Every marketer lives and breathes social media these days. Because, quite frankly, these platforms have placed leads on our fingertips.
However, social media marketing is a complex process in itself. Every step that a brand makes must be meticulously planned.
And putting these many social media marketing techniques into action on a large scale necessitates a lot of time, effort, and resources.
As a result, social media teams and agencies are turning to smarter solutions and adopting the best social media marketing tools to automate tedious tasks.
Here’s a comprehensive list of the 30 best social media marketing tools to help you decide on those catering to your needs.
We have segregated them under specific marketing activities for easy reference so you know what to use and when.
How we analyze and select Social Media Tools:
Our process of curating a list of relevant tools involves thorough research and evaluation. Factors considered include platform compatibility, automation, content creation, visualization, analytics, collaboration, pricing, scalability, and user experience. Curated by seasoned professionals, these tools empower marketers with valuable insights to make informed decisions and scale their businesses.
Let’s get started!
Social Media Marketing Platforms for Scheduling
Buffer is a platform that helps you manage major social accounts. While its community of happy customers appreciates its good user interface, agencies and small teams might find this social media marketing platform expensive in the long run.
You will need a separate subscription to enjoy all Buffer features such as Buffer Reply and Buffer Analyze, which are usually offered without any extra charges by its alternatives.
If your team’s or agency’s primary focus is visual marketing on Pinterest and Instagram, then Tailwind is undeniably the best choice for you.
It has some unique features like finding hashtags, monitoring trends, and sharing evergreen content that can save your team a lot of time and effort. You can even connect with multiple community members and boost your reach which makes it one of the best social media tools for marketing.
Planable features are tailored for small social media teams. You can bring all your communication from email threads to this platform by leveraging features like tagging and content feedback in real-time.
This social media tool for marketing also offers localized workspaces with amazing team collaboration services. You can even access most edit history and restore older versions.
Loomly started as a simple social media calendar that focused on content discovery, organization, and management.
Now, they’ve added scheduling and publishing capabilities through an integration with Buffer. It also gives you post ideas for upcoming holidays, latest trends, and best practices which makes it one of the best tools for social media marketing.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Content Curation
If you read multiple publications, keep track of trending conversations on social media, and various blogs, or explore new videos on YouTube to keep up with the ongoing industry talk, Feedly is the app for you!
Feedly organizes all your favorite web content to one platform, so you and your team save time. Its most popular features are shared feeds, third-party integrations (like Zapier), and multi-language content support.
Buzzsumo provides you with advanced options to filter curated lists, discover influencers, monitor social content, and analyze content trends on various social platforms.
Buzzsumo also helps you discover the most popular questions posted on forums like Amazon, Reddit, Quora, etc. If you need powerful content discovery, curation, and insight features, Buzzsumo is one of the best social media tools.
Quuu is a great social media platform for marketing for your team if you don’t wish to spend time crafting and scheduling posts. You set Quuu to automatically share relevant content to your social accounts at specified intervals.
Quuu does not have a scheduling platform of its own, so it integrates with Buffer and HubSpot to publish content.
This social media marketing platform has over 500 categories wherein you find content suggestions that are the most relevant to your niche. If you use Quuu Promote, your content will be suggested to other Quuu users following the same niche so they might share your content to their social network.
Curata’s intelligent Content Curation Software (CCS) improves your experience of curating content by constantly adapting to your content preferences.
It has a browser plugin that helps you curate content when you’re surfing on the Internet. It also lets you receive content suggestions from your team members.
This social media platform for marketing helps you find the right content and shares the relevant content on social media, uses it in emails, and publishes it on your blog/website with its various integrations. Curata enables you to make changes to the content before you share or publish it. It also provides you with SEO and image suggestions.
UpContent claims to have cut down on time consumed in content search by 65%, and rightly so. It is an amazing content discovery platform that integrates with many social media management tools to provide a supply of fresh content.
UpContent curates more than 1.5 million monthly articles for its users and clients. These users can add custom search parameters and not stick to pre-set filters, and the tool takes care of the rest.
You can even customize articles, and add images from Shutterstock access which UpContent provides or post them as they are to your social media profiles.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Analytics
SocialPilot’s social media analytics helps you view analytics for your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest accounts.
Its in-depth and comprehensive analytics reports give you an overview of all essential metrics such as engagement, top fans, best times to post, popular hashtags, and more.
To create a consistent brand experience, SocialPilot enables you to add your organization’s name and logo to the reports. You can either export the PDF and excel reports or mail them to your team and clients from the tool itself.
Keyhole mainly focuses on hashtag tracking, keyword tracking, and listening for your connected social media profiles. Its dashboard displays real-time analytics and also helps you download reports in PDF format.
An added advantage of this best tool for social media marketing is that you can discover the most relevant influencers in your niche by filtering the list with keywords, hashtags, and geographical location.
Audiense is an advanced analytics tool with unique features like audience personality insights and audience segmentation. Their intelligent audience segmentation capability considers important aspects like users in your target audience having low engagement.
