To be successful on social media, you need the right skills, the right knowledge, the right training, and the right social media marketing tools.
Every social media platform works like a bunker. So, without third-party social media marketing tools, you will spend an incredible amount of time just switching tabs, logging in and out of different social media accounts.
The right social media marketing stack simply makes you a better marketer. Using the best social media marketing tools frees up time for creative tasks. At the same time, you get a clearer picture of how these creative solutions work.
Here we look at the different types of social marketing tools for businesses that will help you effectively connect with your social media audience and achieve your goals in 2023. We even have marketing tools for specific social media platforms to make sure your social strategy is relevant across all channels.
Social Media Planning Tools
The social media scheduling tool is a software solution that allows marketers to pre-create social content and schedule it to be posted automatically at a specified time.
Most social platforms have some basic scheduling options built in. But third-party tools provide more flexibility, functionality, and the ability to schedule content for multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard.
And by creating extra time in your content creation workflow, social media tools actually help with more than just scheduling.
Social media management tools provide a workflow that allows teams to work together more effectively. It’s easier to collaborate on pre-created content than on instant posts. This can be especially important for large teams or organizations in regulated industries.
This built-in collaborative process also allows content to go through a predefined series of approvals. With some social media tools for marketing, anyone can work on social media posts, but only senior management members can approve their posting.
Benefits of Social Media Planning Tools
- Proactively create social content and plan a single posting schedule for multiple accounts.
- Publish content automatically at predetermined times.
- Manage cross-platform campaigns centrally.
- Create and schedule content in batches to join forces and avoid multiple interruptions throughout the day.
- Collaborate effectively with teams.
- Create an approval workflow to review all social media posts before publishing them.
- Pause posts across all platforms with a single click if necessary in the event of important news or a crisis.
Social media analytics tools
Social media analytics tools are solutions that give marketers the ability to track, analyze and understand the performance of social media posts and campaigns. All social networks offer basic built-in analytics tools. But they require you to log in and out of each network individually, so you look at your results in isolation.
Dedicated social media campaign tools let you see the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on which of your Instagram posts perform best, you can see how your results on Instagram compare to your performance on Facebook or TikTok. You can then rethink your strategy to connect with your followers where they are most likely to be involved.
Social media analytics tools also allow you to track customers and leads from your social media content to a purchase or other conversion.
Benefits of social media analytics tools
- Set clear performance benchmarks based on a single view of all your social media posts.
- Learn how to improve your results over time.
- Simplify the ROI calculation for your organic and paid social campaigns.
- Track customers from first contact to conversion.
Social media monitoring tools
Social media monitoring tools are software solutions that allow you to understand what people are saying about you online. They will also help you gain insight into your competitors and your industry.
Social platforms will provide a notification if you are tagged in a social post. But not everyone who talks about you or your products on social media will include an @mention in their post. And they certainly won’t tag you if they talk about your competitors.
With social monitoring tools, you can keep track of your brand name variations. In addition, you can track brand and industry hashtags, brand names and usernames of your competitors, and any other relevant keywords.
You can also identify influencers in your industry and potential influencers or content creators to partner with while building a library of curated content to share.
Benefits of social media monitoring tools
- Stay up to date with the latest cutting edge ideas in your industry.
- Access a constant stream of relevant curated content based on hashtags, location, or keyword.
- Get a complete picture of what people are saying about your brand online, even if they don’t tag you.
- Follow your competitors to find out when they launch a new product, promotion or campaign.
- Identify potential partners to help build your brand.
Learn more about social media monitoring:
- The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools and How to Use Them
- How to track what people are saying about your brand
- How to Track Your Social Media Mentions
Social listening tools
Social media listening tools are similar to social media monitoring tools. But they allow you to understand social dialogue even more deeply. Beyond simply monitoring social discussions, social listening tools will help you plan the best course of action based on what is being said online.
Simply counting mentions does not give the full picture. Social listening tools will help you understand the intent of a social conversation. This means you can track and protect your brand reputation.
Social listening also provides important opportunities to engage with your target audience. You can identify pain points and maybe even come up with new product ideas. This is a good way to connect with the communities involved where they are already talking about your niche.
Benefits of Social Media Listening Tools
- Understand your audience based on what they are talking about online.
