This is not a regular column of “Top 10” or “Top 20” or “Top 30” marketing tools. We will be diving deep into a social media marketing strategy, and then work our way towards using tools for creating it. There could not have been any better time than now, to be taking care of your social media presence. In the year 2021, there are nearly 3.98 billion people actively using social media, worldwide. 3.96 billion!
If you are a social media manager or a business owner, you’d know the importance of social media presence for your brand in general. Building a functional social media presence is not something that can be done overnight. Wish there was an easy recipe to it, with which we could put together all the ingredients in the right amounts and get the world’s best social media marketing strategy! Sadly, that’s not true.
A social media marketing strategy is also like any other marketing strategy, which is prepared with creating, measuring, strategizing and analyzing. And for that, you can’t just wake up in the morning, sit in your chair, sip coffee and get your hands on all the possible data you could ever get from all the different social media platforms, all by yourself, create, strategize, automate and analyze! By virtue of the upcoming technologies, there are many such tools that are available that will make your lives much much easier. Trust me! It’s a very good day for you that you’ll get an amalgamation of the most used and important tools, here today, which will be immensely helpful to you.
So, let’s start from the top. For any social media marketing campaign, you need content. After creation and curation, you schedule them, then measure the success of your campaign and then analyze the results at the end. Here, we are dividing the categories into- Content creation and curation tools, automated scheduling of content, measuring and data analysis tools, and another thing is, “social listening”, which we will cover in the later part of the blog. So let’s get started:
When creating content for your social media platforms, you always need some pictures, graphics, infographics etc. Canva is the basic and extremely useful tool with which you can go ahead and make beautiful content. There are free as well as paid templates which you can use, or make your own designs. The best part is that you don’t need to be a graphic designer to use it. You need no special skills, anyone can use it. It has a free and a paid version, so depending on your needs, you can use either one of them.
Did you know that the native videos that are uploaded on Facebook have 10x reach than of the videos on other video search engine platforms like YouTube? If you weren’t focusing on video content marketing, take this as your sign! Animoto is an amazing video creation tool that has lots of beautiful templates which you can use. And it allows you to make marketing videos from scratch with drag and drop features which make it a lot easier to create video content for your brand.
Your audience wants to hear from you. But you don’t always know what they want to hear about. This is when the CURATION of content comes in. As a social media manager, you should always take care about content curation strategies. And Quuu does just that for you. It gives you hand-curated content ideas to you. Once a piece of content is submitted to it, a real human from their editorial team reads it, approves it, and adds it to its distribution network. So it has both curation and promotional sides to it, it’s quite interesting, you know!
BuzzSumo is really killing it in terms of research and curation. It is literally one of the best tools I have ever come across. Have you ever gone through those days when you are just not able to come up with content, no matter how hard you try. Why worry when BuzzSumo is here? You just need to put in the relevant keywords and it gives a list of the new trends and content that’s getting viral on the internet. And to top it off, it also shows you all the influencers who shared that content, so it also gives you a chance to get in touch with those influencers and plan your influencer marketing strategy.
Hootsuite is one of the oldest tools in the game. It is a boon to any SMM. It has many such features which can help one in the long run. It gives options to schedule bulk content in advance, helps to create and analyze streams, keep track of your social media performance in terms of engagement and other metrics and analytics. One of the best features it provides is the collaboration of team members and the approval feature. It provides a free trial period of 30 days. It is a very beneficial tool for any brand which has multiple social accounts to be handled simultaneously.
It is for your audience that digests a lot of picture related content, that is Pinterest and Instagram. Not only does it help you in scheduling bulk content for Pinterest, but also lets you find the best people to reach out to (with hashtags), tells you what’s working for your page and what’s not, and also gives you an option of collaborating with your team. It’s drag and drop calendar feature helps you in easy content strategy planning.
When talking about automation tools for scheduling, Buffer would always be the front-runner. It is kind of an all- rounder tool, as you can do anything with it, from scheduling to analysis to group collabs. One of the most amazing features of Buffer is that whatever you are searching on the web, you like it? Buffer helps you to put it to your queue of scheduled content. It makes sure that your posts will be shared at the best possible times. You can also track links to see which content is most popular with your readers.
If you want to try an intuitive platform whose dashboard will help you to manage and analyze all your social media efforts on major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, then do give a try to Sprout social. It offers a 30 day free trial period. The most unique feature about this tool is that it helps a brand to receive genuine feedback from customers which allows you to build long lasting relationships with them.
Do you need a customizable dashboard that can automatically monitor all your on-going ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google ads? AdEspresso is the thing for you. It checks out all your active ads and suggests what is working for you and what is not, and automatically promotes new posts and uses some extremely intelligent filters to decide what should be promoted for how long. This is legit fire!
SocialInsider is a benchmarking and analytical tool which helps you to measure the different metrics and KPIs depending upon your social media strategy. It can be used for all influential platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Whenever you run a business, online or whatever, always remember, it’s not just about you. It’s not just about selling. It’s not just about announcing your offers, your products. It’s also, not also but to a great extent, about your customers. What do people feel about you, your product, your brand. Are they even happy with you? Do they respect you? Would they want to make a purchase with your brand? Would they want to come back to you? More than talking, LISTEN. (Ahh, you see what they did there?)
Social listening is just this. Your reputation is on the line when people put in mean comments about your company, your product online. Listen to what’s going wrong with your product, respond to them online, make your customers feel respected, make them feel that you care. Let’s see some tools which may help you in this:
If you want deep insights on what people have to say about you, Mention is just for you. You can track 1 Billion sources across the web daily with it. 1 Billion. As I discussed above, protect your reputation, build relations and in turn more number of leads using it. It offers real time social media monitoring of your social media presence. It helps you to respond to all the tags, comments, and mentions on one single dashboard. It also gives you an option to sort out the mentions based on priority and N number of other filters available.
Awario is a majorly discussed tool when Social listening is talked about. It not only lets you know whenever your brand is mentioned or other related keywords are discussed on all major social media platforms, it also segregates the mentions into positive reviews, negative and the neutral ones. It provides you with a detailed report on how many times your brand was mentioned, and by whom, if they were influencers, it gives you a list of them too. Hence, it helps you in monitoring your social media presence in terms of mentions to great heights.
Brandwatch's analytics data is ideal for illustrating the meaning of social media marketing. Signals is another feature that sets Brandwatch apart. You can set up an alert to get notified anytime a keyword is discussed by the writers you select. Signals are triggered when major changes in the data set occur, such as a sudden surge in unfavorable comments or a sudden peak in the number of mentions.