It refines your audience segments and helps you target them better. Its personality insights capability enables you to take a closer look at your audience’s behavior and mindset.
Audiense has another product called Audiense Connect. This product helps you with all crucial Twitter analytics such as insights, competitive analysis, Twitter followers management, chatbots, and more.
Brandwatch is an advanced analytics tool that helps you better understand your customers and audience’s minds with AI-powered insights, social listening, sentiment analysis, and reporting capabilities.
This tool is apt for you if you are an agency dealing with big brands and handling all their marketing processes.
Brandwatch also helps you find micro-influencers in your niche, create visual data reports, and find relevant data with many filters.
Brandwatch’s target audience comprises agencies and enterprises. Hence, for small to medium brands, its pricing may seem steep.
Mention works as a community management tool for you by monitoring keywords, analyzing competitor’s strategies, and finding relevant influencers.
One of the most popular features of Mention is its ‘alerts’ system. When you set to track a keyword, you get notified about its mentions in real-time.
You can get summaries of your analytics delivered to your inbox every day. You have instant access to all your brand mentions on the web, along with the ability to filter analytics to focus on specific metrics.
Rebrandly is a custom URL shortener that lets you shorten, brand and track every link you create and share with its detailed analytics feature.
Its more advanced features include link retargeting that enables you to track anyone who clicks on your links. It gives you the power to personalize your audience’s journey based on their surfing behavior.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Analytics
Buzzsumo is popular for its content discovery, curation, and analysis features, but its influencer marketing capability is equally useful. The tool helps you in the entire process of influencer marketing – right from discovering influencers with real social influence to reaching out to them.
You can review the content shared by an influencer to see if it matches your brand’s tone and message. Also, you can follow influencers directly from Buzzsumo, so they get added to your Twitter lists.
You have the flexibility of exporting and sharing the influencer data with your team members. You can even maintain a list of all influencers your team needs to reach out to.
Upfluence is a tool that helps you at every stage of influencer marketing. You can look for the right influencers, track influencer campaigns, and measure their success rate.
This tool enables you to search for influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and blogs. Its smart filters help you narrow down the list as per the influencer’s location, language, metrics, and activities on social media.
As for its campaign management capabilities, Upfluence helps you set your campaigns’ budget, coordinate with the influencers throughout, and finally transfer the payment to them.
If you run an agency that provides influencer marketing services to its clients, this tool can work wonders for you.
TapInfluence‘s real-time dashboard helps you schedule posts, invite influencers to collaborate on assignments, and check their progress. Its analytics gives you an edge by comparing your campaign performance with that of the industry’s standards.
TapInfluence competes with Upfluence in terms of features. It has added capabilities of advanced search and content scheduling for influencer campaigns.
It helps you review the influencer’s reach and engagement rates, gain insights about their audience, interests, brand affiliations, income, etc.
NinjaOutreach helps you find and reach out to influencers. This tool’s features are tailored for agencies that are looking for influencer outreach in bulk.
So, NinjaOutreach enables you to automate the entire process of creating emails and sending them to influencers. With its ready-to-use templates, you can save the time you currently spend on writing emails.
After sending all emails, you can see what worked with the open rate, click rate, and replies. This tool is perfect for teams and agencies that are looking for simple search and outreach features.
HypeAuditor is an excellent tool for brands and agencies. The platform claims itself to be a fraud-free influencer marketing platform.
This social media marketing tool skims through millions of profiles and filters out fake followers and bots, so you get influencers who are actually reliable.
Apart from influencer discovery, you can also use it for analytics, campaign management, competitive analysis, sentiment analysis, white-labeled reporting, custom integrations, and more.
Social Media Marketing Tools for Designing
Instasize is a photo and video editing app used by both professionals and aspiring creatives. With its well-curated selection of filters and effects and incredibly user-friendly interface, Instasize has become an easy choice for those who want to publish high-quality content while on the go.
With its one-tap resizer, you can ensure that your content is optimized and ready for any social media platform of your choice.
The app has a free version which comes with limited access to its popular features and filters, while the pro version is available for only $4.99 a month.
InVideo is an online video creation platform that helps you convert your content into great videos. It comes with three video creation techniques, namely, Text-to-video, where you can convert written content to videos; pre-made templates, where you only have to customize and edit the template to create a video; and a blank canvas, where you can start a project from scratch.
InVideo’s stock library comprises footage from iStock, Shutterstock, and StoryBlock. This online video editor comes with innovative editing features that allow users to add animations, overlays, masks, and voiceovers. You can render your videos in 1080p Full HD quality and share them on social media or download them to your system.collaboration features.
Canva is unarguably the most popular image creation and editing tool used by professionals across various industries. Its hundreds of templates for social posts and photo and icon libraries make it easy to create compelling visuals.
While you can use Canva for free, its Pro account has advanced features for small businesses and agencies.
For instance, it helps you create a brand kit so your team can maintain a consistent tone across all visuals. Also, it provides you with great animation and team collaboration features.
