As an entrepreneur, you may have wondered how to start 2021 right and turn your donkey social media marketing into unicorn for your business.
Around 73% of marketers believe that social media marketing proves to be effective in boosting profits for businesses.
That gets even better with the use of social media tools to make marketing quicker and easier, as well as more measurable.
Whether you’re a marketer or an entrepreneur, building your social media toolkit is now essential to maximizing your chances of success.
Here are the 10 best tools to start your social media marketing campaigns and get the best possible results this year.
1. MobileMonkey
Nowadays, it’s important to use a chatbot as it greatly frees you up from the tedium of responding to user messages.
MobileMonkey is a free Facebook Messenger marketing chatbot platform that lets you connect with customers easily.
You can build a chatbot for Facebook Messenger in just five minutes without a line of code.
It can also do chat blasting, drip campaigns, and contact list building easily, all within Messenger.
That lets you engage with customers, as well as nurture leads and convert them without tearing your hair out.
And now, with its patent-pending OmniChat technology, it can now do the same thing in multiple channels. It allows you to consolidate SMS, Messenger, and Web Chat all in one place.
2. Brand24
Social media listening is an important part of the campaign as it lets you learn who your target audience is.
Brand24 is one of the best social media listening tools out there as it helps businesses what people are saying about their brand.
You can track brand mentions from social media and online publishers and pinpoint influencers in your niche.
It also shows other brand mentions in your niche, letting you learn more about your competitors.
That shows how your brand stands against rivals, as well as what they’re doing that you should also do or avoid.
3. Buffer
The bulk of social media marketing is in social media management, which can get very tedious.
A good social media management can ease that burden, letting you publish multiple posts well in advance with ease.
Buffer was once just a post scheduling tool for Twitter, but it then branched off to other major platforms.
It then added features that turned into a more complete social media management tool.
You can use Buffer to increase reach and engagement for your social media and traffic to your website.
It can also be used to follow up on those posts, letting you know which ones were effective and why.
Many of Buffer’s features are free, but you can avail of the premium version starting at $15 per month.
4. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is another social media management tool that brings agile marketing through collaboration tools for your team.
It has color-coded timetables that can be used for planning and scheduling your future posts.
You can also see how messages will appear on different social media platforms.
There are also other features like a headline analyzer, milestone tracking, Gantt charts, and so on.
CoSchedule is a great tool for bigger social media teams that need more power in their hands.
After a free trial, you can avail of plans starting at $40 per month.
5. Quuu
Content curation is important to social media marketing as it ensures the highest quality content possible.
Quuu is a content curation and promotion platform that lets you deliver your posts to your audience in the best way possible.
It lets people submit their content to Quuu for review and approval by your editorial team.
Once approved, the content is then sorted by category and made available for curation.
Quuu then adds that post to its distribution network, where you can track how many shares and clicks it gets.
The platform also gives you suggestions related to your niche, so you can follow it up and engage with your users.
It also has a free library that contains over 500 topics, giving you a never-ending pool of ideas to draw from.
6. EveryPost
If you’re more into visual content, then EveryPost may be a better tool for your social media team.
EveryPost is a social media management and content curation tool that lets you create and post visual content more easily.
It can give you content ideas by showing you visual content from various sources related to your niche.
You can then post and share across major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on.
This platform lets you collaborate with your team from anywhere and customize your posts in one place.
EveryPost has a 14-day free trial and premium plans start at $9.99 per month.
7. BuzzSumo
In the thick of social media marketing, knowing more about your niche and competition can give you an extra edge.
Social media analytics tools are plentiful, but not all of them are comprehensive when it comes to competitive analysis.
BuzzSumo is one of the most well-known tools out there, and for good reason.
Aside from being a solid all-in-one tool social media marketing tool, it has one feature that makes it stand out.
It lets you track what’s hot in your niche on social media and what your rivals may be doing.
Not only does that let you know what new topics you can make content out of, but also know what may not perform well.
It lets you know of what other brands are doing and who the most popular influencers in your niche are.
When it comes to becoming more social, BuzzSumo can do it all.
8. Sprout Social
Staying true to the social part of social media can be daunting over time, especially when you’re overwhelmed by all the noise.
Sprout Social was designed to help brands form connections with both their marketing teams and their audience.
It offers both social media management and in-depth social media analytics in one package, with a major focus on building communities.
This tool doesn’t just the usual stuff like scheduling posts, discovering mentions, and tracking data.
Sprout Social also lets you easily start, join, and maintain conversations in your chosen social media platforms.
Its large feature set was designed for larger social media teams who are looking to get big things done.
You can get a 30-day free trial, and premium features are available starting at $99 per month.
9. Canva
While text posts are still relevant, you’ll need images to make them draw attention.
Visual content gets tons of engagement in social media, so having a dependable image editor is important.
If you don’t have any budget to buy licenses for popular image editing software, then just use Canva.
This tool is a free online image editor that does most things that retail software can do.
You can create pretty much anything you’d want to post on Instagram and Pinterest through Canva.
It’s incredibly easy to use and doesn’t need graphic design experience to learn.
Canva has a library of ready-made templates for creating your own images in just minutes.
10. Animoto
Video content continues to grow in social media, and no brand looking to expand should be without it.
But video creation and editing can be rather complicated for most people, and professional software is quite expensive.
Animoto is free cloud-based video creation platform that can turn your photos and clips into watchable videos.
There’s no need to have any video editing or filmmaking experience to use Animoto.
It has a large repository of templates, themes, and stock music for creating your own unique videos easily.
You can just drag and drop whatever you want to put in the video, and Animoto will take care of the rest.
Conclusion
Many of these tools have plenty of alternatives out there as well, so it’s good to explore your options throughout this year.
The ones listed here are seen as the best for most people, but you may have specific needs and limited resources.
For instance, you may want a tool that works for all the major platforms, like Brand24, Buffer, and BuzzSumo.
Or you can go for something that was designed for a specific platform, like MobileMonkey for Facebook Messenger.
Whichever you go with, it’s good to test each one until you get the toolkit that’s most efficient and effective for your brand marketing.
About the Author – Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey, the World’s Best Integrated Web Chat, SMS & Facebook Messenger Bot Platform for Marketing and Customer Service. He’s also the founder of WordStream, Inc., the leading provider of Google Ads, Facebook Ads and keyword tools used by over a million marketers worldwide. The company employs over three hundred people and manages billions of dollars of ad spend on behalf of tens of thousands of customers. WordStream was acquired by Gannett for $150 million. Larry is ranked the #8 most popular author on Medium. He’s a contributor to CNBC and Inc. Magazine. Key interests include: Chatbot Marketing, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, entrepreneurship and startups. He received Marketer of the Year awards from Search Engine Land, US Search Awards, and PPC Hero.
