What are the functions of social media marketing tools?
In today’s digital age, any business that wants to succeed has to engage in social media marketing in one way or another. Since it is something that every brand makes use of, it is often difficult to stand out. This is where social media marketing tools come into play. If you use them appropriately, they can be transformational for your brand. In this article, we will take a look at the different kinds of tools you can use to boost your social media, along with some examples.
Here’s what you can use social media marketing tools for
Content Creation
This is an essential step in any digital marketing strategy. In order to post on social media, you need to have content that you can share! Content can take many forms – text, graphics, audio, video, or a combination of any of these. While certain platforms specialise in specific kinds of content – for example, you wouldn’t go to YouTube if you didn’t want to watch videos – it is becoming increasingly important to be able to combine different components to create content that is engaging, fun, and interactive. Here are some tools that you can make use of:
- Biteable is a video maker that lets you create engaging and entertaining content. It is easy to use and offers several templates for video, music, and animated scenes.
- Canva is an online graphic design software that you can use even without any graphic design experience. You can choose from their preloaded templates, frames, and elements to create content to match your brand’s personality.
Scheduling
It can be stressful to make sure that your content goes up at exactly the right time. What if you live in a time zone that is far away from your target audience? You don’t want to be waking up in the middle of the night just to click a button. You can use social media marketing tools to help you make sure that you post content at a time when your audience is most active. Most of these tools also give you the option to share the same content across all your social media profiles. In this way, you only have to click once to create posts on Facebook, Instagram, and any other social networks that you use. Here are a couple of scheduling tools that you can check out:
- Buffer was originally created to help you schedule tweets, but they have now expanded to support other social media platforms as well, including Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin. It lets you create a posting schedule and even lets you reply to posts from within Buffer.
- Sprout Social not only lets you publish content to multiple social platforms at once, but it also offers you some analytics (for example, analysing hashtags) that will help you to improve your social media presence.
Analytics
Creating content and posting it is just the start of what you need to do to run a successful social media marketing strategy. Once your posts are out there, you have to track their performance by seeing what resonates most with your audience (and by keeping track of what doesn’t). You might also want to keep tabs on what – and how well – your competitors are doing. Social media analytics tools help you do all of these things with ease. Here are some examples:
- Buzzsumo lets you track what your competitors are doing and analyse their content. You can also use it to research keywords that your audience is interested in, which will help you create engaging content.
- With HubSpot, you can tie your revenue growth to your social media performance. This tool creates graphs and visualisations of your social media data (such as audience demographics and impressions) to make your job easier.
Engagement
Creating content, posting it, and analysing its performance isn’t enough. You have to engage with your customers as well. If you have even a medium-sized business, you might be getting hundreds of messages a day. It is impossible to reply to all of them one by one. To help you out, you can use social media marketing tools to manage your engagement. These tools typically let you view and reply to all your messages in one inbox so that you do not have to keep switching between platforms. They can also show you the social media history of people who reach out to you. Here are a couple of engagement tools that might make your life easier:
- Statusbrew not only gives you one single inbox with which to manage your different accounts, but it also helps you automate your workflow by categorising the messages you receive.
- With Hootsuite, you can ensure that you provide your customers with personalised engagement, and make sure that you never miss a communication.
Monitoring
In order to engage with your customers effectively, you have to make sure you understand them. This is where monitoring comes into play. By monitoring your social media conversations, you can discover engagement opportunities. To find out what your target audience is saying, you can track hashtags, keywords, and mentions. This will help you stay up-to-date and involved in your industry. Here are a couple of social media monitoring tools that you can check out:
- Nexalogy is a free tool that gives you excellent data visualisations with respect to timelines, locations, and common topics. It can also give you data regarding popular keywords and the most active accounts.
- Mentionlytics is another free tool that you can use to monitor your engagement across different platforms. The major benefit of this is that it supports multiple languages. Keep in mind that some of the social media marketing tools mentioned above serve more than one function. Have clear goals and come up with a social media marketing plan before you decide to invest in any one of them.
Not sure which social media marketing tools are right for you?
It can be daunting to sift through all the different options available. If you’re not sure what to go for, you can always outsource your social media marketing work. iTrobes is a digital marketing company that offers its services all over the world. We can help you with your marketing on several different platforms, from Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, to Linkedin and Google AdWords. Based on your needs, you can choose from several different social media marketing packages that we offer.
Write to us today to get started!
