7 Social Media Marketing Tools Every Business Owner Must Be Using

Social media marketing is not dead…

It is still alive… grow year by year.

What truly has happened to social media marketing is that it has become more complicated.

The days are gone, you can expect to drive tons of visitors from each tweet and Facebook share.

With the immense number of competitors hanging on each niche, it is harder to complete your business purposes.

Luckily for you, there are many social media marketing tools that can make hard works easier for you.

Even, the proper use of social media tools can help stand out from your competitors and consolidate the exponential growth of your social media marketing campaigns.

Why you should use social media marketing tools for your business

One common question that pops up every time you see any internet marketing niche is that whether you can engage in without using ANY tool.

In fact, I used to think I do not want to use any social media tool for my marketing purposes.

I tried everything as possible to grow my business.

Some of them worked perfectly. Not needed to use any tool.

However, when I face the one common problem that every marketer confront; the lack of time to do everything, I thought there must be an alternative way to automate social media marketing arrangements.

Can you count how many social networking channels out there, right now? 30, 40? I do not know.

Facebook still king when it compared with other social networks with a great engagement.

Yes, not all social networking sites will adapt for your business. You should test every social network and use different social media marketing strategies to find out what network get a higher ROI for your business.

As of being overwhelmed due to tons of social media marketing activities, I tried a few social media software and tools.

You shouldn’t use social media marketing tools because others use; however you should use especially because,

Reach more audience

Even though organic traffic or search engine traffic is the best medium of traffic for many businesses, still social media can do a tremendous job when driving high targeted traffic to your website.

For an example, let’s think that you have a photo blog which covers many topics from traveling to foods.

However, as you know, it is far difficult to get traffic from search engines to your photo blog.

However, you can utilize social networking sites such as Pinterest (especially in this case) to drive high targeted traffic.

By using a good social marketing plan and a social media automation tool, you do not want to worry about reaching potential prospects even they are living in the other corner of the world.

Acquire more customers

A proper social media strategy can drive more sales than other most paid advertising methods such as banner advertising, PPV.

Nowadays, many social media tools provide different types of SMO tools to reach your potential customers and target them accordingly so that you can convert them into long-term clients.

Increase your brand awareness

What is even better medium than social media to increase your business’s brand awareness?

There is nothing, right?

So, by using proper social media tools for your business plans, you can amplify business growth while improving the brand awareness.

When your brand become more popular, people will start talking about it on social media, forums, and Q&A sites and even search your brand in search engines.

At last, you will see an increase in conversions, as a result of popularity of brand.

Build a community

Nowadays, every business has a social profile on every social media sites.

Social media marketing tools can help build a better relationship with your followers while making your social media profile an open place for everyone to talk, smile, make a conference.

That is why every time 9gag post an update on Facebook they get tons of shares, comments likes, and other emotions.

Understand your potential customers

If you just started out, then it might be little bit not easier for you to understand your customers.

Where they are hanging around, what they are talking about, what articles read, what content they most like to consume all matters to your business growth.

So, you can use an appropriate social media analytics tool to understand your potential customers’ behavior to make a good plan for next social media campaign.

Analyze competitors’ social media techniques and strategies

This is one of best choices why I prefer to use competitor analysis tools. By using a few social media marketing tools and techniques, you can find what strategies your top competitors use to dominate social media marketing.

You can find what channels they get most of the leads, sales, and long-term customers.

And why not, find the influencers who helped to bump up competitors social media marketing efforts.

Build a strong foundation for your next social media marketing strategy

It is nothing better than being a social media marketing expert.

Experience is the biggest asset you have that other cannot buy or steal.

Getting a better understanding what works in 2016 and ability to forecast what will happen in next few years of SMM will surely assist to adapt to future social media marketing changes.

[divider style=’centered’]

These all seven advantages you get as you use social media tools and services for your marketing affairs.

There are tons of tools for social media optimization and marketing. It was a difficult task me to find best ones for this article.

However, I came to a decision to include these seven best social media marketing tools to this article.

If you know any other tool for social media marketing, social media tracking or social media monitoring, please let us know in the comment form below. I will check it out and will add if it is capable of.

[divider style=’full’]

7 Best Social Media Marketing Tools ~ The 2016 Edition

[divider style=’full’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#1: HootSuite ” orientation=”center”]

Hootsuite is a relatively well-known social media management platform by social media marketers. Hootsuite supports many popular social networking sites, so you will be able to automate content distribution on all of your own accounts.

