Do you promote your small business online on your own? Or are you a pro marketer helping other companies? In any case, you need tools for your social media marketing work to make it simpler and more effective. This post will save you some time searching for the right instruments.
This year, social media adoption for businesses hit a new high. Companies realize that if they wish to reach their prospects and customers, they must build their online presence in different social media networks. It is the foundation of their overall marketing strategy.
The tools I want to share with you will simplify your social media marketing work and provide you with more outstanding opportunities to get the most of Social Media.
Table of Contents
1. Mention
A mention is an outstanding tool that I hit upon quite recently, but I fell in love with it from the very first day.
Mention is a brand monitoring tool that gives you much more opportunities than Google Alerts. With it, you will see your brand or product mentions on the web. What’s even more important, this tool also monitors mentions on social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, Instagram, and others.
As you find out who mentions your brand and where you can track your online visibility and reach out to your potential clients who show interest in your brand.
With a free version of Mention, you can create only one alert, while with the premium, you can add numerous alerts to track various brands and products. What is also important, you can also track mentions of your competitors.
2. Content Explorer by Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful pack of tools for SEO specialists, online marketers, website owners, and managers. But here, I’ll focus on the social media aspect.
With Content Explorer, you can discover the most popular content, sorted by the number of shares on different social media networks. Just search for the topics you plan to use in your content strategies and see how popular they are among people.
Knowing the topics, that gather thousands of shares, you can adjust your social media strategy and create content that has much more chances to be shared.
Now you can predict your content social behavior, not just analyze it after posting.
3. Recite
Social media is getting more and more visual each day. Posts with images attract much more attention from the audience on Facebook and Twitter. Such posts get more engagement.
Keeping this in mind, you can turn your text quotes and sound bites into cool visuals with Recite. This online tool is extremely simple in use. Just enter your quote text, select one of the available designs (there are more than 40 nice templates) and click “Create”. That’s it!
You can instantly post your image on one of the social networks, download it or email it to anyone. Just give it a try.
4. Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule
You already know that your headline’s quality has the utmost importance for SEO. But it is even more important for social media marketing.
The headline is your only chance to get social media users interested and make them click through. The most awesome headline will make people re-share your content on social media networks even before checking it out.
Headline Analyzer will examine your title and give you recommendations on how you can improve it. Sure thing, it will not write the ideal headline for you; it’s just a “robot analysis.” But it is a good reminder of the best practices for writing magnetic headlines.
Note: There’s no need to aim for A+ in Headline Analyzer. It is not a grade put by a human being who you’re actually writing your headline for.
5. King sumo Headlines Plugin for WordPress
Speaking about your headlines, Kingsumo offers an awesome plugin for WordPress to A/B test (split test) your headlines for the same post. Just write several versions of your blog post headline and observe how they perform with the Headlines tool.
Your titles will be randomly shown to your visitors, and as different headlines get different impression levels, you’ll see the performance for each title in percentage. You can see which headlines are most effective and pick the best one.
The “winner” headline of your A/B testing will also perform better in social media networks.
6. Inkybee
One of the top blogging experts, Adrienne Smith, once gave me great advice:
“To get anywhere in life you need people; it’s all about the relationships”
Building relationships with influencers is an important part of a social media marketing strategy. The goal here is to connect with them, establish relationships and finally get them to share your content in front of their huge audience.
With Inkybee, you can find top bloggers in your niche on all major social networks.
Find the blogs related to your niche, and get ways to connect to the right people. You can also save the selected blog to a list so that you can target these influencers later.
7. IFTTT
IFTTT is an awesome multi-purpose tool for any marketer. It “connects the apps you love.”
IFTTT stands for “if this then that.”
IF (condition) —-> THEN (action)
The principle is pretty similar to basic programming conditional expression but applied to social media usage. You just have to define the “IF” condition and “THEN” action.
For example, IF you update your Facebook status, THEN send this status on Twitter.
Each predefined action is called a “recipe” in IFTTT. Here’s how they look:
This tool is awesome for social media because it can “execute operations” with all major social networks:
- YouTube
- Tumblr
You can create your own recipes or use the ready ones created by other users.
8. Social Locker Plugin for WordPress
Social Locker for WordPress is a great tool, bringing its users more traffic from social media.
The concept of this plugin is quite similar to the concept of Content Upgrades, but instead of trading some bonus exclusive content on your site for an email address, Social Locker exchanges it to a social share.
With this plugin, you will offer your visitors some bonus material, but they can only access it after sharing your content.
Here’s how it looks on the page:
You can lock any content and automatically unlock it after a visitor has shared your page. All you need to do is select the part of your content you want to lock, click a button and you’re done!
The box, created in Social Locker, is fun to interact with, thanks to the animated social share button “hatches”. It looks pretty attractive.
9. TweetDis Plugin for WordPress
TweetDis is another outstanding plugin for WordPress on this list, which will drive you more traffic from the Twitter network.
With this ultimate tool, you can easily create outstanding tweetable quote boxes and click to tweet links, which will add more ways to share your content. Every tweet resulted from clicking the quote box or click to tweet link, includes a URL to the page with your content.
Here is one of the tweetable quote boxes examples you can create with TweetDis:
And here’s what happens on Twitter, when someone shares it:
If your social media marketing aim is a Twitter audience, this plugin is definitely for you. If you want to learn more about this strategy and why it works so well, read this in-depth article about tweetable quotes at Bloggerjet.
10. Bonus:
Social media is an ever-changing game, and it can be hard to keep track of various changes by every social media site. MakeAWebsiteHub has created a handy guide to help you create the most appealing images for every major social media platform.
In addition to the various image size requirements of the social media platforms, this guide also tells you the accepted file formats and maximum filesize.
Here’s the Twitter guide!
Final words
I hope you liked my short reviews on each of these outstanding tools, that will simplify and amplify your social media marketing. I’m sure these instruments will serve you well.
Yet, of course, no matter how awesome these tools are, they will not make all the work for you. Remember that social media marketing is hard and consistent work. And only the most persistent will succeed.
And don’t forget to share this tool list with your friends. It will come in handy for them as well.
