15 Best Social Media Tools To Grow Your Business – Save 10+ Hours A Week

by Vedh Jagadish on Thursday Apr 20

Social Media Tools, just like Social Media, play a very important part in enhancing businesses. They can be used for customer service, lead generation and sales. Nowadays, unless you have your presence in the digital space, people find it hard to have that initial trust in your brand. And if your digital presence is not strong, you have lost a goldmine of customers!

Having established the importance of social media for a business, there’s no denying the fact that social media marketing is a time-consuming process. To help tackle this issue, there are several premium social media tools available that help you get the best from your social media marketing strategy.

Social media marketing tools help automate your activity on social media sites, optimise your strategy, and provide an in-depth understanding of all your efforts by providing social media analytics. This list aims to help you find the right social media marketing tool for your business-

Social Media Management Tools

1. Buffer

Buffer provides a super easy interface that enables you to schedule posts, discover content and analyse the same. It provides a smooth interface and also a calendar view of the month which helps you plan your social media content strategy with ease.

This highly recommended social media tool provides integrations with 60+ apps which makes establishing your brand presence all the easier. Buffer also provides a browser extension, and Android and iOS apps to facilitate on-the-go social media management.

Buffer provides a forever free pricing plan with limited features and also offers premium plans starting from $10 per month.

2. DrumUp

DrumUp provides an efficient interface to help you manage your social media accounts with each. Not only are you able to fill your content calendar to its brim, but you also can provide your followers with quality content to increase social media engagement.

This social media tool helps you discover content relevant to the keywords you provide, schedule posts as per your desired date & time, and also provides analytics regarding the performance of your post. Its Google Chrome Plugin, mobile app and 1-Click Schedule feature make managing your social media accounts simpler.

DrumUp offers a free trial post which you will have to choose a suitable plan ranging from $15 to $159 per month.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers solutions to manage 35+ social media sites all from one place. It offers the complete package and aims to make the entire process faster, smarter and safer. It is one such social media tool that emphasises providing zero compromises with respect to protecting your brand on social media.

This social media tool helps you improve your social media engagement. You can maintain a closed loop with its publishing and analytics features. Hootsuite App Directory and Hootlet extensions are also a big help. You can extend the power of social media and gain the best results for your business through the 160+ apps available.

Hootsuite offers a forever free pricing plan with limited features and premium plans starting from $14 per month.

4. Knackmap

Knackmap is a dynamic social media marketing tool. It has been making its impression in the market as an inexpensive alternative to Hootsuite. It houses a clean interface that enables you to manage your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn profiles.

Knackmap provides you with content discovery, content calendar, scheduler and publisher features, all in one power-packed tool. In fact, it also lets you automate the entire process. You have to select your “level of activity”. Knackmap aims to be a complete social media tool as it also provides social media monitoring features.

This marketing tool provides a 14-day free trial, after which you will have to upgrade to one of their monthly packages starting from $15AUD.

5. Social Oomph

Social Oomph offers a simple yet powerful social media tool that helps automate your social media activity across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Tumblr, RSS feeds, blogs and Plurk. It is a straightforward tool that aims to help boost your social media productivity.

Scheduling posts of every kind! Track keywords across various channels, blog integration, secure account access, automated follow feature, purging Twitter DM or tweets, SPAM protection, URL shortening and automated DMs are some of the highlights of this tool.

Social Oomph offers a forever-free pricing model and also offers a professional plan for $17.97.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

1. TweetDeck

TweetDeck provides you with complete monitoring control over your Twitter account. It is a powerful Twitter tool that helps better engagement with its real-time tracking and organising features. It is Twitter’s very own productivity tool to help reach your audiences effectively.

This tool doesn’t just help you monitor your social media presence but also helps you study your competitor’s social media strategy. You can track Twitter activity based on your desired keywords and filter down the results as per engagement, location, users and other preferences. You can set up dedicated tabs for your keywords and monitor all the activities in real time.

TweetDeck is a completely free social media tool that makes you the Godfather of Twitter.

2. Brand24

A social media monitoring tool that provides you with the set of ears you need to understand thoroughly how your brand or business is perceived. In addition to monitoring your presence on social media sites, this social media tool also houses features that help measure the buzz around your business, brand or keyword.

Brand24’s range of features includes a mention feed to discover what people say about your business.  These are discussion volume chart, sentiment and social media marketing analytics, social media influence score, data exporting, data filtering to narrow down your results and email/in-app notifications to keep you updated all the time.

Brand24 offers a free trial for 14 days post, which you can upgrade to Plus ($49/mo), Premium ($99/mo) or Max ($399/mo) plans.

3. Brandwatch

As the name suggests, Brandwatch provides you with social media and internet monitoring tools along with arguably the best graphical representations. This makes social media monitoring more efficient as you’re able to understand your brand identity through such analytical representations.

