Social media marketing requires goal-planning, an understanding of your audience, engaging content, optimal scheduling and consistent adaptation to be recurrently successful. A good marketing team can perform these actions competently but not always efficiently. With the help of s, specific tasks can be completed quickly and intelligently.
At Pinnacle Internet Marketing, we provide social media marketing services for clients in a wide variety of industries. We implement flexible techniques and strategies because every business has different needs. When choosing which tools are right for your company, consider your current marketing objectives, budget, and any limitations you want to overcome. This way, you can assess the tools discussed below and make the most effective decision for your social media strategy.
Social media automation offers significant benefits to businesses and marketing agencies. With the right tools, marketers can publish content at specific times for optimal engagement. Once the logistics are taken care of, there is an opportunity to spend more time creating powerful content for your brand.
Choosing the best automation tool for your social media accounts is all about selecting your essential functions and matching them to your budget. With a wide range of tools at your disposal, you’ll need to narrow down your options by assessing the benefits in relation to your strategy.
We’ve selected two of our favourite automation tools to help social media marketers optimise their content publishing and enhance their productivity.
Hubspot’s marketing software package is a tool that includes almost every tool that a social media marketer could possibly use. Marketing automation is just one of the many features of SEO tools, marketing analytics, ad management, and plenty more.
The social media automation feature offers a time-saving solution to social media posting. With the intuitive scheduling platform, you can create a consistent output of content published at optimal times for user engagement.
One of the standout features included alongside Hubspot’s automation services is ‘social listening.’ This feature track mentions of your brand across social media to determine what users say about your business. This information can inform both the content of your social media posts and the time they are published.
To access the automation tools within Hubspot’s marketing software, marketers must subscribe to a monthly plan that costs between £38 per month and £2,624 per month. Certain plans may be more suited for different companies depending on the number of clients and specific features that you’ll require access to.
SocialPilot is an intuitive, simple-to-use platform that enables social media managers to schedule many posts from one dashboard. Whilst it may not be the most revolutionary software on the market, this reasonably priced tool is utilised by plenty of marketers looking to effectively coordinate several social media accounts.
With the ability to schedule posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram and Pinterest, SocialPilot effortlessly handles multiple accounts with different publishing times.
SocialPilot offers four subscription models depending on the needs of your social media campaign. Their basic package starts at £20.40 per month. This option enables one user to manage automated posts for 10 different social media accounts. Their most expensive option is directed towards marketing agencies and costs £85.85 per month. This package allows nine users to manage up to fifty social media accounts.
Like other automation tools, Sprout Social allows users to schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. However, this tool differs from many other options due to its intelligent and intuitive premium features.
To benefit from the high levels of engagement and awareness, Sprout Social offers various publishing options for your posts. You can publish posts instantly, schedule a time and date in the future, or enable Sprout Social to analyse engagement gaps and suggest recommended times for the best result. Additionally, the ViralPost function uses AI social media analysis to instantly publish your content when it is likely to receive the most engagement.
Social media managers considering adding this tool to their repertoire will notice a considerable increase in price compared to software like SocialPilot. Their most basic package starts at $89 per user per month, and their most expensive costs $249 per user per month. Unlike many other social media suites, SproutSocial doesn’t offer team packages. Large teams managing many social media accounts may not find this tool an affordable option for effective social media management.
Between the two automation tools mentioned in this article, Sprout Social is undoubtedly the priciest option. However, the key difference lies in the catalogue of premium social media management functions that Sprout Social offers. Their brand sentiment analysis feature is a core example of this. It enables users to measure positive, negative and neutral mentions of your business over time to see where improvements can be made for a positive response.
Social media content should capture the audience’s attention and provide a meaningful experience. These are the critical components of nurturing user loyalty and engagement. Creating informative, engaging and entertaining content requires dedication and skill, but it can be rewarded with shares, likes and conversions.
Like many other stages of the social media strategy, various tools aim to enhance your marketing efforts. The two tools below intend to assist content research and inspire hashtagging for increased content visibility.
Buzzsumo is a content research tool that eliminates the need for guesswork within your social media content strategy. An index featuring 8 billion articles and over 300 trillion engagements ensures that your content research is data-driven and relevant.
This tool’s primary function involves content research. Features such as the content analyser reveal trending articles relating to a specific keyword. The competitor analysis tool discloses your competitor’s best-performing articles so you can match their efforts. Additionally, the question analyser presents questions being asked by your audience so you can provide answers that meet their needs.
In addition, Buzzsumo provides a host of other features that contribute to your overall social media strategy. These include, but are not limited to, monitoring your brand reputation, mentions and PR campaigns, discovering key trends or researching journalists & influencers.
To get a taster of Buzzsumo, the tool offers ten free monthly searches via their content analyser. To gain access to their advanced features, packages range between $99 to $299 per month. The right package for your company will depend on the number of users and the amount of use you intend to get from the tool.
Any social media marketer will be aware of the importance of hashtags, especially on platforms like Twitter and Instagram. They inform a user and the algorithm that your tweet relates to a particular topic.
To increase the visibility of your posts, the right hashtags are essential. This is where tools like Hashtagify can enhance your social media strategy. The extensive database of tweets and engagements can help you to identify which hashtags are trending and relevant to the content you’re about to publish.
For advanced insights with real-time data, Hashtagify offers three different plans depending on your needs. Their Personal, Business and Enterprise plans range from $29 to $311 per month.
Brand consistency across social media channels is essential when establishing a recognisable social media campaign. With every piece of content you publish, it is crucial to stand out and relate to your audience with connected imagery. This helps to establish brand recognition, which is vital for building relationships and loyalty with your target audience.
