great in that it allows you to connect with other people using the software. So, you have a chance to connect with the best content curators in your industry.
You can start right away by entering a few keywords and let big data semantic technology fetch robust content. Publish it to your social networks, websites, blogs, newsletters, white-labelled content sites or even your private intranet with one click.
Topsy allows you to search through popular relevant articles based on your specified interest. You can even specify whether you’re looking for links, photos, videos or people! Topsy also displays how popular any given content is by displaying how many people are talking about it right now. The platform also offers analytical and trend information that might prove very useful in gaining insights into content that gains traction with your audience.
5 Scheduling Tools
*Pssst… a whole list of Instagram schedulers is here.
CoSchedule is an amazing app for bloggers using WordPress platform (like this girl). It is a content calendar that manages all of the pitches, drafts and published articles and allows you to manage and work with your whole team.
What’s even better, you can let it automatically share the new content to all specified social networks and then automatically repost it every week or month. This allows for greater reach, so if some people in your audience didn’t see your amazing piece of content the first time, they might see it the next time. Besides, this increases traffic to your website or blog as a whole, expanding the span of the content instead of just sharing it once.
Hootsuite interface looks like streams. When you schedule messages for all major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, you can see all the scheduled content in a stream with times when it will go live.
Download free Chrome extension Hootlet, which allows you to schedule interesting content across the web without the need to go back to Hootsuite website. Hootlet also allows you to see tweets in the proximity of your business and monitor the web for brand mentions.
The “Suggested Content” feature (available to paying customers) suggests best content for specified keywords and automatically schedules it for you at times where a majority of your network is active for maximum exposure.
A majority of social media and digital marketing leaders stand by this app. Buffer allows you to schedule content to all major social networks and suggests the best times to publish it. If you’d like to promote the same content multiple times, schedule it once and allow Buffer to handle the rest with their extension. The app will put it in queue of scheduled messages and you won’t have to do it manually.
Klout is a great tool to monitor your influence. Klout also suggests content based on keywords and topics, as well as the best times to publish it. Klout also has perks program for people who have the most influence in their respective fields. Companies use Klout to find thought leaders and influencers in their niche. However, this function is available for individual users, not business users.
Don’t forget to add all of your handles if you manage multiple social accounts; your score will only improve.
Edgar is a relatively new, yet differentiated proposition in the market. First, you have to create categories for social updates, such as “company updates,” “promotional messages,” “content curation,” and so forth. Then, you create a schedule for each category. So say, you could publish curated content each day and choose to send out promotional messages only once a week. At this point, a bulk of your job is done. Now, all you need to do is sort your updates into categories. Voilà!
After Edgar publishes every update in a category, the software automatically pulls more from your library of already sent messages. This way, your social queue never gets empty, and your updates get the chance to be seen multiple times.
5 Analytics Tools
Google Analytics provides a wealth of information about your website, including traffic acquisition, social channels, user profiles and much more. So, it comes as no surprise that a majority of business owners use it to track overall website health.
However, you don’t have to pull all that information manually. You can set up reports with all the necessary data and then schedule these reports to be sent out automatically on a weekly or monthly basis.
From the Email Setup screen, choose the Schedule tab. Then add any email addresses to which you’d like the report sent. Check “Send to me” to have the report sent automatically to the address on the account. Be sure to include a meaningful Subject and Description as this will be the subject and content of the email you are sent with your reports.
Choose the format in which you’d like to receive your reports. Select a Date Range or schedule monthly. Check “Include date comparison” if you want to have this report’s data compared to a previous month in the report you receive. This is good for tracking changes and growth. Click “Schedule.”
Sprout Social provides a wealth of network, profile and message-level insights for all major networks, including Facebook, Twitter and more. Sprout’s proprietary analytics suite also allows for team and engagement reports that show engagement of each team member and a team as a whole.
Their dynamic reports are also beautifully simple and can be custom branded and exported to CSV and PDF. Sprout Social also sends out weekly summary reports emails of activity across all your social networks.
Hootsuite can be employed not only as a scheduling tool, but as an analytics tool as well. You can track growth, engagement rates and much more across all of your social handles. What’s even cooler is that you can schedule daily, weekly, and monthly PDF reports that will arrive to your and boss’ inboxes automatically (saving you time going through separate accounts and collecting and organizing important data).
Iconosquare allows you to easily measure your Instagram performance with exclusive insights, easy-to-understand graphs and data exports. Iconosquare monitors each individual post’s engagement, your account growth (including gained and lost followers), hashtag performance, community insights (like brand advocates identification and location, most engaged followers and reciprocal relationships and followings who don’t follow you back), and optimization tips to improve your posts’ performance.
Iconosquare also provides data export, rolling month analysis, and monthly reports.