Among its other offerings, Brandwatch Analytics is the highlight for social media monitoring. It projects data from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, videos, reviews, news, and much more. This social media tool provides instant access to conversations from around the world with its marketing measurement, Influencer identification & outreach, competitor benchmark, reputation management and market research features.

Brandwatch offers a free demo and an upgrade to Pro, EnterpriseM and EnterpriseQ plans.

4. Mention

Monitor your brand, product, competitor, campaign, industry and more across the vast expanse of the web with Mention. This powerful social media tool scours the web and provides live updates about your brand.

Mention’s media monitoring package provides you with social media monitoring, web monitoring, brand tracking, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Instagram tracking facilities. This tool scours social media sites and enables you to find influencers, study the competition, monitor your brand and create reports. To enable on-the-go monitoring, it also provides apps for iOS, Android, OSX and a Google Chrome extension.

Mention offers Solo ($29/mo), Starter ($99/mo), and Custom plans to choose from once you’re satisfied with your demo.

5. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a popular option amongst many to start with. It provides a simple interface to enable tracking of your brand, competitors and keywords.

Google Alerts enables you to set email alerts or notifications when the query that you’re tracking is mentioned. It scours the entire web, especially blogs, to keep you informed of trends and topics that you’re interested in. This can be used efficiently to track brand mentions from various blogs and review articles. You’re able to set your alert preferences with respect to the frequency of alerts, time, delivery type and result type.

Google Alerts is a free offering from Google and can be used as an effective social media tool.

Social Media Analytics Tools

1. SumAll

SumAll is a social media analytics tool that provides a graphical representation of the performance of all your social media channels. It is a cross-platform tool that helps you create reports to understand the correlation between all your social media platforms.

SumAll intends to help you assimilate and optimise your social media strategies by providing a complete overview of your social presence through reports and insights. Reports help turn your social media metrics into elegant and easily readable graphs and charts. This helps you assess the performance better as against numerical data entries. Insights provide you with the analytics of your posts, timings, hashtags, keywords and guidelines to improve your post performance.

SumAll offers a 7-day free trial, after which you can upgrade to the $ 99-a-month plan.

2. Union Metrics

Union Metrics helps you work smart by providing in-depth social media analytics. It helps optimise your social media strategy, attain better engagement rates and learn more about your customers. This leads to growth through its comprehensive social media analytics reports.

This social analytics tool provides engagement analysis. It helps identify key influencers, best-performing posts, suitable keywords and more with its automated insights. Its features include Twitter archive search, Twitter analytics, Facebook analytics, Instagram analytics, Tumblr analytics and free Twitter snapshot report, and Instagram account check-up.

After the demo, you can choose to upgrade to the Starter ($99/mo), Team ($199/mo) or Custom plan.

3. Facebook Insights

This is a powerful inbuilt social media analytics tool provided by Facebook for Facebook. It provides a thorough understanding of your brand’s Facebook performance and helps you understand the type of fan base that your brand resonates with.

Facebook Insights offers performance reports of your Facebook activity and enables you to monitor your competitors’ progress. It further provides data about your audience base, which can be filtered down to location, age, sex and language. You can also derive the best times to post with the Active time feature.

Facebook Insights is a free Facebook analytics tool that can be accessed through your Facebook page itself.

4. Twitter Analytics

This analytics tool for Twitter, by Twitter, offers you every bit of information you need to devise the best strategy to grow your audience and brand presence. It helps you measure and enhance your Twitter influence.

This social media analytics tool provides you with analytics of your Twitter activity and also helps you understand your audience better. It provides data about your followers, helps measure engagement and, overall, helps you hatch the best plan for Twitter.

Twitter Analytics is a free inbuilt social media analytics tool that can be used in integration with your Twitter account.

5. Simply Measured

Simply Measured is a cross-platform social media analytics tool that helps you analyse your social media activity and help grow your social influence with its comprehensive reports.

This social media tool enables you to study campaigns, and analyse competitor performance. It also unifies the analytics data from across different social media sites into easy-to-read reports. It provides insights supported by simple visuals to help you effectively plan and execute your social media strategy. Other features include social listening, conversion tracking and content share tracking.

Simply Measured offers a demo, on the expiry of which you may choose to opt for the full version for about $500 per month.

From management and monitoring to analytics, this list of social media tools has a choice for every business. Automating mundane social media activities. Track such activities and make the best use of your time. Once you’ve found the perfect mix that works for your business, you will be able to strengthen your social media influence in no time!

To fully automate your social media activities, you can always mail us at hello@firstlaunch.in, and we’d love to help you grow your business with our digital marketing services.

Comment below the social media tools you use, which are worth checking out!