Social media marketing is a complex process with many moving parts. Here are 10 essential social media marketing tools to help you take control of your brand’s social media presence.
Why You Need The Right Social Media Marketing Tools
Social media marketing can be a difficult thing to get started on. Also, it can be even harder to get right. This is why many businesses choose to outsource their social media marketing entirely, finding that the DIY-approach is lacking in results.
However, just like with any other project, you need the right tools to get the job done perfectly. There are numerous aspects of social media marketing to tackle. This runs the range of content creation to data interpretation.
If you are looking for some clever ways to bolster your brand’s social media marketing strategy, we can help. Here are some free social media marketing tools you can use to get started.
The Facebook Page Barometer
Facebook is a massive social media platform, with over 2.4 billion monthly active users. Most social media marketers want to get in on the action. It is important to post on social media. However, it is equally important to know just how well those posts are doing.
After all, if you endlessly post content with no strategy and have no idea how well your posts are actually landing, you are doing your business a disservice.
You can use the Facebook Page Barometer to get a quick snapshot of how exactly fans are interacting with your Facebook page. It gives you specific strategic insights, such as letting you know exactly how your engagement rates stack up against pages of similar sizes.
SEE ALSO: Using Facebook Custom Audiences to Create an Unforgettable Digital Brand
Influencer Fee
It’s no secret that Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful social media marketing tools. When companies partner with the right influencers for their ad campaigns, it can lead to incredible results.
However, as this is a new practice, there are not a lot of obvious universal standards set in place, it can also be confusing for newcomers. Many who want to get started in the world of influencer marketing have questions like:
- Can I figure out influencer engagement?
- How do I determine what an individual influencer is worth?
- How do I know I am making a smart investment?
Choosing the right influencers for your brand will involve a lot of research. First, you have to find an influencer you want to work with. Then, there are some tools that you can use to get a rough estimation of their engagement and earnings per post.
If you want to learn more about making Influencer Marketing easy, take a look at our Cheat Sheet For Working With Social Media Influencers.
Let’s Take A Look
You will most likely want to work with micro-influencers. They are more accessible and often have higher engagement than macro-influencers. However, say that, just out of curiosity, you wanted to know how much pop culture icon Kim Kardashian West, or any other influencer, earns per Instagram post based solely on engagement.
It’s actually a lot easier to find out than you would think. All you have to do is enter her IG handle on Influencer Fee.
Tweepi
Tweepi is a tool that empowers you with artificial intelligence to help you grow your Twitter brand.
While you do have to set up an account, they do offer both free and paid versions. In order to use Tweepi, you first have to set up your account. Then, Tweepi will monitor twitter for you to find the best tweets and users for your brand to engage with.
It can help you spend a short portion of your day on growing your Twitter account, rather than hours and hours combing through the platform and managing your account.
Remember, social media is not just about posting. If you only post, but never truly engage with anyone, your brand is essentially talking to itself online. The whole point of social media is being social and getting engagement. This is how you can build a thriving community around your brand.
Google Alerts
There are actually many free ways that you can use Google to get important data on your social media presence, influence, and engagement. While most people already know about Google Analytics, fewer people are making use of Google Alerts. It is one of the most underrated social media listening tools.
You can use Google alerts to be emailed alerts whenever anything new appears about topics of interest. If you create a Google Alert using your brand name as a keyword, you will be notified whenever anyone mentions you online.
If you are not a true social media fan, this might sound like it has the potential to become very overwhelming very quickly. However, this is not the case at all. You can choose to be emailed all alerts at once in the form of a neat digest. In addition, you can even choose the time that you want Google to send it to you every day.
Social Mention
Social Mention is one of the social media marketing tools that you can use for real-time social media search and analysis. It is unique for a few reasons.
Most tools you can use to track your social media use will analyze your social media pages, such as Facebook and Twitter. However, Social Mention goes deeper. Erin Cushing, Account Manager, Social Media & Content Strategy, inSegment, Inc, describes how it can give you a fuller picture of the scope of your social media engagement:
“It crawls all of the usual social media suspects, but it also looks at blog content and blog comments as well as forums for any mention of your keyword. It also gives you a plethora of stats, including reach, sentiment, passion, and frequent authors. I haven’t seen many other free services get this in-depth.”
One other unique thing that Social Mention offers is that it ranks the general sentiment about your brand online. It gathers all of this data and analyzes it. Based on this, it lets you know if the general web sentiment about your brand is positive, negative, or neutral.
SEE ALSO: How To Do Online Reputation Management
Final Thoughts On Social Media Marketing Tools
Mastering social media cannot be done in a day. It often involves so much work that it can take multiple people with varied expertise to keep all of the social media accounts for a single brand or business up and running.
However, these tools can make it easier to understand your stats online and make decisions accordingly.
Do you have a favorite social media marketing tool? Let us know below…
