Let’s be honest, keeping up with social media isn’t easy.
From content creation to daily marketing to-do’s, knowing how to manage it can be confusing. Not to mention the hundreds of social media tools to choose from.
But while automation can be a divisive topic, I’ve always believed that automation in moderation is the key to success.
And the data supports it.
- Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months’ time.
- Businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects.
- 69% of marketers say converting leads is their top priority. 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years.
So how do you pick the best social media management, listening, and promotional tools to keep you productive, not just busy? I’ve made it easy!
Below are 21 of my top picks. Not only are they the most effective social media tools on the market, but they’ll also simplify your social media strategy.
No more running around trying to manage social media. Instead, these tools do the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters most: your business.
TL;DR:
You”ll find all 21 social media tools listed in alphabetical order. I break down how to use it, why you’d use it, and how you can get started today.
21 Social Media Tools for Smart Marketers
1. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management tool that can make your life infinitely easier, and is my #1 recommendation.
With integration into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram, Agorapulse helps you publish and schedule activity, monitor your results, and listen to what your audience cares about most.
Most importantly, Agorapulse makes it super easy for brands and agencies to get set up and start saving time.
2. Brand24
Brand24 is my daily social listening tool. With Brand24, you can intentionally listen to your customers, target your niche audience, and attract potential leads.
In fact, you’ll find that social listening is one of the most powerful ways to better understand your audience. And once you do, you can give them exactly what they need.
But be careful not to confuse social listening with monitoring. Monitoring is simply tracking your brand mentions. Social listening, on the other hand, requires analysis and lets you see the bigger picture behind the conversation.
Use it daily and you’ll see your engagement, leads, and traffic skyrocket.
3. Buffer
Since its inception, Buffer has been saving marketers oodles of time. Although many tools have followed in their footsteps, Buffer retains its popularity and remains a favorite among social media marketers worldwide.
At its core, Buffer is a publishing platform. With it, users can schedule content to publish across various social media platforms.
Thanks to Buffer, marketers no longer need to login several times a day to post content – instead you can simply create a posting schedule for each social network and queue posts to be shared at an optimal time. This becomes incredibly powerful when you pair it with a “best time to post” tool like Followerwonk.
The best thing about Buffer is that it gives you back your time. Create a schedule for weeks and even months ahead, posting your evergreen content without lifting a finger.
Plus, their built-in analytics help you see what is working and what is not so you can quickly (and easily) adjust your course of action.
4. Buzzsumo
Great content is key to great social media marketing, and Buzzsumo is just the tool for that.
It helps you find the most popular content and stay updated on what’s happening in your industry. It can be used as a source of curating content or researching top performing keywords.
Simply type in the word or phrase you’re looking for and you’ll find popular content that’s already performed well. You can also type in the domain name of your competition and look at the most popular content they’ve created.
Buzzsumo searches through different types of content including:
- Article
- How-To Article
- Infographics
- List
- Videos
- What Post
- Why Post
It’s a daily go-to tool for me as I’m researching a specific topic or looking for additional content to link to from a blog post like this one.
Any way you use it, it’s a goldmine of insight into your target market likes and dislikes. Use that info to better tailor your marketing strategy to the needs and tastes of your audience.
5. Clickfunnels
I’ve been using Clickfunnels for over 2 years now and have found it to be an invaluable tool. Whether you’re looking to create a webinar landing page or build out an entire membership site, Clickfunnels makes it easy and pain-free.
From their template library, choose from professionally designed landing, thank you, and webinar funnel pages. Those templates contain each step within your funnel and follow the methodology behind Russell Brunson’s massive success.
6. Commun.it
With Commun.it, you will never need to worry about missing a mention or important conversation again. Commun.it is an easy way to monitor your Twitter activity and respond in real time.
You can also find and engage your top supporters to create reciprocal and meaningful relationships.
7. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is an end-to-end social media calendar scheduling system. Rather than simply posting content, use it to strategically align all content, including blog and social.plan, create, and promote your content and projects all in one place.
CoSchedule not only saves you time, but also helps you grow your audience through smart marketing plans and efficient team collaboration.
8. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
Headlines can make or break a post, and that’s why you want to make sure that yours is a winner.
Co-Schedule has created a headline analyzer that measures the effectiveness of your headline. In other words, how well will it perform?
I use this tool daily to Co-Schedule test out as many variations of a headline as I can come up with. Each one is scored based on their algorithm, giving me an idea of how my audience will respond to it.
