Tools to enhance social media marketing strategy

Social media is the new in-house favorite of the masses becoming a regular part of our lives. Marketers try to gather their audience by meeting them halfway on the social media channels. There are more and more brands today that use social platforms to pass on the messages to their respective customers. Today more than 80%in the US have a social profile. But we are not together in a single social network. The audience is spread on a number of platforms. So the businesses are diverting their attention across an ocean of social networks to keep being steady and in touch with fans and audience. Companies have been developing 3rd party apps and tools for years to help marketers keep up to the challenge. The best social media management tools are always changing based on the social landscape but some are the must-haves which will help dominate the social strategy.

1. ANIMOTO-Managing and standing out in social media is not a cakewalk. The popularity of social platforms depending on visual media(Instagram and Snap chat) gives an indication of how the audience may prefer to digest content. Video is a great way to capture the attention of the audience and Animoto can help with that. This tool gives access to a large volume of attractive templates, themes and a collection of stock music to add depth to video. It’s an added bonus that Animoto lets add text overlays throughout the video. 85%of video ads are viewed without sound and so it can be a life-saving marketing tool.
2. GRUM-Instagram gives a lot of marketing potential and unique engagement with Instagram. But there is one obstacle which is that any content can be posted only from the mobile device. And GRUM offers up the perfect solution.

From a single dashboard on the PC one can---Post on Instagram from their PC.

The posts should be prepared and scheduled to be posted later.

One can swap between Instagram accounts without signing out and signing back in again.

One can process and edit photos including cropping images.

With GRUM you can drop your videos at any time like 2 a.m or 5 p.m.

3.VENNGAGE-The creation of quality, engaging content is time-consuming. And this is very true of infographics. In it one has to source your data but one needs to compile it into an eye-catching design and write a great post to go along with the graphics. VENNGAGE is a popular tool for streaming a portion of that process. It provides lot of templates to help you put together the perfect infographic or presentation slides. One has complete customization options to add your brand’s style and also get access to a suite of charts that make building the graphic easy.

4.QUUU-To master social media the company has to know that their audience wants to hear from them. But they don’t always want to hear about them. The followers are looking for value. They want information and tips to pass along, entertainment, ideas, education and more. Instead of feeding the audience a stream of their content, one should curate quality content from around the web. And Quuu is an excellent tool for doing that. Marketers and influencers submit their content to Quuu for strict individual review and approval by its editorial team. When approved that content is sorted by topic or industry, company selects the topics most relevant to the industry and audience and Quuu creates an automated queue of content that will be dispersed or sent to your social account. It’s also a promotional tool to help you grow the reach and shares of your blogs and articles. Curating content establishes thought leadership which is the target goal of some 85% of marketers. About 83% of marketers curate or share content with their customers from 3rd party sources. It includes blogs, social media, industry publications, news sites. Quuu removes the manual sourcing of that content making you free to manage more critical elements of your social media.

5.BUFFER-There are plenty of tools for scheduling social media content but BUFFER allows to connect to multiple social accounts for scheduling content at different dates and times and you can set up the BUFFER plugin on your browser. The BUFFER plugin lets you buffer any page or image one comes across on the web adding it to your queue of scheduled content. BUFFER integrates with a number of other applications to help with content curation. The most notable option is Quuu. When the two are linked anything loaded to your Quuu account is automatically fed to BUFFER for posting.

6.IF THIS THEN THAT(IFTTT)-Everything done on social media is not scheduled. And there are plenty of manual updates to make on a regular basis. To help in managing schedules and minimize the little tasks of the day then IFTT tool should be used. Anything that helps you be more productive on social media is a smart investment.

7.CANVA-Visual content is really important. But if you are not totally skilled and you don’t have access to a creative designer it can be difficult to source the right images for your content and social campaigns. And so Canva is a very handy tool. It is a free browser-based design tool, ideal for non-designers who need to make attractive quality images. Canva offers many free and premium images, drag-and-drop design functionality, custom layouts designed for different marketing channels, beautiful designed text overlays and font selections. With CANVA one can create these kind of custom images like posts customized to social channels(Twitter,Facebook,Instagram), featured images for blogs, ebook covers, presentation slides, photo collages. It’s important to have visual elements in content marketing. They are key for boosting engagement in the entire blog content and they play a big role in knowing how often content is shared. By simply adding an image to a tweet it’s retweets will be boosted by 150% and more.

8.VIRAL CONTENT BEE-Marketers rely totally on social media for content promotion. One can use it to share your own content and the work of others and get influencers to spread the word about the posted content. VIRAL CONTENT BEE is a social promotional tool to help with getting others to share the content automatically. With this tool, you can put the content in front of social influencers who will share it across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest.

9.FACEBOOK MESSENGER-Every social media tool requires a buy-in or subscription fee. As social media is becoming more and more personal, customers are demanding more direct attention from companies. Facebook Messenger should be recognized as a business tool and for improving customer experience. The coming of bots opens many opportunities and new elements like direct shopping and easy communication with customers tied to the Shopify platform which will improve the way companies do business on social media.

10.BRAND 24-It is an ideal tool for tracking brand mentions. In a big world with lot of social space it is not possible to monitor manually all the conversations that are taking place among the customers and prospects. With BRAND 24 one can use the dashboard to see every person who mentions the brand on social media. It’s a simple and effective tool to stay in the race of both good and bad posts about the brands, products and industry. BRAND 24 makes sure that no customer-service issue tied to your brand is missed.

11.RIVAL IQ-To be able to keep a steady track of social insights can be time-consuming when you need to bounce between platforms, dig through tabs and take out specific reports. Rival IQ pulls engagement metrics in a single dashboard for you. This tool compares own social engagement rates and the best-performing content with competitors that you specify.

12.Bit.ly-Our activities online should be tracked and measured. And it has become far easier to do with social insights. Custom URLs with UTM parameters should be utilized. Bit.ly works to help you make your marketing efforts more traceable. Bit.ly is also known as a URL shortener but it functions beyond pretty links. It’s a great way to see which social channels are bringing the most traffic from the posted content. Such tools should be checked daily to monitor activity and growth works.

13.BUZZSUMO-Buzz Sumo is one of the best tools to track what’s hot on social media and which topics are proper and which are not. With a few keyword searches you can discover the likings of the audience and start drafting new ideas for blogs and other contents to share. This tool can also be used for curating popular content the audience will find valuable. The best part of Buzz Sumo is that you can trace the content back to the person who shared it, giving you the names of influencers to connect with you. Today about 60% of marketers find it a challenge to create nice content and this tool can eliminate the guesswork and timely research involved in finding better topics.

14.POST PLANNER-Buzz Sumo is used for finding most shared articles but it does not include social posts. Post Planner feeds the most viral posts across Facebook and Twitter. You get a ton of topic ideas that you can use for status updates. And there are a lot of tactics for boosting engagement on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other channels. Each is useful in it’s own way. The content meat surely will have the greatest impact on boosting engagement.

15.REPLY-It is a software platform that falls under the umbrella of the Buffer team. The service links your social media accounts to your customer-care team for a very proper service experience. Instead of managing multiple logins and checking various inboxes all the social marketing and customer service efforts can be put together in a single environment.

CONCLUSION 

Social media tools are evolving constantly with new apps and platforms being presented regularly to improve social marketing efforts. Every tool may not be equally relevant and provide the exact needed functionality.