8 Social Media Marketing Tools you Need to Be Using​​

In today’s digital landscape, growing your brand presence via social media — is evidently no longer a ‘nice-to-have’.

No wonder over 97% of the fortune 500 companies leverage at least one social channel for their marketing efforts.

Putting a little effort into social marketing will reap some serious ROI-maximizing results. Take it from 90% of the marketers who say social media marketing has helped increase their business’s exposure. 75% also say they’ve used it to grow their webiste traffic.

Social media marketing can also help secure brand loyalty and increase your sales – in addition to increasing brand awareness and lead generation. (Check out these Linkedin tools for lead generation)

Consumers agree: 71% say that if they’ve had a good social media experience with a business, they’re likely to recommend it to others. Plus, 21% go on to say that they’re more likely to buy from brands that they can connect with on social media.

But there’s just one thing: If you haven't teamed up with popular social media marketing agencies, managing social media platforms to drive these benefits takes time and the effort of a full-time job. The solution? Use social media marketing tools to save your time and become more efficient by analyzing your social media strategy.

So, in this post, let’s introduce you to our favorite time-saving social media tools that you every marketer needs.

The 8 social media marketing tools you can’t do without

Each of these social media management tools has been cherry-picked for marketers to help them up their digital marketing game.

Let’s dive in!

1. PlayPlay - video creation and editing

Video is the content format everyone wants to see on social media, with 85% saying they’d like to see more videos from brands.

Not just that, but engaging videos can help you ‘edutain’ your audience and leave a lasting impression.

Create high-quality professional videos effortlessly with PlayPlay's social media video maker.

For example, create bitesize videos that share quick tips on an in-demand subject. Or create behind-the-scenes videos of life at your company to earn your audience’s trust and build a stronger connection.

You can also drive sign-ups for your next webinar with a teaser video that highlights the main subject/theme and any key information about the event.

The best part? You don’t always have to create videos for social networks from scratch. You can simply repurpose video content in various ways.

You can create new videos rapidly for your social media sites by browsing through PlayPlay's huge range of templates, and choosing the one that suits your goal/message.

And don't forget to add subtitles to every video you post on Facebook, Twitter and other social channels. Luckily, PlayPlay has an 'automatic subtitles' feature that generates your captions in just one click — in a variety of different languages. Isn't that handy?!

69% of consumers watch videos with the sound off. So if you want to retain your followers’ attention, it’s crucial to caption your video content.PlayPlay makes this easy for you, and also offers a variety of cool lower-third subtitle styles to choose from.

2. Later - social media scheduling

A great social media marketing strategy doesn't just imply quantity — it also ensures quality content that gets top engagement on social channels.

But posting on every platform manually takes precious time away from your time spent creating the content itself. A social media scheduling like Later will take care of this for you — so you can focus on engaging your audience with great content instead.

With a scheduling tool, you can schedule your  social media posts to live at pre-set times.

Scheduling your content in advance can also help you reach your audience when they are most active on social media.

Now, this would be impossible if your followers are in a different time zone. With a tool like  Later, you don’t have to worry about staying up at night to post at times when your audience is active in another time zone.

What’s more, by using Later for scheduling the bulk of your pre-prepared social media content, you can invest more time in engaging with your audience – responding to their comments, tags, and messages, for example.

3. SmarterQueue - curating and scheduling evergreen social media content

Like Later, SmarterQueue allows you to schedule posts and maintain a consistent presence on social media.

The tool offers a powerful discovery engine that pulls out trending content, which drives engagement.

This way, you can share engagement-driving web content to your social channels without having to spend hours searching for what to share on social. This makes it simple to curate social posts.

You can also set your schedule queue to 'recycle' so that content can automatically repost after a specified passage of time.

Plus, each scheduled post gets its own category. For instance, divide your social content into categories like tips, questions, inspiration, videos, business promotion, and so on. This way you can ensure you’re creating interesting social media feeds with the right balance of educational, promotional, and entertaining content.

4. Agorapulse - social media management

Where SmarterQueue is a great option for influencers, small businesses, bloggers, and consultants, Agorapulse is a social media management software designed for teams.

It offers multiple features such as intuitive publishing, social listening, unified social inbox, and reporting.