9. Dashlane
With Dashlane, you can get your logins and passwords in order.
Stop trying to keep track of your passwords, and instead let Dashlane do the work for you.
And the beauty in this tool? You can get your passwords wherever and whenever you need them!
10. Designrr
If you’re ready to take one piece of content and turn it into multiple with a click of a button, this is the tool for you. I use Designrr to take blog posts and video and repurpose them into pdf’s, ebooks, and downloads.
Get it now with this one-time offer of $27 for lifetime access, regularly $324. Why spend hundreds of hours and dollars on designing content upgrades or opt-ins when you can get Designrr and get started today?!
11. Droplr
I couldn’t live online without this handy tool. And if you work within the design space or manage a team, this will simplify your life tenfold.
With Droplr, you remove the friction and frustration of sharing files, shortened URLs, screen recordings and even gifs from your busy life.
12. Likeable Local
Likeable Local is a powerful social media platform that offers small businesses a simple solution for managing a social media presence.
As Neal Schaffer from Maximize Social Business says, “it’s a scalable tool solution to small businesses who are looking for an easy-to-understand and easier-to-implement complete social media solution.”
13. LikeAlyzer
Are you randomly posting to your Facebook Page with no clear strategy? Would you like to know what you can do to better optimize your Page?
Look no further than LikeAlyzer!
With LikeAlyzer you get a comprehensive review along with tips to help you improve your interaction with current and potential fans and customers.
14. Mention
If you are looking for a tool that will help you monitor your brand’s presence across social media and the web, then Mention is a real life (and time) saver.
Mention, a real-time monitoring tool, detects any reference to your brand or keywords you’re monitoring on all forums, social networks, blogs, and sites.
It also offers the option of responding to the mentions and sharing them making it a quick and easy engagement solution.
15. OverVideo
Video is hot, hot, hot. What better way to show off your product or display your latest feature than a video? Now take that video and amplify the message with an animated text overlay!
With OverVideo, you can take an average video and make it a real stand out.
16. Pocket
Knowledge is one of the most important tools in a marketer’s tool belt. But who has time to cull through the hundreds of thousands of articles written daily?
That’s where Pocket comes in. Stay up-to-date on the latest trends and industry news by saving content to read later. I use the Chrome extension and the iPhone app to sync my content as I save on the go.
17. Post Planner
I can’t talk about my favorite tools without mentioning Post Planner. Full disclosure, I’m the brand ambassador for Post Planner, but my love of the tool goes well beyond that. I’ve used Post Planner for years for many reasons.
Not only is it one of the top tools for social media marketing, but it can also help you save time through proven content, creating predictable results. And who doesn’t want that?
For those unfamiliar with Post Planner, it’s an app that helps you manage and enhance your marketing strategy. In other words, it does all the heavy lifting so you can focus on what matters – building relationships, driving traffic and making sales.
But what makes Post Planner stand out is that it also helps marketers find the perfect content to post. It gives you access to the most viral posts on Facebook and provides a huge list of status ideas.
With Post Planner, it’s incredibly easy to find content that is currently trending in your niche, so you never have to hunt for popular content to post.
The tool also provides a real-time analysis of the posts, helping you see what posts will help your engagement soar!
18. Quill Engage
There is no denying the importance of quality analytics. Unfortunately, not all analytics tools can provide clear, detailed, and easy to understand data analysis.
Most are complicated, with too many options and data that is difficult to filter through. That’s where Quill Engage stands out.
This is a fantastic social media tool that connects to Google Analytics, scans it, and puts the data into a detailed report. It focuses on the most important information you need and reports any significant changes, whether good or bad.
The review Quill Engage sends you has a summary of your site’s traffic changes, as well as information about which post got the most or least traffic, and where the majority of the traffic came from.
All of that information is sent to you in simple language that paints a clear picture of what is really going on.
19. Relay
Any social media marketer knows about the importance of visual marketing. It’s also no secret that a significant portion of your visual content must be original if you expect to get great results. But how can you create visually appealing content and do so over and over?
Relay is the answer. Relay is new to the scene, but quickly has become my go-to for creating attention-grabbing graphics in a matter of minutes.
Relay has pre-designed templates with appropriate dimensions for an Instagram post, Facebook post or cover, presentation, and many more.
The layouts, fonts, sizes, and others factors Relay lets you choose from make it possible to create professional looking content that will get noticed and shared.
