Successfully marketing on social media takes time and effort, and if you’re like most people, you simply don’t have enough hours in the day or access to all the resources you need to truly meet your social media marketing goals.
So, what do you do?
Rather than:
- Waiting until you have a higher profit margin
- Trying to do it all yourself and sacrificing time you desperately need to work on something else in your business
- Hiring new staff you can’t afford
… get serious about your social media marketing efforts by using tools that’ll help you optimize your time.
By using the right tools – and using them properly – you can get back to the more serious aspects of running your business, while still ensuring all of your social media marketing needs are met. In fact, by using third-party services, plugins, and software, you can do everything from scheduling the times your social media messages are posted to conducting detailed analysis of how well users are responding to your content.
Since you’re probably time starved as it is, instead of wasting time testing all of the most popular tools out there, here’s a shortlist of the top five social media tools you need to be using in 2017.
1. EveryPost
With EveryPost, you can identify and follow influencers, schedule posts, and track your analytics. This platform supports email, DropBox, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr. It also enables you to curate content from Flickr and YouTube, and then automatically share it to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+.
2. Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster is amazing for analytics and optimization. It automatically updates your analytics and then sends you important information about the data. The real benefit here is that you can tweak your strategy in real-time based on how well your content is received. If your audience doesn’t respond well to something, Crowdbooster will let you know so that you can change it immediately.
3. Cyfe
Cyfe is a business dashboard tool that makes it easy for you to monitor every piece of your analytic data. Once fully configured, you’re able to get all the data you need in a single dashboard, which is a huge timesaver. After all, who really has the time to go to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram – and then Google Analytics? With Cyfe, tracking your brand mentions, Twitter followers, and Facebook demographics is a snap. You’re also able to easily identify the number of people who’ve signed up for your services, see how many subscriptions you have generated, and look at the number of downloads your app has, all in real time.
4. Buffer
With Buffer, you can connect up to ten social media accounts, and schedule up to 100 posts for each account. But the goodness doesn’t stop there – Buffer’s a powerful curation tool too. Simply add RSS feeds from your favorite sites or blogs, then share them through the suggestion tab. If you’re really feeling wild and crazy, you can also use Buffer’s browser extension, which will help you more effectively schedule your social media posts. Timing is everything when it comes to posting on social media, which makes this is a great tool to have in your arsenal – especially since every social media platform has different ideal times for posting.
5. Quuu
Quuu enables you to curate content and increase social media activity. With this tool, you can go through categories and/or topics that interest you or your company. Look to be as specific as possible, ensuring you share your posts with people who have an interest in your brand. Once you’ve done this, Quuu will automatically send the content to your Buffer account.
Bonus Tools
Of course these aren’t the only tools out there, and the following bonus tools are site specific, meaning that they’ll only work on one or two main social media platforms instead of the top seven.
Bonus Tool #1: Curalate
Curalate is the tool for images. With over 2.6 billion photos being shared every day, no one can deny the importance of a great photo, especially if you consider each photo posted to be worth 1000 words. Curalate relies on a special algorithm to scour the social media sites you most often use, like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest, in search of what visual content people are sharing about your brand. It enables you see what people are sharing, whether fans are pushing content, sharing photos, and more. You can push your own content with this information, create customized images and schedule your posts to Instagram and Pinterest, all from a single user interface.
Bonus Tool #2: SocialRank
SocialRank helps you identify your top followers on Twitter and Instagram. It sorts your followers based on your highest profile followers, those who are retweeting and/or replying the most, people who have recently engaged with you, and brands that follow you most often. You can also add in filters of your own, including geographic locations, interests, or special keywords.
It’s important to note that there are literally dozens of other social media management tools on the market, and new products come out daily. Don’t fall victim to “bright, shiny object syndrome” and start using anything and everything you hear about, however – if you do, you’ll quickly find yourself feeling overwhelmed and burned out.
Always start out small when using social media tools, and test each one out individually. Not every tool is going to benefit every business, and the only way you’re truly going to know whether something’s working for you is to test everything individually.