You and your team can collaborate easily when posting on social to maintain a consistent messaging tone.

So, for instance, you can have the designer create posts according to your social media plan. Then, the social media manager can jump in to approve them and ask the copywriter to prepare captions.  See how teams can work together seamlessly using just one tool? Agorapulse facilitates that.

The tool also gives you shared social inboxes, where every message you receive through each of your social network accounts is grouped together. This way, your entire team can get back to customers and prospects quickly.

Most of all: you can get back to customer queries with accurate answers. For example, someone from the sales team can answer a pricing-related question.

To add, you can use this management platform to create reports for quarterly reviews on your social media performance. You can also share these with stakeholders to walk them through the social media ROI you’re driving.

5. Meltwater - social listening

Meltwater is an all-in-one marketing tool for social listening not only for social media, but also across the web.

You need to pay attention to what your target audience is talking about by listening to their conversations across multiple channels. This is as critical for when you’re starting out as it is when you're honing your content marketing strategy. Why? Because it helps you create audience-relevant content that drives engagement.

With Meltwater or another influencer marketing software, pay attention to what’s trending across social media (and beyond) and what your target audience is saying about you and your competitors. In doing so, you can quickly respond to untagged brand mentions to win your audience’s heart.

You can also track these untagged mentions for sourcing user-generated content, which is an essential content type to share on social. Why? Because it brings rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener"social proof to the table – telling your audience that others like them trust your brand. This gets them interacting with you. Ultimately, you might also convert them into customers.

Another way you can use Meltwater: find and collaborate with the right influencers in your industry. Whether it’s B2C or B2B social media marketing, it’s essential that you leverage influencer marketing to hit your social selling goals.

A major challenge, however, is finding the right influencers that are trusted in your industry. With Meltwater, you can not only find them but vet them, create a working strategy with them, and finally, track results using the tool’s advanced influencer analytics.

6. Canva - creating images for social media

Canva is a DIY design tool that helps you create different types of visuals – from animated graphics to social media stories, infographics, and media posts.

It’s pretty simple to use with its drag and drop interface and also saves you time by offering a wide range of social media posts templates.

Each time you create a post in Canva, aim to create an on-brand image with your brand colors and fonts. This way, the images reflect your brand personality, leaving a consistent impression on your audience.

At the same time, make sure you use enough white space in your visuals. This is the space that comes between various design elements. And, it’s essential to add more of it for a breathable and clutter-free design.

7. GIPHY - creating GIFs

Using GIFs can help to show your brand’s human side by tapping into the pop culture that online audiences love. With GIPHY, you can find a whole stock of GIFs.

You can also use the GIF search engine to trace and add trending GIFs to your content. This helps you grow social media engagement.

The icing on the cake? You can create your own GIFs with this tool. Simply upload a 10-min long video clip or enter its URL in the GIF maker and create your GIF from there.

This helps you create branded GIFs within minutes to impress your audience and, of course, engage better with them.

8. SproutSocial - analyzing social media performance

You can pick from SproutSocial, Hootsuite, or even Agorapulse to analyze how well your social media is achieving your business goals.

First make sure you’ve got a clear idea of the goals you want to achieve. This way, you’ll know which key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to monitor and include in your social analytics reports.

Then, look for your performance in social media analytics tools. Let’s say you’ve selected SproutSocial. Using this tool, you can see how well each of your social channels performing in one dashboard.

In fact, you can analyze your competitors’ performance with the tool to make sure your content and social media are doing better than your competitors’.

Remember: the key to success on social networking sites is constantly analyzing your performance to improve it as you go. Without knowing what's working and what's not, it's far less likely you'll get the results you’re aiming for.

Ready to invest in incredible social media marketing tools?

We've now come to an end of our list of social media marketing tools. It's worth reading up on each of these social media management tools to make you sure you pick the right one for you and your company.

Ideally, you’ll want to select an all-in-one platform that helps with social selling, influencer marketing, analytics, curation, and scheduling.

But when it comes to creating media posts, you’ll need PlayPlay, a social video maker, to ensure you’re creating engaging video content – the foundation of success with social media marketing.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free 7-day trial of the best video maker on the market.