20. Sprout Social
Another superb, all-in-one, management tool is Sprout Social. I’ve used Sprout Social since their beta days and couldn’t live without it.
The Sprout Social publishing system lets you schedule content on all of your accounts, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or LinkedIn.
It also lets you easily monitor any mentions across the major social networks and reply to them right away. There is even a mobile app available that makes messaging a piece of cake.
One of Sprout Social’s coolest new features is their Instagram integration. More Instagram makes me happy!
21. Tailwind
Tailwind is my go-to tool for Instagram and Pinterest scheduling, including powerful performance data.
If you want to make content curation, scheduling, and analysis super easy… this is the tool for you.
Take a look at “Post Inspector” to analyze the performance of your Instagram posts over time. Identify which message, graphic, and style are creating a buzz around your business.
Or make your way over to your Pinterest dashboard and checkout Smart Loops.
As a content creator, this feature blows my mind. Not only can automate your top performing pins, but identify the best times to post to each board.
Brilliant!
Final Thoughts
As you can see, there are many social media tools to choose from.
The key is finding the one (or two) that simplifies and improves your current process.
All of them are business-friendly — including features that will help boost engagement, reach, traffic, and sales.
So, what’s your favorite tool? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
Do you have any recommendations to helps grow an audience? Thanks for all of these recommendations!
Hi Randi! It’s really as simple as showing up consistently and creating a conversation. Your audience wants to get to know you. Let them. 🙂
Great list Rebekah 🙂
Although I think Proofer should be on here!
Rebekah,
Several of these tools are new to me. If you would use all of these tools, what would your budget come up to per month?
Hi Rebekah,
Great joy to be here again!
Great share about these tools, I am already using some of them but many are new to me. Will surely check those shortly. Thanks for sharing the updated version for your readers.
I found this today curated on the platform BizSugar and I up-voted and dropped a comment.
Thanks
Keep writing
Keep sharing
Best
~ Phil
Good one. Thanks guys!
Thanks for this posts
Thanks for this post.. Nice one
Thanks for the great list!
I’d like to share the tool for social media monitoring and analytics – Snoopreport https://snoopreport.com. It tracks the actions of Instagram users as likes, comments and follows and provides weekly and monthly reports with metrics that help to research user insights and update a marketing strategy.
Hey Rebekah,
What a great list of tools! I found a few new ones. I was wondering whether you ever had a chance to explore Kontentino. It’s the most intuitive social media calendar, which allows you to completely streamline your content approval workflow. Currently, you can schedule your posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Linkedin. Additionally, you also get several small but really handy features. You get 30 days trial for free. It’d be great to hear your feedback – https://www.kontentino.com/
Hi Rebekah
I loved this post – thank you.
Another tool worth a look at is SwiftlySocial (www.Swiftly.Social).
It repurposes blog content into social media content automatically.
Hitesh
Maybe you can add OnlyWire. You can blast your post to more than 50 social media with it feature.
Great list of tools Rebeka. PostPlanner iso one of my favoriteson for curating and autoposting. It’s great to “set it and forget it”! Dashlane has made it easy to “log in” from anywhere on any device without me having to remember the gazillion passwords I have.
social media is the only hope of most internet marketers as trying to rank on google is becoming more and more competitive. great post but just to add, every online marketer should try IFTTT. IFTTT is especially great for social media marketers because the tool can post, read, and do all sorts of things with almost all major social networks: Facebook. Twitter. Pinterest. YouTube. Instagram. LinkedIn. Tumblr.
Begin new to this era I come to know more about social media from your article. seem like I have discover something more valuable than gold. Thanks for the resources.
Awesome toolkit! Collect as many tools had to take a lot of time and effort. Appreciate it!
I know some of them, some are new to me and I will try them for sure.
Although I feel like there missing one of my favorites: Brand24.com which is a really nice, easy to use, efficient tool for social listening. It allows to track mentions on the Internet and notify you when something related to your topic has been posted. Great for online presence managing but also for building engagement and getting new leads.
I believe that is worth to try and consider adding to this great list!
The list is great! I’m coming across many of them for the first though I’m familiar with few
Wow, great list of tools!
I’m using a bunch of these already (Pocket is a life-saver for my commute to work!) and the other’s I’ve added to my list of tools to check out. I’m actually going to go give Likealyzer a try right now!
Thanks for the great list!
