Over the years, social media platforms have changed more than your friend who regularly changes their profile picture.
Even if at the beginning it was all about selfies, cat pics (no one uses βpicsβ anymore, but here we are), baby photos and weird challenges, now social media channels are full of ads, posts with well-developed marketing messages and photos of your mom.
That is why this is your time to shine. Designing a great social media marketing strategy means establishing the pillars for your great business.
To do so, you need help when assessing your campaignsβ evolution. Social media marketing tools are the right fit.
Today, we will provide you with a list of the best social media marketing tools to empower your new campaign.
Social Media Marketing Tools
1. What are social media marketing tools and how are they useful
When designing a social media marketing campaign, you need a social media marketing tool to closely look at data which measures your evolution.
Depending on your needs, social media marketing tools can split into different categories like listening tools, monitoring tools, analytics tools, scheduling tools and engagement tools.
A social media marketing tool will help you in your marketing initiatives, from facilitating your content creation process to offering you data to better assess your work on a specific campaign.
To make sure your campaign is effective, you have to first establish which are your main goals. In this way, you will know what to expect and how to establish your KPIs.
By using a data-centered social media marketing tool, you can guide your work to obtain the results you are hoping for.
Having access to all that in-depth insights allows you to accustom your campaign and the content you design based on the results.
You can look at data even while your marketing campaign is still unfolding. This way, you can quickly change the strategy for the better, to attract more leads and increase brand awareness.
Next, letβs check which are the best social media marketing tools to suit your needs.
2. Social media marketing tools for different needs
Social media marketing tools can split into different categories according to your brandsβ needs.
These marketing tools can categorize into:
- listening tools
- monitoring tools
- analytics tools
- scheduling tools
- engagement tools
Based on your brandβs needs, you can use one of these social media marketing tools or even try out more to compare the results.
1. Social media listening tools
Social media listening tools provide you with insights related to what people say about your brand.
Through these specialized marketing tools, you find out who tagged you, who talked about your brand in the online world, and what are your audienceβs queries and wishes.
Moreover, a social media listening tool also offers you data about the new trends in your industry to help you revolutionize your marketing campaign.
This way, more eyes will be on your brand, empowering lead generation and triggering brand recognition. Here are our top three social media listening tools you should try.
1. Brand24
Brand24 is a social media listening tool that offers you data about what people say in the online world about your brand.
The social media marketing app offers you the chance to discuss with users who have tagged or mentioned your brand, receiving their feedback.
Moreover, you can also obtain a list of influencers in your industry so you can start connecting with them and maybe develop collaborations. This social media marketing tool is really helpful.
Price: The main service package costs $49 per month.
2. AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a social media marketing tool which features a very friendly interface where you can listen to what users say about your brand.
Then the app allows you to take action on every matter and interact with those praising or criticizing your brand.
The great part about it is that you can use your account with a co-worker to which you can assign or label different listening queries to solve for your clients.
Price: For this social media tool, the starting package is $79 per month.
3. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is another social media marketing tool which also provides listening features. This multifunctional platform offers you the chance to find out about the latest trends and hashtags to include them in your marketing campaigns.
Besides the chance to track keywords and phrases around your brandβs name, you can also track your followers and see what are their preferences to engage with them more.
Price: For the essential plan, you will have to pay $109 per month.
2. Social media monitoring tools
Different from listening, social media monitoring tools are designed to go even more in-depth when it comes to tracking and answering your followersβ queries.
Via these social media marketing tools, you can be more effective and your customer support service will be praised by your audience. Putting your community first will assure your climbing to success.
Here are our top three social media monitoring tools you should try.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool that helps you analyze all your social media platforms, offering you details about mentions, most popular hashtags and specific users.
The tool offers you a 30-day trial to explore all the features. There you will find an overview for millions of conversations between users about your brand.
Price: For this tool, you will have to pay $49 for the basic plan.
2. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a social media marketing tool that helps you find keywords and mentions, but also what people say about your brand.
To learn more about your audience and how to satisfy their needs, this monitoring app will offer you useful insights to adapt your marketing campaign.
Price: This is a free social media marketing tool.
3. Nexalogy
Nexalogy is a social media marketing tool which offers you interactive timelines and patterns of topics in your industry.
Through this app, you can get closer to your audience through its features. This social media marketing tool also helps you find the most active accounts and popular keywords.
Price: This is a free social media marketing tool.
3. Social media analytics tools
When it comes to social media analytics tools, you get the chance to check all the important metrics like engagement, reach, impressions, interactions and follower count.
These analytics tools help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaign based on your content and strategy.
Here are our top three social media analytics tools you need to try.
1. Socialinsider
Socialinsider is a very useful analytics tool which offers you in-depth data about your brandβs evolution. You can go back in time a few years ago and see how your previous campaigns performed.
Moreover, you can compare your metrics and content to the ones of your competitors.
By developing a report that shows you a detailed analysis of your post, you can easily create and adapt your marketing campaign.
Price: The basic plan is $100 per month.
PS: If you want to see how this social media marketing tool works, all you have to do is register for a free trial!
2. Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media analytics app that provides hashtags analytics for Twitter and Instagram.
By learning which hashtags are more popular among your audience, you will know what tags to use to increase lead generation.
Your number of followers will grow if you promote your marketing campaign based on the keywords from their searches.
Price: The pricing for this social media marketing tool starts at $99 per month.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot is an analytics tool that offers you efficient data which can contribute to your business growth.
The insights you get help you assess your campaignβs performance.
This way, with all the metrics unfolding in front of you, you will learn how to alter your strategy to obtain even better results.
Price: For the basic plan, you will have to pay $41 per month for this social media marketing tool.
4. Social media scheduling tools
Social media scheduling tools help you speed up your posting process, planning a marketing campaign on a longer term.
