40+ Social Media Marketing Tools: The Must-Have Arsenal

40+ Social Media Marketing Tools: The Must-Have Arsenal

In 2024, having a solid presence on social media is a must for businesses and marketers. But with so many platforms and features to keep up with, it can be overwhelming to know where to start. This is where social media marketing tools come in—they are the keys to unlocking an efficient, effective, and cutting-edge social strategy. Let's explore the top social media marketing tools modern marketers need in their arsenal!

Listening & Analytics Tools: Keep a Finger on the Social Pulse

The first step to marketing is understanding your audience and competitors. Listening and analytics tools help you do just that by aggregating mentions, hashtags, reviews, visual content, and more from across the major social platforms:

• Meltwater – Get competitive benchmarking, influencer identification, PR analytics, and real-time alerts on brand mentions all in one powerful tool. Pricing starts at $500/month.
• Sprout Social – Dive deep into hashtag performance, audience demographics, sentiment analysis, and amplification opportunities. Plans from $99/month.
• BuzzSumo – Uncover top-performing content by competitor brands or influencers in your space—pricing from $79/month.

Having this intelligence informs your targeting, engages your community, and helps craft messaging that truly resonates.

Key Benefits

• Monitor brand mentions and sentiment
• Identify influencers and opportunities
• Analyse competitor social content performance
• Inform audience targeting and messaging

Social Media Management: Save Time & Energise Your Presence

While analytics tools keep a pulse on your brand, social media management platforms enable you to execute a winning strategy efficiently. Managing multiple brand profiles is made easy with scheduling, publishing, engagement, and reporting features:

• Hootsuite – The OG social media management tool, perfect for social customer service and managing unlimited profiles thanks to tiered pricing.
• Sprout Social – An all-in-one platform with robust analytics, monitoring, engagement, scheduling, and reporting.
• Buffer – Great for queued content and highlights opportunities to fill gaps in your schedule. The basic plan is free!

No more logging in and out of accounts or scrambling to keep up—let these platforms energise your social presence!

Social Monitoring Tools: Listen In and Act Fast

While management systems help plan and schedule content, social monitoring tools provide real-time intelligence and workflow to act on emerging opportunities in the moment:

• Awario – Smart alerts with suggested responses so you can react instantly. Free plan available.
• Mention – Monitoring that highlights opportunities for engagement and community management. Starts at $29/month.
• Keyhole – Track hashtags and viral posts in real-time with easy analytic reporting. Pricing from $99/month.

Why Monitoring Matters

• Flag and respond to negative brand mentions
• Jump on relevant hashtags and trends
• See what content resonates best with your audience
• Enable real-time community engagement

No more flying blind – monitoring tools let you act intelligently and immediately.

Social Contests & Promotions: Incentivise Engagement

Getting seen on social means capturing attention amidst the noise. Running social contests, giveaways, and promotions is the perfect way to incentivise audience engagement creatively:

• Rafflecopter – Run terrific contests by easily integrating with major social platforms. Free plan available.
• Wishpond – Easily create sweepstakes, contests, landing pages, and more with beautiful templates from $45/month.
• Shortstack – Build fun quizzes, ballots, and promotions to capture leads and boost fans. Plans from $49/month.

Driving engagements, shares, tags, and new followers qualify your content to earn more visibility from social algorithms over time. Compelling prizes supplied by sponsors can also lower associated costs in exchange for cross-promotion. Contests work!

Influencer Marketing Platforms: Leverage Key Relationships

Influencer marketing harnesses the power of critical personalities to promote your brand to their engaged, trusting audience organically. Specialised platforms make influencer partnerships scalable and trackable:

• Upfluence – Discover and manage influencers from their over 1M creators database. Free account available.
• AspireIQ is a self-service platform with proven methods that facilitate productive influencer relationships and payment flexibility.
• Traackr – Robust tools to search, manage, optimise, and report on influencer programs. Custom pricing applies.

Micro and nano-influencers are affordable while still creating strong returns thanks to dedicated audience trust built around their niche. Larger personalities bring the potential for considerable spikes in brand visibility and credibility with fans.

Influencer marketing pays—when done right!

Employee Advocacy Tools: Boost Brand Ambassadors

Your employees are your best brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy platforms motivate your team to engage their social networks positively:

• EveryoneSocial – Makes it easy and rewarding for employees to share company content—14-day free trial.
• Smarpshare – Gamification, tracking, and content management simplify driving employee amplification. Free plan available.
• Bambu by Sprout Social – Enable employees to share content easily while providing helpful analytics. Starts at $400/month.

By sharing your content, showcasing involvement, and commenting expertise, your staff attracts great exposure and goodwill towards your brand across their communities.

Make It Matter

• Increase reach 2-5X over company profiles alone
• Employees have 10X more connections than brand channels
• Leverage credibility as “real people” vs corporate accounts
• Reward and recognise top brand advocates

Get your team onboard to expand your brand’s social imprint!

Social Advertising: Double Down on High-Value Audiences

Once your organic social presence is established, social advertising can help scale your impact through targeted promotions. Major platforms make it easy to manage advanced campaigns:

• Facebook Ads – Hyper-target audiences by interests, behaviours, and demographics for your goals. Cost per impression model.
• Twitter Ads- Promoted tweets, trends and accounts to achieve specific objectives within flexible budgets. Pay-per-engagement pricing.
• Pinterest Ads – Drive traffic or conversions by targeting profiles’ browsing behaviour. Charged cost per click.

Refine your targeting and creativity over time based on performance data loops available in each platform. Small daily budgets can still have a noticeable impact!