Lumen5 helps you create a short video format in minutes. Import your content, and Lumen5 will convert it into a text video. You can customize font style and color as per your brand tone.
Lumen5 also has an extensive library of images, GIFs, music, and short videos that you can just drag and drop to add to your video. While this tool has a free plan, it has certain limitations regarding the quality of the video, with the number of videos restricted to 5.
Fotor is a great free online photo editor and design maker. It enables social marketers and businesses to create ads, social media posts, and more for their targeted audience.
You can edit photos, make a photo collage, and create designs. It provides a wide range of photo effects and filters with design templates for social media, including Twitter cover, Facebook cover, and YouTube Channel art.
Animoto works quite like Lumen5. It has a storyboard feature that enables you to drag and drop photos and videos directly. It also has a library of Getty images and videos.
While Animoto has great templates for various themes, its customization features like style, speed, layout, text, etc., are limited.
Snappa is a graphic design tool that helps you create and refine your images with a feature-rich photo editor. Its asset library gives you access to more than 1,00,000 photos and graphics.
It enables you to import your brand’s fonts and organize all your designs into various folders. This tool works great for teams as it helps you share all designs, assets, and folders with your team members.
Visme lets you create visually appealing presentations, infographics, reports, social media graphics and so much more.
It has free stock photos and vector icons, easy-to-use data visualization tools, pre-made templates and a drag-and-drop editor. You’ll be able to create beautiful designs in little to no time.
All templates and design elements are fully customizable, from color schemes to fonts to background images.
Placeit is a powerful online design tool that allows you to create branding images in just minutes. You can access new templates daily and mockups made by professionals that can be customized in just a few clicks.
Placeit is perfect for small business entrepreneurs, where you can find everything to brand your Facebook page from scratch, logos, banner templates, video intros to slideshow presentations, and so much more.
You can use Placeit for free with their selected free templates or sign up with a monthly subscription. The subscription includes unlimited downloads on mockups, designs, video templates, and logos, plus you can cancel anytime.
BeFunky is a photo editing and graphic design platform that’s incredibly easy to use. With its many one-click editing features, you can turn photos into art, remove backgrounds, retouch portraits, create collages, and make your own designs using templates.
You can use many of BeFunky’s features for free, but its BeFunky Plus option gives you access to its entire suite. Whether you stick with free or Plus, you’ll get to browse an extensive library of vector graphics and stock images you can use in your brand’s marketing.
Conclusion
The growing importance of social media marketing is causing companies to devote more time and money to it as they realize its immense potential. However, without the right technology stack, you can’t take advantage of the potential.
The effectiveness of a tool depends on its scalability, user-friendliness, and value for money, and we incorporated these qualities into our list so that they are ready to grow with your team, help you increase productivity, and save you time.
If you are all set to heighten your social media marketing for real, get started with SocialPilot. Take its 14-day free trial and volte-face your branding altogether.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s a social media strategy?
A social media strategy is a comprehensive content creation and promotion process on popular social media sites for branding purposes. Marketers also leverage social media tools for executing their strategies and even analyzing their efficiency.
What are social media tools used for?
Social media tools are used for streamlining social media activities across multiple social media sites. It is also beneficial for those who manage multiple accounts on the same platform. Social media tools are efficient and great time savers.
What are the best social media tools for marketing?
The best social media marketing tools are:
- SocialPilot
- Buffer
- Tailwind
- Planable
- Loomly
- Buzzsumo
- Curata
Which social media marketing tools do I need for my social media team?
You need social media scheduling tools, content curation tools, social media analytics tools, influencer marketing tools, and designing tools as a complete social media marketing tool stack for your team.
Which social media designing tools should I use for my social media posting?
The best and easy to use designing tools for your social media team are:
- Canva
- Lumen5
- Fotor
- Animoto
- Snappa
- Visme
What are the best influencer marketing tools to work with for your social media marketing?
The best influencer marketing tools to work with for your social media marketing are:
- Buzzsumo
- Upfluence
- TapInfluence
- NinjaOutreach
- HypeAuditor
About the Author
SocialPilot
$30
SocialPilot is one of the best social media marketing tools that allows you to effortlessly automate and manage your social media posts on various platforms, all in one place. SocialPilot assists you in creating, planning, scheduling, and publishing your posts using advanced features.
Draft and tweak each of your social media posts for every platform as and when you are scheduling them on SocialPilot.
Schedule up to 500 posts along with images at once using the bulk scheduling feature of SocialPilot. Just upload a CSV file and you are sorted with a month’s worth posting in a few minutes.
Get a bird’s eye view of your daily/weekly/monthly posts from its social media calendar. You can even drag and drop posts to suitable dates and reschedule them as per your needs.
Other noteworthy features of SocialPilot are:
SocialPilot’s social media analytics helps you view analytics for your Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google Business Profile accounts.
You can download performance insights as PDF reports and share them directly from the tool to your client’s inboxes.
You can even customize your creatives with its image-editing capabilities and customize links to make your posts crisp and succinct.
Get your team and clients together with seamless collaboration and smooth running of your social media marketing agenda.