Updated November 2019 to reflect new pricing and features for certain tools.
Social media has tilted the marketing landscape, with close to 90 percent of marketers believing in the importance of social media marketing—a practice that saw a spending of close to $10 billion in 2015.
And as its reach has expanded, heightened importance has been placed on social media management, monitoring, analysis, automation and content creation.
This has led to the development of hundreds of tools designed to help brands and e-commerce ventures cope with the increasingly competitive landscape.
More than ever, optimizing your social media presence and understanding both your audience and competitors has become key to improving your marketing strategy.
Here are 17 of the best social media marketing tools available in the market:
Hootsuite
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Plans start at $29.99/month with FREE 30-Day Trial
Hootsuite allows you to manage all your social media marketing efforts from one dashboard, serving as both a scheduling and monitoring tool. The professional plan, designed for entrepreneurs, allows you to manage up to ten social media profiles and get basic analytics, while the team plan, aimed at small businesses, supports 20 profiles and additional features like exportable reports.
AgoraPulse
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Starts $79/month with FREE 28-Day Trial
Agorapulse allows you to virtually monitor everything about your social media profiles in one place. They do everything, like track incoming posts, tweets, direct messages, and comments, and gather all responses to your paid ads.
But that’s just the tip of it, as it is also a tool with which you can manage virtually all your social media engagement, complete with stats and reporting, as well as the ability to run contests, quizzes, and promotions.
Sproutsocial
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Starts at $99/month with FREE 30-Day Trial
Sproutsocial allows you to build and maintain your community by streamlining tasks such as starting, monitoring and joining social conversations, basically providing you with a tool that ensures smarter, faster and more efficient social communications. It also provides analytics that allow you to measure all your social media marketing efforts.
Canva
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: FREE for basic account, Pro plans begin at $9.95 per team member per month
Canva is an incredibly versatile visual editing tool. It comes with thousands of templates that allow you to create images that look great on just about any social media profile. Whether you’re looking to create a Facebook banner, an Instagram post, or LinkedIn profile photo, Canva’s got a template for you.
Tailwind
Best for: Instagram, Pinterest
Price: Starts at $9.99/month with FREE Trial
Tailwind positions itself as the smartest way to schedule on Instagram and Pinterest, saving users time with tools such as bulk image uploads, multi-board pinning, drag-and-drop calendar, along with a slew of shortcuts designed to unclutter your busy schedule. This social media marketing tool also automatically optimizes your Instagram and Pinterest schedules, posting when your audience is most engaged.
Oktopost
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Contact Oktopost directly for subscription plan pricing
Oktopost is a social media management tool designed specifically for B2B enterprise companies. It allows users to stay on top of social media engagement, create and manage engaging campaigns, and empower employee brand advocacy online.
Discover.ly
Best for: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn
Price: FREE
Discover.ly requires users to download a Chrome browser extension, which will then allow you to access additional information about common social media connections with the people you email. Discover.ly enables users to see Facebook and LinkedIn information from Twitter, for example, or see mutual Facebook friends with a LinkedIn contact.
Zoho SalesIQ
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Starts at $19/month with FREE Trial
Zoho SalesIQ is designed to help businesses track visitors to their website and manage live chat to improve customer engagement. The platform also scores leads, identifying those prospects who are most likely to convert, so that you can focus your energy and attention on your best leads.
Atomic Reach
Best for: Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, LinkedIn
Price: Contact Atomic Reach for plan pricing
Atomic AI identifies and measures the impact of language on your marketing communications through the use of artificial intelligence, advanced mathematics, linguistic analysis and machine learning technology. They then rewrite your content in a way that’s designed to boost your conversions.
Followerwonk
Best for: Twitter
Price: Available for FREE, while plan pricing starts at $29/month
This social media marketing tool tells you who your Twitter followers are, their locations and when they tweet. Followerwonk also allows you to expand your social graph by searching for Twitter bios and comparing accounts, enabling you to target new influencers. You also receive actionable visuals to compare your social graph with others and can easily share your reports.
Buzzsumo
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Starts at $99/month, FREE trial available
In brief, Buzzsumo helps you analyze which content performs best for any topic or competitor, while also enabling you to find key influencers to promote your content to. Users consider it an important tool for content marketing and SEO campaigns, with its ability to quickly identify what content works well in which industry.
HowSociable
Best for: Most social platforms
Price: Free
HowSociable gathers the best social media research, services, apps, and software all in one place to help you navigate the world of social media. They provide insight into what tactics and tools work best, and they’re constantly trying out the latest and greatest approaches to give you the inside scoop on what’s the next big thing and what’s just a flash in the pan.
TweetDeck
Best for: Twitter
Price: FREE
Tweetdeck is a Twitter tool designed for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule tweets for future posting, build tweet collections and view multiple timelines in one interface.
Iconosquare
Best for: Instagram and Facebook
Price: Starts at $29/month, FREE trial available
Iconosquare helps you track all your Instagram and Facebook accounts in one place, providing you access to up-to-date insights on all activities, which allows you to maximize your performance. It also gives you access into audience growth, including geo-location and popular followers—vital data that help you grow in Instagram.
Facebook’s Audience Insights
Best for: Facebook
Price: FREE
Audience Insights provides a wealth of demographic and behavioral data about both your and your competitors’ audience on Facebook. As noted by HubSpot, while this social media marketing tool was initially created to enable advertisers to target their ads more effectively, you can also use Audience Insights to help you build stronger buyer personas and create better content.
Headline Analyzer
Best for: Everything
Price: FREE
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a free online tool that helps you write headlines that drive traffic, elicit more shares and give better search results. It does so by rating the quality of your headline draft and breaking it down to give you ideas and tips on how to write it better while providing analysis on word use, headline length and choice of words.
Pablo
Best for: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
Price: Free
In a similar vein, Pablo is a tool that helps you create beautiful images designed to help increase your social media engagement. With over 600,000 images and dozens of fonts to choose from, you can create the perfect size and format for virtually all social media networks.
Depending on what you feel you need for your brand, there’s a social media tool out there just waiting on you.
With most of these tools offering free trials, you can get a feel of how they’ll help your business at virtually no cost. Just be sure to measure their efficiency through analytics to maximize your free trial and have a solid basis before purchasing any of their services.
See what they can do for your brand today!
If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Social Media.
About the Author
Jolina Landicho is a freelance writer and marketing specialist working with various brands online. She is devoted to helping businesses bridge relationship gaps and creating new branches in the online marketing sphere.
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