Social media marketing is a rather counterintuitive field. It seems anyone can do it — post something (anything!) on social media, search for existing content, talk to people, fill your company’s Instagram with your most photogenic team members. It seems to be a task for every kid in today’s social media age. However, if you want your social media marketing ROI to grow, this is not the way to go.

It may sound simple, but without the financial resources, talented people, and the right tools for the job, marketing social media effectively is next to impossible. This post focuses on social media marketing tools. Thus, I’ve divided them into three groups based on the top social media marketing activities that need to be automated:

• Head of Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Monitoring
• Social advertising

Here is a quick preview list of all 12 social media marketing tools:

• IFTTT
• bumper
• quoo
• Meet Edgar
• Stingy
• Quote
• Brandwatch
• Talkwalker
• social insider
• Facebook ad rating
• Qwaya
• Perfect audience

…but read on to learn more about how these tools work, how much they cost, and more!

Social Media Marketing Planning And Workflow Tools:

These social media management tools will help you manage the workflow required for social media (yes, the name says it). They make the process easier, more organized, less stressful and therefore more effective. Here are some of my favorites.

1. IFTTT

So you’ve scheduled your social media posts and maybe even canceled the task of content curation. What is the next step? Automate everything before and after (and in between). That’s what IFTTT is for. The name of this automation tool stands for If This, Then That. Connect all kinds of apps and services together to automate multi-step tasks at will. So, for example, if you publish a blog, you can create an IFTTT “recipe” that sees the new post and create a tweet and Instagram post about it.

If there’s one activity in your social media marketing workflow that you keep forgetting about despite all the sticky notes, give IFTTT a try.

For free

2. Buffer

Buffer is a popular scheduling tool that marketers use to schedule posts across a variety of social media platforms. You can adapt each post to any platform or publish the same everywhere.

You can use a Chrome Buffer extension to add any content you find on the web to the buffer queue. This brings some fun and creativity to the whole content aggregation and sharing process because for once you don’t have to plan ahead what you want to share. However, your posts will be shared at the best times. You can also follow the links to see what content your readers like the most.

Price: Freemium; Paid plans starting at $15 per month

3. Offer

Already buffered? To further simplify your work, i. H. To eliminate the part where you are looking for valuable content to share, start using Quuu. This is a social media marketing tool that curates content for you – it takes selected and always relevant content and adds it to the buffer queue. This eliminates the hassle of curating and sharing content that you no longer want to share (e.g. your blog posts and promotional content).

Price: Plans start at $15 per month

4. You know Edgar

MeetEdgar is another social media scheduling tool that excels for one reason: it allows you to recycle old posts. This is more important than it sounds: content, even good and popular, is forgotten and left behind. Recycling that old content to restore views is a low-impact fruit and all too often a missed opportunity.

With MeetEdgar, you organize posts by category, schedule content by category, and every time the tool has reviewed your scheduled posts, it automatically publishes old content from each category so it can start attracting attention again.

Price: $49/month

Marketing Tools Monitoring:

Organic social media marketing is divided into two processes. One of them is content that comes from you and your brand. It’s the content you create, the content you aggregate and share with your audience, and the advertising content. The social media marketing tools that automate and simplify this part of the job are discussed above. The second aspect of social media marketing comes from the audience. Thus, it’s your brand’s online mentions, reviews, questions, compliments, and complaints that are directed at you.

While posting can be more important for building brand awareness, it’s also important to keep an eye on what people are saying about you and respond appropriately. It’s almost impossible to manually find all mentions of a brand on social media because people don’t always tag the brand, even on social media platforms. That’s why social media monitoring tools exist: to complement communicating with an online audience. Here are a few that stand out:

1. Wachio

Awario is a social media listening tool for sole traders and small businesses. It doesn’t require a huge budget but covers all major social media listening features – find mentions of your brand or any other keyword on all major social media platforms including influential forums like Reddit; Divide the mentions into positive, negative, and neutral mentions; shows you a list of influencers; and provides reports with all statistics on the authors who mention your brand.

