Social media marketing is bigger than ever. You basically have to be doing it.
Trouble is, that means it’s competitive. To make a dent, you need a great social media strategy.
We’ve found some tools that you can use for marketing automation along the way. If you’re like me, you want to outsource as much as you can, and the best way to do that is through social media marketing tools.
These tools will help you build the best social media profiles, and start bringing in customers.
These social marketing tools help you find content, engage influencers, and monitor your social media campaign.
But first, you need a social media account. It takes skill to make a good one. We won’t get too deep into this, but here are a few tips for some of the major social networks:
Setting Up for Social Media Success
According to HubSpot, the key is to have a great “About” page, an excellent cover picture, and to know how to properly use Facebook Insights.
All you need for Twitter is a good handle, some nice images, and the right voice. That will lay the groundwork to build a strong brand on this social platform.
LinkedIn SEO is a real thing, so optimizing your profile is all about adding the right keywords, and building your brand identity. We also suggest you leverage LinkedIn analytics to make the most out of your marketing campaign.
Hootsuite calls Instagram a “critically important social network.” Their guide to creating a Business account explains everything you need to know to get started. Plus, they recommend some fun photo-editing apps.
Now that you’re all set up, let’s look at those tools.
Best Social Media Marketing Tools
Table of Contents:
- Discoverly – Find New Followers
- BuzzSumo – Share Great Content
- Rafflecopter – Host a Competition
- Tribe Dynamics – Find and Engage Influencers
- Mention – Complete Social Monitoring
1. Discoverly – Find New Followers
You won’t make much of a dent without a decent following. You need people to share and engage with your content. That’s how you build brand awareness.
Buffer’s Kevan Lee wrote a great piece on how to get your first 1,000 followers.
For every social network, you need:
- A complete and interesting social profile
- Links to make your profiles easy to find
- Great social media content
- A social media scheduling tool – our personnal favorite is Mention’s Publish feature
- Great social media followers to interact with
The Discoverly Chrome extension will help with that last point, as it is one of the most interesting social media tools for digital marketing.
When you view a person’s social media or email profile, it’ll show you their other accounts.
Suppose you follow someone on Twitter. Hover over the Discoverly icon, and you’ll see all their other public social networks.
Use it to build stronger connections with customers, clients, and colleagues. Follow your Twitter customers on their LinkedIn and Google+ profiles. When they follow back, you’ve turned a single social user into three.
2. BuzzSumo – Share Great Content
Once you’ve found your followers, you need to make them happy. This means excellent content creation.
You should also share other people’s work. BuzzSumo makes it easy to find the best content around, for great social media engagement.
BuzzSumo is a simple tool for researching your industry. Search for keywords, and get a list of the most popular content that day, week, month, etc.
Share and comment on these posts to interact with other writers, and cement yourself as a voice in your industry.
Through this social marketing tool, you can also see what’s popular on specific social networks. If certain topics are more popular on one network than another, build that into your sharing strategy.
3. Rafflecopter – Host a Competition
Competitions get social media users engaged. Plus, they’re dead simple. Our friend Rob Brooks says social media competitions need:
- Clear contest objectives
- The right competition format
- Well-defined rules
- Time – and prize – limits
- A great look and feel
Rafflecopter calls itself “the world’s easiest way to run a giveaway.” In three minutes, you can run a contest across multiple social platforms.
It lets you add multiple ways to enter the contest, from following you on Twitter, to signing up for your newsletter.
With this social media marketing tool, you can assign different point values to different entry options.
It’s a quick and easy way to entertain users and collect lead information. All for free!
4. Tribe Dynamics – Find and Engage Influencers
To make your message heard, find the people with the loudest voices.
Influencers are social media users with large followings that listen to them. They help build brand awareness and direct people to your company. Plus, they make you look good.
The key to influencer marketing is finding the right partners. If influencer marketing is your main mission, that’s where this tool comes in handy.
To learn more, we wrote a whole book about influencer marketing on social media.
5. Mention – Complete Social Monitoring
Want to find new content ideas, monitor competitors, schedule your social media posts, and grow your brand?
Look no further.
With Mention, you can monitor what is being said about any name or keyword online. With that knowledge, you can then react to and analyze conversations.
Specifically for social media:
- A designated Twitter dashboard to monitor and improve your account’s performance.
- Join Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram conversations directly from the app.
- Monitor and analyze competitors’ social media strategies.
- Identify and interact with the important influencers in your niche
And That’s The List!
Short and sweet. There are a million-and-one ways to market on social media, but these six tools for social media marketing will make a huge difference.
Pick your favorite, or use all of them together. Make them part of your daily social routine. You’ll start building connections and finding customers in no time.