Simcha
Hi Rebekah! I’m actually taking a social media class right now and I had no idea all these tools existed. The one the caught my eye almost immediately was BuzzSumo. I was spending so much time sifting through content. It was really nice that I was able to type in a few words and find a lot of great stuff to post. Do you have any tips for using BuzzSumo effectively?
I love that you just call it like it is: social media marketers are smart marketers. “Having the right social media tools can make your life easier. Fortunately, there are dozens of cool tools, and most are aimed at earning time back in your day,” I love this. I had no idea about a good portion of these, and I think it’s excellent that you took the time to research and describe them all in order to help those trying to better their brand. Much appreciated!
[email protected] https://socialmediaopportunist.wordpress.com/
Oh my goodness this is overwhelming! Thank you for providing such an exhaustive list, it’ll take me the rest of the day to research all of these websites. 🙂 At least I’m familiar and use about 1/3 of them already.
I’m sharing this article with all my mommy bloggers – we need all the time management tips and advice we can get while running after little ones and blogging!
Hi Rebekah,
I’m a big fan of tools like PostPlanner, Buffer and Buzzsumo. But you have some gems on this list that I never check out before like Doplr – it might come in handy one day. I’m downloading OverVideo right now!
Pocket will read the articles back to you so I find myself using that one on a daily basis. Mention is cool but Buzzsumo alerts are pretty sweet as well.
Thanks for the Inforgraphic my dear.
Hope to see you on Blab soon!
Hi Ileane! I use Pocket to save and categorize content. Helps me to refer back and/or read later. I love it!
And BuzzSumo is my daily go-to. Love everything about that tool.
We need you on as a guest on Blab. I’ll reach out via email to see if we can get it scheduled. 🙂
Rebekah, I would love that. Blab has me hooked and I’m loving your shows over there. Looking forward to it!
Thanks and enjoy your weekend.
Rebekah, I have to sheepishly say I am not a regular reader of your blog! But after reading this terrific roundup of tools, I’m hooked and I am now going to be back on a regular basis to read, absorb and share all of your great info. Thanks so much for sharing! Amanada
That is awesome to hear Amanda – thank you! I’m so glad you enjoyed this roundup. I can’t live without my tools and I’m sure you feel the same way.
See you soon!
What an amazing resource, Rebekah! I use some of these tools almost every day and I absolutely love them. Some are completely new to me and I’ll make sure to check those out. I’ve heard a lot of positive things about Tailwind and that’s a tool I’ll try out next!
Hi Camilla! Tailwind is an amazing tool and if you’re serious about Pinterest, it’s one you can’t live without. Give it a try – you’ll love it!
Hey Rebekah,
Nice list of tools and and there were two that caught my eye. Likalizer and Kingsumo.
Although I use coschedule’s headline analyzer it would be great to test each headline to see which ones get the most traffic. Thus tool would definitely come in handy.
Also I want to start engaging more on my page. Using a tool like Likalizer will be a great help to see what I can do to make it a more engaging page. Especially for the fact I plan on adding more visual content.
Thanks for sharing Rebekah! Have a great week!
I use Hootsuite, Pocket, and Feedly. I’ve tried everything-Buffer, Klout, CoSchedule-but I keep going back to Hootsuite. I don’t care bout all the bells and whistles, like the Klout score, or the headline feature. I used the headline feature in my CoSchedule trial, and the suggestions did not stand up against real world trials.
I’m thinking about trying IFTTT, because I use workflow “recipes” of my own, but they work really well, so I’ll wait a while. Thanks for some interesting suggestions. I’ll be checking out the ones that are new to me, like InkyBee and Mention.
Okay, no surprise here. Another excellent article. I pride myself on keeping up with the latest tools, but you listed a couple here that I definitely need to check into. Thanks for another great jump into a New Year. (PS: “see” you at #InfluencerChat again this evening.)
Thank you Rebekah for your enthusiastic support of RELAY! We’re honored to have you as part of our street team and will be unveiling some amazing features in 2016.
RELAY is the only tool featuring “graphics that design themselves” and we’re excited to empower everyone to make some amazing visual content for their brands.
Hadn’t really heard of postplanner untill now. Social media marketing has become so important to businesses so this post is golden.
Thanks Rebekah
I’ve never found headline generators all that helpful, even CoShcedules, but then again I *could* be missing something. Do you ever use any of them, Rebekah??
I REALLY need to get in on Mention this year!
Great roundup of awesome sauce, lady! <3
Thank you for this Rebekah – great read and resources all in one place. Love it!