- Find out what people are really saying about you on social media by tracking both tagged and untagged mentions and relevant keywords.
- Quickly spot changes in your online reputation to highlight successes and quickly respond to mistakes.
- Join relevant discussions to start building relationships and stay in the spotlight.
Learn more about listening on social media:
- What is social listening and why is it important?
- How to do social media sentiment analysis
- How to conduct a competitive analysis in social networks
Social media reporting tools
Social media reporting tools give you the ability to create professional social reports to share with team members and stakeholders.
Instead of just listing numbers related to your social performance, social reporting tools allow you to create visual representations such as charts and graphs. This makes it easy to see what works and what doesn’t and how it changes over time.
When you need to report on the performance of your entire organization, social media reporting tools will help you create user-friendly documents or presentations tailored to each stakeholder group. You can share every minute detail with your team, providing high-level analysis for busy senior managers.
Benefits of social media reporting tools
- Easily compare your performance across platforms.
- Track organic and paid posts together to get the most out of your best content and understand the value of your ad investment.
- Use charts and graphs to get a visual idea of your social performance.
- Create publish-ready reports that can be customized for various stakeholders in your organization.
Social media automation tools.
Social media automation tools are programs that free up time for busy social media managers by automating basic or repetitive tasks. This allows you to spend more time and effort on higher-level work, such as brainstorming new content ideas or fine-tuning your social strategy.
Social automation tools can also improve your engagement with your followers by providing them with faster responses and more personalized information.
One of the new components of social automation is the ability to automatically create content using artificial intelligence.
Benefits of social media automation tools
- Spend your time on creative endeavors, not manual labor or data entry.
- Make the most of your social advertising budget by setting triggers to automatically boost your top social media content.
- Automatically recommend the best products or services with AI-powered social commerce.
Social Media Engagement Tools
Social Media Engagement Tools are solutions designed to help you get more engagement on your social media posts and increase engagement on your social channels.
One of the first rules for increasing engagement is that you need to respond to all comments and messages. Subscribers are more likely to comment on your posts if they see that you have replied to comments that were previously made.
When you have a lot of social media followers, it can be difficult to keep track of your incoming public and private messages. Social media tools let you manage comments and messages from all your social media profiles in one inbox. They also allow you to gain support as you can assign messages and comments to other team members.
Another social media engagement tool is a prediction tool that suggests the best time to post your content to get the most engagement. This tool analyzes the performance of your past posts and crunches the numbers to predict what will perform best in the future.
Benefits of Social Media Engagement Tools
- Get personalized recommendations on when is the best time to post for each account to maximize engagement.
- Reply to comments, complete user posts, and share content with teammates for follow-up – all from one screen.
- Monitor and reply to direct messages from multiple accounts in real time from a unified inbox.
Social media customer service tools
Social media customer service tools are any tools that help simplify or automate customer service on social media. More importantly, they can actually help improve your customer responsiveness.
Social media is the preferred customer service channel for many consumers. And when they use it, they have high expectations for response time. Social media customer service tools help direct incoming requests to the right team member for the job.
Connecting customer support in social networks to CRM allows you to get a complete picture of the interaction with each client both in social networks and beyond. Social media customer service tools help your CRM and your social media accounts (and teams!) communicate with each other, so information is shared with anyone who needs it. Each customer interaction builds on the previous one, instead of starting from scratch each time.
You will also know when clients are contacting you across multiple platforms so you can ensure a consistent response.
Benefits of social media customer service tools
- Assign requests to the best team member for a quick and competent response.
- Use a library of saved responses or response templates to reduce the burden on customer support.
- Integrate social strategy with your CRM.
- Monitor and analyze the performance of your customer success team on social media.
Chatbots in social networks
Social media chatbots are essentially virtual robots that provide automated messaging between followers and your brand. In the past, these tools were quite simple. In recent years, they have improved significantly thanks to the introduction of artificial intelligence.
The original chatbots could only give pre-written answers. No, now they can use AI to suggest products, resolve queries, and even make sales. When a conversation gets too complex, chatbots can hand over the conversation to a human. Your customers and subscribers get all the information and help they need, while your team focuses on the toughest cases.
Benefits of social media chatbots
- Respond instantly to simple queries.
- Offer basic customer support even when your office is closed.