Social Media Image Design: Visuals Win On Social

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so stand out in social feeds by incorporating compelling visual content that stops scrollers in their tracks. Leverage user-friendly design tools to create stunning social graphics, videos, and more:

• Canva – Beautiful templates and easy customisation for every graphic need. Limited free version available.
• Crello – Funky images, animations and videos. Affordable monthly subscription plans.
• Desygner – Quickly craft Instagram stories, ads, and cards with professional polish. Free and paid versions are offered.

Follow best practices with on-brand filters, text, animations, and more:

• Maintain consistent visual identity
• Leverage seasonal themes and trends
• Experiment across platforms
• Feature UGC when possible
• Promote engagement with polls and questions
• Use the video for deeper storytelling

Well-designed visuals stop the scroll, tell better stories, convey identity, and perform better.

Social Listening Survey Tools: Prove Campaign Impact

How do you know what social strategies are moving the needle for tangible business results? Listening survey tools enable you to directly survey audiences on brand awareness, consideration, and loyalty over time tied back to their social media use and exposure:

• Survata – Simple surveys let you correlate social activity with purchase intent and consideration.
• Impact – Expert-designed listening surveys illuminate campaign exposure and effects on audiences. Significant technology and services cost.
• Demand Metric – Specialists in mapping marketing ROI across all channels via surveys. Substantial fees are based on program depth.

These tools cost more but are incredibly insightful when launching major campaigns or validating social media ROI to the C-suite. All social activity may drive impressions, but does it drive real growth? Listening surveys quantify the actual impact.

Social Publishing & Curation Tools: Fuel Your Content Engine

Quality original or curated content is the lifeblood of social media. But constantly dreaming up new ideas and topics and finding share-worthy news can be challenging. Social publishing and curation tools make it easy:

• Feedly – Follow topics and publications to get alerted to trending news stories to share or report on. The basic version is free.
• DrumUp – Easily curate relevant industry news, blog content, and mentions for sharing—base subscription is $6 per month.
• Content Cal – View trending upcoming moments and clever content ideas in a shareable calendar. Free version available.

Promoting relevant and exciting social content builds community. However, doing so manually consumes too much time and headspace spent searching and curating. Automate the discovery process instead!

Social Media Analytics: Quantify Efforts and Optimise

As we’ve covered, analytics are crucial on social to track performance and refine your strategy. Purpose-built social media analytics tools provide complete yet comprehensible data to learn from and improve:

• Iconosquare – Powerful Instagram analytics, including engagement metrics, audience demographics, and growth tracking. 14-day free trial.
• Socialbakers – Deep analytics across multiple social platforms focused on audience segmentation and competitive benchmarking—custom quote.
• Sprout Social – Robust reporting and analytics capabilities included with their advanced social media management platform. $99+/month

Common reporting dashboards provide:

• Content analytics – Impressions, engagement, amplification
• Audience analytics – Growth, demographics, interests
• Ad analytics – Spend, CPM, CPC, CPL, conversions

Learning from what content resonates, who engages, and how ads perform empowers smarter social investment. Measure analytics that matter most to your goals!

Social Media Customer Service: Deliver Support on Social

Social platforms have become a common channel customers use to seek support. Specialised social customer service software equips brands to handle inquiries, problems and complaints efficiently:

• Sparkcentral – Unified view of all social conversations for tracking and response workflow. Team pricing is available.
• Sprout Social – Manage incoming messages from multiple platforms via connected inboxes. $99+/month
• Zendesk – Seamlessly continues support conversations started on social in their help desk platform. $89+/month.

Delivering excellent social support drives positive brand sentiment, promotes engagement, and provides an opportunity to convert detractors into promoters. Listen and respond!

Social Media Policy & Management: Govern Your Brand Footprint

Between company-owned and personal employee accounts, many disparate voices speak on behalf of your brand across social media. Platforms to develop social media policies, benchmark guidelines, and monitor compliance are crucial to governance:

• Linktree – The standard for creating a guided menu linking all your brand social profiles in one place. Free plan available.
• SocialSignIn – Manages employee access and permissions to corporate social media accounts—14-day free trial.
• Social Intelligence Reports – Tracks policy violations like profanity and delivers usage analytics—customised quote.

While empowering employees brings many benefits on social, structure and oversight mitigate risk:

• Establish contribution guidelines
• Monitor comments for policy adherence
• Limit access where required
• Enforce branding rules

Governing social media usage protects your brand integrity while enabling amplification.

Social Media Marketing Services: Let the Experts Handle It

Developing and executing an impactful social strategy requires significant specialised expertise and effort. For those lacking the in-house capabilities or bandwidth, social marketing service consultants get you up and running quickly:

• Inkbot Design is a full-service digital marketing agency offering specialised ongoing social media management. Custom quote.
• Overit Media – Strategists help build playbooks for executing social initiatives tailored to your brand—custom scope and pricing.
• Drive Social Media – Complete outsourced solution from initial strategy to content creation, community management and reporting. Starts at £795/month.

These experts take time to understand your brand, audience and goals strategically. This insight informs the development and execution of holistic social campaigns designed for maximum impact across the buyer journey. The investment pays dividends in the amplified brand visibility and engagement achieved.

In Summary

Utilising the robust social media marketing tools available enables brands to efficiently listen, publish, engage, advertise and manage communities at scale across social platforms. When woven into an integrated strategy, these tools drive measurable awareness, consideration and lead-generation results. Experiment, learn and optimise efforts based on performance analytics to realise the full potential of social.

Now, reach your audiences where they are already active daily—on social media—in an authentic, relevant way. These are the social media marketing tools to make it happen!

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