9 Social Media Marketing Must-Have Tools

Over the last few years, social media has grown to become an essential aspect of everyday life. For entrepreneurs, using social media has become a routine marketing mix. Various social media platforms have millions of users that allow vendors to connect with the target audience, build relationships and attract new leads and share information related to your industry with much ease.

With the endless benefits, if you aren’t using the various social media channels for your marketing, you are certainly missing out on various business opportunities for your venture. Just to prove this, below are some social media statistics courtesy of social media analysts WebDam, Advertising Age and JeffBullas.com.

• Approximately 72% of internet users are active on social media daily.
• 43% of online marketers have found a customer through LinkedIn.
• 52% of all online marketers have landed a customer through Facebook.
• Emails with social sharing buttons have a 158% click-through rate higher compared to emails without social sharing buttons.
• Approximately 47% of online customers attest that Facebook is their number one influencer of purchase.
• Up to 86% of online consumers agree that they use social media in their purchase decision-making process.

Well, with the above outlined stubborn facts, it is time to create the right social media marketing strategy. However, doing this by yourself can be daunting, time-consuming and costly. This is why the introduction, and use of social media tools received a huge applaud. Well, some of the essential social media marketing tools you should have are outlined below.

1. Buffer – best for social media management

Are you looking to save time on your social media management? If so, consider integrating buffer in the list of your marketing tools. Initially, buffer was a Twitter scheduling tool. However, it has evolved and currently supports all the major social media channels including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.

This social media scheduler makes it easy staying active and engaging on social media. It lets social media marketers schedule and publish marketing content on all social media networks.
Some of the neat things Buffer does include;
You can add articles and content from web to your buffer queue and share content on the go through its chrome extension.
Shorten links automatically as you share.
Upload quality photos and videos
Access social media analytics that tracks your performance over time.
Develop a posting schedule to have your content spread out throughout.

2. AddThis – best for content distribution, tracking, and analysis

This is an essential social sharing and engagement tool common in various social media websites. It features share and follow buttons that makes it easy to distribute your content, grow your audience and boost your channel social media presence. Besides website marketing, this tool provides valuable data on social media audience behaviour, number of people sharing your content, social engagement, and where your traffic originates.

Intriguing features of AddThis include;
Has follow buttons for easy and quick audience building
Gives insights on browser language, type, date and time of visits to your website and traffic referrers.
Responsive as it works with various devices.
Easy to install
Available for browser extensions

3. Buzzsumo – best research and insight tool

For effective marketing, research is a crucial aspect. To succeed among many competitors, you should research and understand what they are doing. Buzzsumo is a powerful tool for this. Leverage this tool for keyword research and find trending topics your audience might be interested in.

Use Buzzsumo to search for interesting posts to share on social media, share content ideas and competitor research if you have some cash to invest in. Read a thorough review of Buzzsumo.

4. Google Trends

This is yet another trends hacking and market research tool. It helps you find what’s hot at that time. This analysis helps you create more relevant content. Searching through various categories helps marketers understand what concerns followers at the moment, helping them create content around the issues.

5. Google Alerts – best social listening tool

Social media marketing isn’t about talking always. Marketers should also have time to listen what followers and potential prospects have to say. Well, Google alerts is a free and overly effective tool that helps monitor what happening around you. You can use it to set alerts for various keywords, keep track of your brand mentions and important topics within your niche or about some key competitors.
Mention and social proof are other amazing social listening tools.

6. IFTTT – best for social media automation

Employing automation tools is the best way to save time and money in your marketing strategy. If This, Then That is a tool that makes running your social media marketing strategy much easier. With this tool, all you need to do is create rules that end up triggering specific actions when an action happens.

For instance, you can create a rule where every time a Google notification or a specific alert occurs; it is automatically added into Google documents. You can then check the document later at your own time. The best part being that you can override the rules if you are active.

7. ContentGems – best for content discovery and distribution

This is a content discovery and distribution tool that scans thousands of online content helping marketers find timely, interesting and relevant content for distribution to their audience on various platforms. Having updated content is essential as it leads to more traffic to your website.

The tool monitors leading news sites and blogs for exceptional content, gives users access to thousands of RSS feeds, send weekly emails, has Twitter filters that weeds out low-quality content and allows marketers to build customized feeds. Thing is, you will get to enjoy advanced features of this tool at a small cost.

8. Hootsuite – best for social media management

This is a time saving social media marketing tool that allows marketers to manage all their social profiles from a single location. Users can discover and easily schedule content, identify social media influencers, connect with customers and social media platform followers easily.

The tool is easy to understand and offers an entirely complete set of tools for social media management. This includes content scheduling, analytics, curation, monitoring, contests hosting and team management. It also works as a helpdesk, allowing social media marketers to protect their reputation and answer clients straight from the application.

9. Keyhole – for hashtag tracking and keyword analysis

For major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, use of hashtags and specific keywords is vital. Well, to track the performance of hashtags and keywords, you will need Keyhole. It tracks your account data, generates analyzed reports and offers ideas and suggestions on how you can optimize your social media marketing strategy.

It gives analytics for brand mentions and hashtags, embeds widgets for your website, provides customized alert email notifications and other collection of social media marketing features.

Final Thoughts

Social media tools keep on evolving with new apps and updates being released regularly. This is an advantage as it helps boost your social media marketing efforts, ensuring that your marketing strategy is a success. However, note that not every tool is necessary or relevant. Not all tools meet the needed functionality. Therefore, revise your social media strategy, consider your marketing goals as well as the social media channels you use before determining the important tools.