- Engage subscribers in an intuitive way using the channels they prefer.
- Reduce the burden on your social team.
- Increasing sales through social commerce.
Instagram marketing tools
Instagram marketing tools are third-party solutions that unlock features of this social platform that are not natively available.
For example, you can use Instagram marketing tools:
- for more precise photo editing
- create custom layout and design elements
- to get more technical skills in video editing
- perform more detailed Instagram analytics than the app itself allows.
Instagram marketing tools can also be useful for managing influencer marketing campaigns. Plus, they can be used to maximize your Instagram ad budget.
Link from Instagram posts is always a problem for marketers. Try using Instagram’s marketing tools to create a link page that will help viewers learn more about the content of each of your posts.
Benefits of Instagram Marketing Tools
- Schedule posts, stories, and videos along with other social content.
- Get access to more sophisticated editing tools than you can find in the native app.
- Post to Instagram from both desktop and mobile.
- Collaborate with team members on Instagram posts.
- Create an effective link solution.
Facebook Marketing Tools
Facebook Marketing Tools are solutions for managing paid and organic Facebook campaigns with less overall effort. Facebook tools, from detailed analytics to autoresponders, make the Facebook marketing process easy. Who doesn’t want this?
Because Facebook is so ubiquitous, Facebook marketing tools are a must in any social marketer’s toolbox.
Benefits of Facebook Marketing Tools
- Proactively create, schedule, and collaborate on Facebook posts.
- Analyze and report on Facebook performance.
- Organize, sort and reply to Facebook messages with other DMs.
Learn more about Facebook marketing tools:
- How to do Facebook automation the right way
- Facebook tools to grow your business
- Facebook advertising tools
- How to Schedule Facebook Posts
- How to Use a Facebook Car Poster
Twitter Marketing Tools
Twitter’s marketing tools make it easy to manage your Twitter presence, no matter how many accounts you have. This is especially important for large brands, which may have separate Twitter accounts for customer service or for different regions.
Things move fast on Twitter, and it’s important to keep an eye on all your accounts at all times. Being able to launch them all from one screen is a huge advantage.
Twitter is an important network for listening to social media and this is another area where Twitter marketing tools can help. By creating custom searches and streams, you can track the general Twitter conversation in your industry along with your own accounts.
Benefits of Twitter Marketing Tools
- Manage multiple Twitter accounts from one dashboard.
- Reply to messages from all your Twitter accounts in one inbox.
- Follow relevant conversations on Twitter along with your own tweets.
- Follow competitor accounts without following them or adding them to your Twitter list.
TikTok Marketing Tools
TikTok marketing tools are resources that allow social media marketers to do some exciting things that are not possible on the native platform. For example, TikTok initially only allows you to schedule up to 10 days ahead. But TikTok’s marketing tools can greatly or even indefinitely expand that timeline.
TikTok marketing tools also let you schedule TikTok from your phone (Yes! From your phone!).
If you’re serious about TikTok marketing, you’ll probably want more detailed analytics and reports than you can get on the app, especially in a graphical format that’s easy to share with colleagues. TikTok marketing tools provide this data on both mobile and desktop.
Benefits of TikTok Marketing Tools
- Schedule TikTok for any time in the future.
- Schedule TikTok from both your phone and desktop.
- Get recommendations for the best time to post on TikTok.
- Get TikTok graphical analysis and reports that are easy to share with colleagues and stakeholders.
LinkedIn Marketing Tools
LinkedIn marketing tools are critical for anyone running a LinkedIn business page. Why? Because LinkedIn doesn’t offer its own scheduling option. And since LinkedIn is a business-focused social network, there are no benefits to posting on the fly, and there are benefits if you spend your time creating, viewing, and planning quality content.
Beyond scheduling, LinkedIn marketing tools can help you better understand LinkedIn analytics, streamline reporting, and even get recommendations on the best time to post on your business page.
Benefits of LinkedIn Marketing Tools
- Schedule posts on LinkedIn, which is impossible without third-party tools.
- Get personalized recommendations on the best posting times for maximum engagement.
- Understand your LinkedIn analytics in the context of your overall social marketing strategy.
Need more than social media marketing tools for business? Back up and check out our list of 15 essential digital marketing tools for teams and budgets of all sizes!