Price: Starting at $29 per month

2. Mention

Mention offers real-time social media monitoring and you can set alerts for your brand, your competitors, and your industry. With this tool, you can view and reply to any likes, tags, or mentions (ah, see what they did there?) right in the app. You can also sort mentions by importance or importance and even set filters by source or language.

Mention also offers two options tailored to the different types of people who need social media monitoring: small businesses that focus on their brand and agencies that work on behalf of their clients.

Price: Starting at $29 per month

3. Brand watch

If your budget is much larger, Brandwatch could be the right tool for you. Than Brandwatch Analytics is very visual and perfect for showing clients the importance of social media marketing if you are an agency.

Another feature that makes Brandwatch stand out is the signals. You have the option to set a notification when a keyword is mentioned by selected authors. Signals indicate significant changes in the data set, such as B. A sudden spike in mention counts or an increase in negative mentions.

Price: Starting at $800 per month

4. Talk To Strays

Talkwalker is another enterprise-wide social media marketing tool that’s arguably one of the most powerful out there. Offers a wide range of filters, secondary filters and deck covers. This includes not only social media, news sites, blogs and forums, but also radio, television and print media. The data available is almost infinite. Combine Google Analytics and social media insights, sentiment analysis and image recognition to show you the most accurate report on every aspect of your audience.

Therefore, aimed at teams of marketers and PR professionals, Talkwalker makes teamwork easy. So It allows you to smoothly manage the workflow within a department and easily share data between departments.

Price: Starting at $9,600/year

5. Social Insiders

• Socialinsider is an analysis and benchmarking tool for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube.
• With this tool, you can see where you stand compared to top competitors, optimize your clients’ social media strategy with advanced analytics and competitor benchmarking, social media KPIs and brand reports.
• With Socialinsider you will save time and amaze customers with data they have never seen before.
• Price: Starting at $59 per month or 7-day free trial.

Social Media Marketing Tools Paid Advertising:

Social media marketing is complicated. Sometimes it seems like everything can be achieved organically and for free, as long as your efforts are creative and authentic. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case and it is becoming increasingly rare to achieve social media marketing success without an advertising budget. This is especially true with Facebook. As attractive as Facebook advertising may seem, it’s hard enough to get it to work if you don’t have the right tools. So here are the chosen ones:

1. Facebook Ad Rating

• Although Facebook does offer some ad analytics, it’s often hard to tell if your ads are worth the money, and if not, what needs to be improved to make them more effective.
• WordStream’s Facebook Ads Grader lets you know just that: It offers a comprehensive free evaluation of the performance of your Facebook ads.
• The report-based social media marketing tool creates a detailed summary of the areas in which you are succeeding and falling behind.
• The analysis includes metrics that show how key performance indicators differ depending on who you advertise; how your highest and lowest performing ads compare to your competitors; if you pay too much; if you are targeting the right audience; etc.
• It also shows if your campaigns, ad groups and ads comply with the industry standards set by Facebook.
• Basically, Facebook’s Ad Picker is the easiest way to see if you’re making the most of your budget and how you can improve.

2. Qwaya

Qwaya is a social media marketing tool for creating and managing Facebook and Instagram ads. It makes sense to buy it before you even start investing in Facebook ads. Qwaya allows you to schedule announcements, provides analytics integration and team collaboration. Most importantly, it allows you to A / B test your ads.

Everyone in marketing knows that testing is key to finding the right message for your audience. Social media advertising is no exception. Thus, with Qwaya you can test any variable you want to make sure you don’t waste your money and get the best possible result.

Price: Starting at $ 149 per month

3. Perfect audience

• Perfect Audience is a retargeting tool that can be used for Facebook advertising.
• Once you get past the clearly outdated design (sorry) and try the tool, you will find that it is very effective for your business.
• Retargeting is an important part of any advertising strategy, or at least it should be.
• Perfect Audience simplifies the process by helping you set up campaigns and view results.
• However provides information on impressions served, return clicks, conversions and costs.
• The tool can be used for both the web and mobile devices and Facebook.
• Price: calculated on a CPM basis (more details here)