Cyfe is a cloud-based service that allows you to easily monitor and share all of your vital business data from one single location in real time. Yes, real time. What’s interesting about Cyfe is that it tracks more than just social media presence. It brings together advertising, SEO, social media, and analytics data, in addition to business expenses, company revenue, customer invoices, balances, and more. It also check the health of your website by analyzing website uptime, server load, app performance, and end-user tracking.
From this extensive dashboard, you also get information on your latest projects, tasks, to-dos, upcoming calendar events, and more. Not only do you get a bird’s eye view of all your digital marketing efforts in one place, you can also automate reporting.
Want even more resources?
5 Tools for Creating Visuals
I love this tool and create a majority of my visual content in Canva. This website makes it easy to build correctly-sized images for all major social media platforms. You can create Facebook and Twitter cover photos, infographics and just web graphics. They have a beautiful library of photos and fonts, but you can also upload your own visuals and design pictures from scratch using text and filters.
This website is a great easy-to-use tool for editing images. You can crop and rotate images, as well as, add filters and frames to it in pixlr-o-matic.com. You don’t have to install any programs on your computer; typing in address is enough to get started with this tool.
You don’t have to be a graphic designer or have a very sharp sense for color palettes to create beautiful, outstanding visuals. Design Seeds is a great resource if you’re not sure which colors go well together. If you have an image, upload it to the website and it will give you great suggestions on your color palette.
Use these colors if you’d like to add a text overlay, create color block or anything else you might want to do with it. It’s really sad to see a beautiful image that has a great potential with unsuccessful copy overlay that distracts or doesn’t go with an image.
InstaQuote is an app available on both Google Play Store and iTunes. It allows to easily add text over any image in just seconds. This is a great tool not only for Instagram, but other networks as well, when you want to share a quick update with your audience and catch their attention with text.
InstaQuote comes with high quality background collections, templates, and over 50 font choices. You can also use your images and customize words with font sizes, colors, alignments positions and line spacing. The app then allows to export a newly-created image to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or just your camera roll.
Piktochart is an amazing resource for infographics. This freemium tool makes it easy to create appealing infographics that look like you spent hours and days on it. They have a variety of pre-made layouts for you to fill out or, if you’d like, you can start from a scratch.
5 Tools for Social Listening
Viralheat is a great social media listening tool that provides in-depth analytics for mentions of your brand name, products, location, and competition. Not only can you listen to conversations across all major platforms in real time, you can also identify influential handles, their sentiment, share of voice and historical trends. The most basic subscription plan allows you to tune in with 15 social accounts with unlimited mentions.
Mention offers a website app, Chrome app, as well as iOS and Android apps, so you can constantly monitor conversation happening about your brand online. Mention sends notifications every time a new result is discovered. You can also sign up to receive daily and weekly summaries. You can even export this information in PDF or CSV format. Better yet, for businesses who dream of going global, Mention monitors an amazing amount of sources in 42 languages.
The only downfall is that their free basic plan offers only one user monitoring one alert and 250 mentions a month. However, give it a test drive and you will see that Mention is worth every penny.
Hootsuite has been included in every category on this list, yet it helps you with social listening as well. There are two options with Hootsuite here. You can specify search terms for Hootsuite to fetch results to you. I set up multiple streams with and without @ symbol as well as search terms for keywords and competition. The second option is to integrate Talkwalker application with the Hootsuite dashboard and set up email notifications as well. However, the latter option is a bit pricier.
Social Mention might be the most user-friendly option for beginners, because it doesn’t require registration and presents information in a single information stream. You can still monitor all major platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube, in real time and access some basic analytics, such as strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the message.
You can also still analyze the most robust sources of conversations and influential handles. Besides, there is also an available RSS feed for specific searches and the ability to export that data in CSV format.
If you’re going to use Sprout Social for its many benefits, don’t miss out on its social listening abilities as well. The Smart Inbox brings all your messages into one place, so you can easily engage with customers across multiple channels, all in one manageable location. You can also configure your Smart Inbox with profile, message type, keyword and date filters to cut through the noise and quickly identify the messages that matter most. You can even monitor conversation that don’t directly mention your brand with Brand Keywords.
Social media marketing is about crafting engaging messages, curating relevant content, responding to questions and comments, listening to online conversations to identify opportunities, analyzing efforts, and repeating this day in and day out.
What social media management tools did you use? What are some tools you like that are not on the list? Share in the comment section below or head over to Instagram @lesyaliu to continue the conversation.
Great list! I hadn’t heard of a lot of these tools and I’m bookmarking this link to explore all of these tools later today. Can never have too much help in the blogging world!
I am glad you found it so useful Casey! Let me knwo how it goes and which tools you liked the most.