Social media marketing can directly impact your bottom line. Hubspot’s 2023 survey found that Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z all prefer to find new products on social media platforms rather than via an internet search.
But to make the most of social media efforts, marketers must go beyond just making posts and adding a couple of hashtags. You need a solid strategy and the right social media marketing tools to make your social media marketing campaigns streamlined and successful.
If you’re planning to improve your social media strategy through data-driven marketing decisions, here are eight social media marketing tools that will help you do it.
Note: These tools were found during our online research while writing this article.
Benefits of using social media marketing tools
When it comes to social media management, choosing the best social media marketing tools for your specific goals is essential. A formidable tech stack with features like automation and reporting saves your marketing team time and makes them more productive.
Plus, social media marketing tools offer increased functionality that helps businesses reach more people with their messaging, increase their visibility, and more.
Brand awareness
Creating a memorable brand is a key driver of growth. Compelling content creation and consistent social media posts encourage potential buyers to read your posts and engage with your brand. From there, they can get familiar with your company’s mission and the products and services you offer.
Engaging with your target audience builds brand loyalty and fosters a sense of community, but it takes consistency. Fortunately, by strategically employing social media marketing tools, your company can showcase its brand more effectively.
Cost-effective strategies
Small and large businesses know that the better they control costs, the more revenue they can enjoy and the faster they can grow. Social media marketing tools offer cost-efficiency by allowing you to target specific demographics that encapsulate your ideal customer profile, which optimizes ad spend.
In addition, automation gives organizations a way to maximize their budgets by saving time and manpower. By automating posting across social media channels and scheduling content, you can save your team members hours of manual work.
Plus, many social media marketing tools offer user-friendly dashboards where you can easily generate, view, and analyze metrics reports to fine-tune your strategy and maximize your ROI.
Measurable results
Social media analytics and metrics are invaluable for marketing teams. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) via social media marketing tools paints a clear picture of how your efforts are paying off.
What content does your audience respond to? Which days do you get the best results? Are you posting too much or not enough? Real-time analytic reports provide these answers and more for data-driven decision-making.
Tracking and using social media metrics with an analytics tool has long-term benefits, like informing future marketing decisions. Using the information gleaned, you can tighten up your execution and improve campaign performance.
The top social media marketing tools for you
Now that we’ve looked at the powerful advantages social media marketing tools offer, let’s cut through the dozens that are available on the market. Here’s our list of our eight favorite tools based on functionality, user experience, integration capabilities, and pricing (some are even free marketing tools!).
1. Bitly
Bitly is a powerful all-in-one link management platform. With Bitly, it’s quick and easy to transform long links into short, snappy, branded marketing assets or to create custom QR Codes and dynamic Link-in-bio pages.
Not only does Bitly help businesses of all sizes create more engaging branding messages, it also helps you gather crucial metrics, giving your marketing team insights into link performance so you can make data-driven campaign decisions that maximize results.
Benefits:
- Inspires greater trust and increases click rates with short, branded links
- Helps you create a personalized Link-in-bio page with links to your best content, so your audience can engage better with your brand
- Allows you to customize QR Codes to match your branding
- Tracks link performance data for more insightful decision-making
- Allows you to pinpoint your top referring channels to better understand which social networks perform best for your brand
- Integrates with almost every digital marketing and social media management tool, providing a seamless workflow
- Scales easily as your business grows
2. BuzzSumo
Monitor social media engagement and find lucrative opportunities for your brand with this cloud-based social media marketing tool. From identifying viral content and real-time trends to connecting with influencers that line up with your brand, BuzzSumo can amplify your social media efforts.
Benefits:
- Use real-time trends to create social media content that will perform well.
- Research content across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube.
- Track mentions of your company and mentions of your main competitors with the social media monitoring feature.
- Connect with relevant influencers who can help boost your company’s visibility.
- Automate and streamline processes with a user-friendly dashboard and visualization features.
3. Canva
Sometimes a graphic designer isn’t in the budget. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have engaging, memorable graphics, presentations, and videos that increase your social media reach.