You can manage social networking pages such as Facebook profile, groups, pages, Reddit account, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, VKontatekte and other cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive too.

In fact, Hootsuite is capable of managing all your accounts.

In a free account, you can auto schedule social updates up to 10 per day for an account.

For an example, if you have two Twitter profiles (one private account and another business account), then you can schedule up to 20 social share updates for each day.

Hootsuite provides variety types of analysis reports for each social account you manage to monitor and track social media campaigns.

Here you can see how I found what it best-performing tweet I have shared.

Hootsuite is undoubtedly a robust tool for social media marketing. I personally use it for content curation and auto-share my updates to social media sites. Give it a try today (Hootsuite have a free plan too) and let us know what your favorite feature of Hootsuite is.

[divider style=’split’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#2: SEMrush Social Media Tool ” orientation=”center”]

SEMrush is the all-in-one the ultimate Online marketing tool you will ever need. SEMrush provides a few invaluable tools. Social media tool is one of them.

In fact, SEMrush primarily used by marketers to analyze competitors; find out their strategies, techniques and if you are an advertiser to find PPC keywords, CPCs, rankings, body text and title.

I am mainly using SEMrush for my SEO arrangements such as finding competitors SEO keywords, track my daily rankings, compare my site with competitors and audit my site to on-page optimize.

The new feature of SEMrush, Social Media Tool is capable of many things such as keep track of your social media campaigns.

To run a cost-effective social media campaign, you should keep tracking your historical data.

How your followers engage with your page, how your page subscribers respond to your messages, they all matters at last to win SMM competition.

By knowing necessary and accurate data of your followers, you can minimize the social media campaign budget while improving engagement and increasing conversions.

SEMrush is a competitor analysis tool used by millions of SEOs, content marketers, bloggers, and webmasters.

They love SEMrush because the capability of analyzing your competitor’s strategies.

With SEMrush’s Social Media Tool you can analyze your competitors and find all the details you want to run a similar or outstanding social media campaign in next time.

While analyzing social media accounts in real time, SEMrush Social Media Tool visualizes each data perfectly so you can clearly understand how to use those data in your marketing campaigns.

I am personally using SEMrush for my competitor analysis aspects. I recommend you to give a try SEMrush today and find how it can grow your business within a short time of period.

[divider style=’split’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#3: Canva ” orientation=”center”]

Canva is a perfect tool to make visualized data for social media marketing.

If you are not familiar with Photoshop or photo editing like me, then you can use Canva to make attractive images to share on social networking sites.

First, go to Canva and create your free account. After you created your account, in your dashboard, click on “More” icon under “Create a Design” section.

Now you can see variety types of designs. As you want to make a social media sharing image, select one of desired design types. I selected “Pinterest Graphic” design type.

In the new tab, you can see the design creator page. You can take a few minutes and practice on creating a graphic for social media sharing on Canva.

Here I made a simple looking graphic for this article to share on Pinterest. (BTW, I am not a good artist :P)

Once you have done everything right, click on “Download” button and next select “Image: high quality (PNG)” option.

You can see the graphic that I made on Canva over here.

Canva is a perfect tool for beginners and busy marketers to use for creating attractive graphics for social media. I am using this to make blog graphics too. Give it a try today and see how Canva will save your time and money.

[divider style=’split’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#4: IFTTT (If this, then that) ” orientation=”center”]

IFTTT is another excellent social media tool to market your business. IFTTT now supports over 350 networks and services so you can make lots of changes to your social media plan.

After created your free account, in the dashboard you can select one of the hundreds of recipes to distribute content on various platforms.

For an example, this recipe builds a Twitter list based on a specific hashtag.

Connect your Twitter account to start on.

After you authorized your Twitter account, add necessary information in fields. Here I wanted to find content writers. This simple statement will make the search of content writers easier.

IFTTT is definitely an excellent social media marketing tool for every type of businesses (small, medium-sized and large) and every marketer.

I recommend you to check out IFTTT and see how it can make you a productive, efficient and a proactive marketer.

Don’t waste your time for social media marketing

Here are a few ways you can utilize IFTTT to boost your social media marketing efforts.

• Curate content: Content curation is something you should pay your attention if you are a content marketer or a blogger. Some content distribution networks such as Flipboard, Paper.li can drive your website hundreds of high targeted referral traffic continuously. Make a new recipe or use a premade recipe to distribute content just after you published them or posted them to your Facebook fan page, Google+ page or LinkedIn business page.
• Get notified when someone mentioned you on Twitter: Social media is a great place to build new relationships and get new customers to your small business. People who loved your blog might have shared them on Twitter. Why not take your time for thanking them for sharing your content on Twitter. Appreciate them. Say them whether they need any help, you are with them. It will build a strong relationship with you and prospects.