Via these social media marketing tools you manage to compose, organize and schedule your posts.
This way, your campaign will be less time-consuming and more quality-focused, necessitating the use of less resources.
Moreover, social media scheduling tools allow you to track every social media message or post you have ever published.
Here is a list of our top three social media scheduling tools to use.
1. SocialPilot
SocialPilot is a scheduling tool that helps you schedule posts on all social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr and more.
This social media marketing tool offers you templates for every social platform. By using it, you can schedule posts, shorts and Reels. Moreover, you can also develop UTM parameters to analyze your social media traffic.
Price: You will only have to pay $30 per month for the basic plan.
2. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is another useful scheduling tool through which you can manage posts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest and other social media.
Besides scheduling posts on social media, CoSchedule also merges with blogging tools like WordPress. This way, this social media marketing tool is helpful when planning your blog posts as well.
Price: The basic plan for CoSchedule is $400 per month.
3. SocialBee
SocialBee is a social media scheduling app suitable especially for small businesses. By developing your content calendar, you can easily craft your content and then hit the preview button to see how your posts will look like.
Price: For a basic plan for this social media marketing tool, you only have to pay $19 per month.
5. Social media engagement tools
Social media engagement tools offer you the chance to maintain a strong connection with all those engaged customers.
To have a healthy relationship with them, you need to maintain a very well-structured message history.
This way, for them, the user experience will be top-notch and your brand will gain their trust.
Social media engagement tools focus on keeping your customer interested by easily collaborating with them and fulfilling their needs.
Here is our list of best social media engagement tools to try.
1. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media engagement tool which monitors your brand in real time.
This app is extremely helpful when it comes to finding trending hashtags, keywords and what customers say about your brand.
However, if you are looking forward to engage with your clients on YouTube and Pinterest, you should know that it does not support these two social media platforms.
Price: For a month, you need to pay $10 for the basic plan.
2. Sendible
Sendible is another social media engagement tool that comprises all the conversations with customers you have on all your social media platforms.
This way, you can answer all messages and comments in the same place.
This marketing tool allows you to establish which are your priorities based on messagesβ urgency, showing you whether the messages you receive are negative, positive or neutral.
Price: The basic plan for this engagement tool is $29 on a monthly basis.
3. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a social media marketing tool that facilitates the communication between your brand and its clients.
You can also find out what customers say about your brand across all social media platforms. All these data will help you design a better plan to engage with your clients.
Price: For this marketing tool, you get a customized plan depending on your needs.
PS: Depending on your needs, there may also be other social media marketing tools you could be interested in. That's why we've put together a more extended list of social media marketing tools here. Check it out!
3. How to measure the results of a social media campaign using a marketing tool
Sephora is a great example when it comes to successful social media campaigns in the beauty industry.
I mean, who loves makeup and doesnβt know about Sephora yet? Their campaign called #SephoraSquad encourages buyers to become the brandβs influencers, no matter their followersβ count.
Isnβt that a fantastic opportunity to encourage makeup loversβ creativity?
The campaign was launched in 2019 and its main purpose was to empower everyone to feel beautiful while applying their makeup from Sephora.
Any beauty enthusiast could use their hashtag to promote the brand, displaying inspiring makeup trends. Sephora challenged storytellers, influencers, and people who simply love the art of makeup to show their skills to the world.
In what follows, we are going to show you how you can use social media marketing tools for a social campaign.
By using different social media marketing tools, Sephora manages to learn who its audience is, what age group they pertain to, what their expectations are when it comes to a beauty company and how to address their needs.
Firstly, to find out what people think about the cosmetics brand and their campaigns, Sephora may use a listening and monitoring tool.
This way, the brand would not only find out which are the latest trends in the industry but also what are their followersβ feedback about their products.
By engaging with their followers and prospective clients, Sephora manages to build a loyal community which is then used in their campaign #SephoraSquad. The community becomes the main character in the story.
A listening tool can also show which is the popularity of the hashtag and how many followers used it in their posts, wanting to be part of this beauty move.
Then, after designing the #SephoraSquad campaign based on their brandβs values and story, the next logical step for the brand to do would be to further look at its evolution and measure its impact.
For this scenario, an analytics tool can offer more in-depth data about a specific campaign, looking at demographics, engagement, reach, followers count, impressions, interactions, and best posting time.
All these metrics provide a clear view of how the marketing strategy works. When looking at this kind of KPIs, a brand can alter its content to increase its performance.
By using an analytics tool like Socialinsider, we could quickly see the results of their campaign, starting from 2019 until the present day. The complete report showed amazing evolution.
For this marketing campaign, the engagement overpassed 2 million, increasing the overall brandβs engagement by 1048%. Thatβs a huge success for Sephora, proving that their campaign worked wonders.
The average reach per post is 42K and the total reach for this campaign increased to 5.5 million. The evolution of reach and impressions touched a new high in July 2021 for the #SephoraSquad campaign.
The number of likes for the posts featuring this hashtag has increased by 1048%, reaching an impressive value of 2.4 million.
The overall number of comments for this Sephora campaign increased by 4028%, raising to 38K.
Final thoughts
Developing a strong marketing campaign is not the end of your mission. You have to assess its evolution until you can certainly establish if it was really helpful.
Social media marketing tools can offer you plenty of insights and some even complete reports regarding your campaigns.
This way, you will know what worked for you and what changes you need to make.
Propelling your brand at the top of your industry means hard work, resources and determination.
To ensure a smooth ride to success, you need to include on your list of spendings a social media marketing tool, choosing one that suits your needs.
Hopefully these tips and tricks are insightful for you. In case you have any questions, remember that we are only a few clicks away.
Analyze your social media performance and benchmark competitors!