If you need to create images, logos, and other high-quality marketing collateral, Canva is your best friend. Packed with easy-to-use functionality, you can package your content in sleek, on-point branding that wows.
Benefits:
- Canva’s template library saves you time and makes it easy to create eye-catching content.
- Editing features allow you to customize and personalize your creations.
- Build a cohesive brand using the same colors and fonts across multiple posts and channels.
- Access Canva’s extensive library of images, graphics, audio tracks, and videos to use in your social media campaigns.
- Streamline your creative approval process with seamless team collaboration and real-time feedback features.
4. Buffer
Buffer is an all-in-one social media platform that enables you to manage multiple social media accounts from a single location. It helps marketing teams save time, increase efficiency, and maximize audience engagement.
Benefits:
- Draft and schedule posts across multiple social media channels with the social media scheduling tool.
- Use the interactive platform to run all facets of your social media posting, from creation to analytics review.
- Take advantage of Buffer’s 24/7 customer support and a constantly updated help center to address any issues that arise.
- Leverage the Start Page to create a small, mobile-friendly site with your best-selling products or most popular content.
- Interact with audience comments and engagements easily, as Buffer’s grid view makes sure you never miss a post.
5. SocialPilot
SocialPilot is a powerful, comprehensive tool that allows you to manage nearly every aspect of your social media marketing in one place. With its in-depth feature list, this robust social media marketing tool makes it simple to create, plan, schedule, and publish posts across major social media platforms.
Benefits:
- Save time by scheduling up to 500 posts in minutes using SocialPilot’s bulk scheduling feature.
- Stay on top of your social media marketing efforts with the intuitive social media marketing calendar.
- Respond to comments across your social media profiles to increase engagement with your target audience.
- Save evergreen content and collect hashtag groups in the content library to easily find and recycle later.
- Use AI tools to generate quality content faster and more efficiently.
6. Agorapulse
Another great social media marketing tool that should be on every company’s shortlist is the feature-rich, intuitive Agorapulse platform. Packed with the functionality marketing teams need, this tool paves the way for well-organized, automated social media marketing execution.
Benefits:
- Plan, collaborate, schedule, and post content across major social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
- Identify market trends and gain insights with the social listening tool.
- Analyze your social content performance to better understand which platforms and engagement types drive traffic and leads.
- Proactively manage your incoming social media messages and engagement from a single location.
7. Audiense
Content planning, creation, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media scheduling are important components of your marketing strategy. However, don’t make the mistake of focusing solely on them and omitting analytics. Audiense is the tool that can drive how you measure your results.
Benefits:
- Segment and measure different types of audience engagement.
- Gain insights into what inspires your target audience and moves them to act.
- Use a wide range of metrics to get to know—and market to—your target audience more effectively.
8. InVideo
Creating videos can seem intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. And adding video content to your social media calendar can generate powerful results. InVideo is an online tool that allows you to create videos from your other content, making it a faster and more simplified process.
Benefits:
- Take advantage of three video creation techniques: text-to-video, pre-made templates, and a blank canvas.
- Add animations, overlays, and voice-overs using the tool’s robust editing features.
- Create professional-quality, customized videos that showcase your brand.
- Create basic text prompts to help AI generate a script that can be turned into a video in minutes.
Boost social engagement with Bitly’s features
This list gives you a good starting point to build a powerful social media marketing strategy. Automation tools can help you schedule social posts in advance, while monitoring tools allow you to stay on top of trends, and analytics tools help you gather and analyze metrics.
But no matter what your goals are, Bitly should be an integral part of every social media marketing campaign. With Bitly, your business has the power to track a link’s performance across channels, and its branded links make it easy to create trust and strengthen your company’s visibility.
Far more than just a link shortener (although that feature is great), Bitly generates customized, branded QR Codes for greater visibility and reach and enhances your efforts with a Link-in-bio service that makes it easier for your audience to engage with your content.
Optimize your social media marketing efforts with Bitly today!