[divider style=’split’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#5: FollowerWonk ” orientation=”center”]

FollowerWonk is a tool for Twitter which analyzes, tracks, searches and compares Twitter accounts.

After you created your account and go to Moz’s FollowerWonk analyze page over here and input any Twitter username.

Here I added our ProBlogTricks’s Twitter account username. You can add any one’s even your competitor’s Twitter handle.

Make sure to select on “analyze their followers” option so you will get details about followers not “followings.”

After you clicked on “Do it” button, you will get much information about the Twitter user’s followers. Here I got ProBlogTricks’s fans’ details.

Here are a few important details about followers.

This Twitter analysis data gives a clear idea of at what times followers of ProBlogTricks are most active.

And recencies of tweets of problogtricks’ followers. A good metric to find whether followers are active or inactive.

Engagement Ratio: Retweets as a percentage of timeline

FollowerWonk is an excellent Twitter analysis tool for Twitter marketing. It offers a free version too. So, create a Moz account and analyze your Twitter followers to find out the best time to tweet to get a maximum exposure.

[divider style=’split’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#6: BuzzSumo” orientation=”center”]

In social media marketing, finding the best posts (or most popular ones) is very important to stay continued with current trends.

BuzzSumo is a great social media tool to find most popular content around all social channels.

For an example, I wanted to find best performing contents related to “freelance jobs.” So I followed steps shown in the below screenshot to find the most viral content about “freelance jobs.”

As you see, the first article has got 13.1k engagements on Facebook! That is lots of shares, indeed.

Therefore, I compared the title with others. I found that the number on it and the word, “opportunities” evoked people to engage with the article.

In fact, I confirmed it with a small A/B test campaign I ran on my blog too.

A few weeks ago, I published a brand new article on “Freelance Jobs.”

I have a plugin which is capable of running A/B test within my site to find the best headline with the highest engagement.

Here is what I found…

The second winner headline includes the “Opportunities” word. The first winner headline performed well because it had two power words; Make money and pay well. Who does not want to earn money doing freelancing jobs that pay well? Hmm…?

You can tweak BuzzSumo and find most popular articles on your niche. Then do some reverse keyword research with SEMrush and create high-quality content as Google described.

You will sooner see your social media marketing efforts become to golden results.

[divider style=’split’]

[thrive_headline_focus title=”#7: Thrive Headline Optimizer ” orientation=”center”]

Every business nowadays are online, right? Most of them have a blog to use content marketing to generate new leads and increase brand exposure.

In content marketing, the importance of Headline cannot be beaten by the content itself.

Yes, only two of ten people read the content. All of the others read the headline first and decide whether they should be reading the content.

So, having a strong title on your blog posts not only make your article is read by most readers but also cut down the budget of social media marketing and get more exposure.

You will first have to purchase Thrive Headline Optimizer and install the plugin on your WordPress blog. (Thrive Themes supports only for WordPress)

Then activate the plugin and authorize your purchase my adding the token key. After you have done everything right, you can start A/B testing headlines.

Here are a few stats of my past headline competitions.

It is amazing and fun to run A/B test as a small word change can improve engagements by an extend margin.

After running the campaign for a few days (to generate a good number of page views to find the highest converting one), you can select a winner and make it the SEO title and page title.

Don’t stop by here. Make sure you track everything such as the number of social shares, comments, likes and social clicks. Then compare results with what past results (with your previous headline).

This method works perfectly. Also, I proved it on how BuzzSumo article got viral shares on Facebook too.

Install Thrive Themes Headline Optimizer on your WordPress blog and find best titles to get more exposure on social media websites.

Over to you

Much more components are integrated with social media marketing. So, you have to do tons of tasks to stay tuned with your followers on social networks.

The best way to make your small business stand out and grow it at a rapid pace is using unique and best social media marketing tools for small businesses.

You can find tons of social media tools that do thousands of tasks at once. Some social media tools such as HootSuite, Buffer and PostPlanner have very similar features and work structure.

However, I wanted to share with you my personal social media toolkit.

Yes, I use more tools than I listed here. Nevertheless, these are the unique ones with great features used and trusted by millions of marketers, bloggers, and businesspeople.

So, what is your favorite social media marketing tool? Didn’t I forget to list your favorite one? Please let me know in the comment form below.