It is a well-known fact that images grab users’ attention far more quickly than words. This happens because humans process and recognise colours and imagery much faster than chunks of text. When scrolling through social media, whilst the text will entice users towards your product, the images and graphics will grab their attention.
Brands that invest in visually pleasing and relevant visual content are far more likely to succeed in lead acquisition and conversion than those that do not. The following tools provide the resources you need to create a consistent brand image and engaging social media content.
Canva is a complete design tool that enables marketers to design images, edit videos, customise a range of templates, and utilise a library of thousands of free images and videos. Users can also benefit from the ‘brand kit.’ This feature stores brand assets such as colour palettes, fonts, and logos. Any team member can access the brand kit, allowing a consistent design across each piece of new content.
Canva offers two paid packages in addition to their limited free edition. Starting at £10.99 for up to five users, the Pro package equips you with the core features of Canva. Upgrading to the Enterprise package at £24 per month will grant the ability to create several brand kits, instead of just one within the Pro package.
Compared to Canva, Adobe Photoshop offers an advanced photo editing suite. Canva is more flexible for beginners and graphic design non-experts. The tool can be limiting for editing experts. Meanwhile, Photoshop is slightly less-suitable for beginners but is far more adaptable for professional graphic designers and photographers.
Within Adobe Photoshop, various functions can assist you in achieving your desired goals. Like any standard image editing software, images can be cropped and edited with variables such as exposure and brightness. Similar to Canva, a catalogue of fonts, graphics, and visual elements can be added to your project. These enable you to create social media graphics and banners which can be used to implement a coherent brand appearance.
Overall, Adobe Photoshop offers users a more advanced platform to create robust designs. With features such as ‘Layers,’ users can stack visual content and edit or move each layer without affecting the rest of the image. This is one of Photoshop’s best features that you won’t find within tools such as Canva.
Starting at just £19.97 per month, you can gain access to the entire range of editing tools that Photoshop offers. In addition, you’ll also be able to access Adobe Lightroom, a high-quality photo editing software that can help to bring out the best in your photos.
After conducting efficient content research, designing stunning visuals to attract new viewers and scheduling your posts to be published at optimal times, it is crucial to measure the success of your strategy.
Analysis of your marketing efforts is the critical component of social media marketing which will determine whether you can adapt and improve or fail to evolve from your current position.
Depending on your company or client’s goals, you can track different metrics to determine the success or failure of a particular post or article. This data can be measured with the following tools.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that social media marketers can utilise to make relevant improvements to their current strategy. The data offers insight into customer behaviour and engagement with your content, informing you where certain users engage with your brand and others lose interest.
With so much information at your fingertips, it can be difficult for first-time users to navigate GA. The most effective way to utilise the data is by defining SMART goals (these are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). By logging these goals in the GA dashboard, you can stay reminded of the metrics that are important to your strategy.
An abundance of reports is generated by the GA platform, providing relevant data for different goals. Marketers interested in the pathways travelled by their users after interacting with your content can utilise the User Explorer. Meanwhile, the Social Report provides actionable insights for data-minded marketers. This report comprehensively reviews your social media traffic, including landing page views and conversions attributed to your social media content. Google Analytics is also integrated with Facebook Ads. This feature allows marketers to track their paid social media ads and explore traffic, interactions and conversions from one platform.
To determine which reports are informative for your campaign, Google Analytics requires time and exploration. However, once you have developed a clear understanding of your goals and the relevant data, the platform offers a detailed insight into the performance of your social media campaigns.
Understanding your audience is critical for refining your social media content. Catering to their interests is hugely influential for increased engagement and conversions. Unamo is a tool that aims explicitly to assist marketers in understanding their social media audience.
With insights such as Word Cloud, which visualises the conversation around your brand or product, you can discover what users are talking about and how to engage them in new and effective ways.
Unamo also offers bespoke query searches that can be filtered by social media platforms. This feature allows you to identify the mentions, top influencers, brand sentiment and popularity of your brand on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter. Utilising this data, you can build relevant queries and monitor topics of interest to adapt your social media strategy.
This analytics tool offers three different packages for social media, SEO, and image monitoring (an AI-powered image monitoring tool, currently in BETA that tracks your branding or logo use across social media). Their social media package starts at £16 per month and can be upgraded for increased keyword tracking. This particular feature aims to monitor industry-specific keywords to keep ahead of the trends and inform relevant future content.
Between Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube and Pinterest, there are so many platforms to keep track of. Social media marketers who produce and manage content for several clients across different platforms will have their hands full, keeping track of their tasks.
Effective project management is an essential component of any marketing strategy. Failing to keep track of content calendars, current events, and constant updates can hugely impact the success of your campaign. Fortunately, there is a range of straightforward and practical tools that can help you manage your social media portfolio.
Asana is an online project management software that can be implemented across all aspects of your marketing strategy, including social media. The tool’s core features include Gantt charts for mapping your timeline, Kanban boards for shared tasks and data reports to track progress.
In addition to these valuable features, a collection of social media-oriented functions can optimise your strategy. These include strategy setting, calendar templates, post editing and automation, and day-to-day workflow management. With these features, you can optimise a work routine that utilises your time in the most productive manner.
This article has introduced some of the best social media tools available to marketing professionals and agencies. Selecting which tools to use should depend on your current goals and marketing budget. Fortunately, plenty of these tools have free trials to test most of their features, allowing you to select the best fit for your company.
Whilst social media tools cannot run your social media campaign automatically, certain features and benefits could improve your current strategy. Non-professional graphic designers can take advantage of the simplicity of Canva. Whereas, Buzzsumo can enhance your content research with trending suggestions when stuck for ideas.
Each tool can be used interchangeably relative to your current needs and business goals. Make sure to try these tools or consider consulting with social media marketing experts to see what ideas and tools you could incorporate into your current strategy.
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