Social Media Marketing Tools
In order to be efficient any professional needs good tools. No wonder a chef cherishes their best set of knives, and a violinist sets great store by their favorite violin. A social media manager is no exception.
You can manage your Instagram account solely by using the features of this social network. It means going through 10-15 latest messages every day, trying to connect to the Internet in the forest to update your feed, and endlessly double tapping the screen hearting posts of potential followers. However, it’s much more convenient to delegate these oh-so-pleasant duties to various services.
In this article I will share some of the social media tools that make life easier for me and my colleagues.
1. Mindmaps
Let’s say you have a musical instrument store, and you are pondering what you should write about on Facebook. A mind map is a more convenient and illustrative way to do it. Use Drichard, which is free, to map your thought like this:
2. URL shortener
If you don’t waтt to post ugly long URLs, or you simply can’t as Twitter doesn’t let you do it, use Bitly to shorten your links. The service will also tell you how many people have clicked the link.
3. Online design
Imagine this scenario. Your designer unexpectedly falls ill, you need to edit a picture asap, but there is nothing but Paint on your computer. Then Pixlr is the tool that will come to your rescue.
This free online Photoshop alternative offers a bunch of tools, effects, and filters similar to those of Instagram. Of course, it’s not a full-scale photo editor (there are fewer fonts, shape tools lack some options, and you can’t upload a PSD). However, it’s a perfect emergency kit.
4. Tools for social media competitions
I have already written about the benefits of social media contests. Now I will just touch upon the tools that make it much easier to determine the winners. We prefer Fanpagekarma for Facebook contests. This tool allows you to create a list of participants and assign sequence numbers to each one them. Then use any random number generator (like this one) to determine the winner.
As to Vkontakte, we prefer Randompromo where you can specify whether the participants should be members of the group.
5. Instagram planner
Both Facebook and Vkontakte can schedule posts. Instagram, however, can’t. That’s why we use Onlypult to delay posts. The tool also allows you to edit the already published posts using your PC. The service and its technical support are available in 7 languages. However, its newsletter is only in English. It is a subscription service.
6. Instagram promotion tools
Mass liking and mass following can be automated with the help of 1mlnlks and Tooligram. We at LeadMachine use both. They are not free of charge, but the former will cost you half of the original price if you promote only one account. On the other hand, some say that the latter is safer for bulk following. In order to find more about Instagram promotion, read this article.
7. Promo repost tool
You can arrange promotional reposts directly with group admins. However, Vkontakte limits this way of promotion, and price negotiations via correspondence may take a lot of time. Sociate allows you to select communities with the right target audience, post your content there and pay for it. The money is charged automatically after the order is completed. The service provides you with screenshots of the published posts and the statistics for them.
Sociate is free. However, it charges a small service fee. Its amount depends on the method of payment: the service accepts credit cards, Webmoney, QIWI Wallet, and Yandex.Money. For example, if you pay with Webmoney, the fee will be 0.8%.
Sociate can be used for Vkontakte and Instagram.
8. Audience parsers for targeted advertising
If you are fed up with wasting your marketing budget and filling your groups with silent audience, use audience parsers like Cerebro Target and Pepper Ninja. These tools will help you set up your advertising campaigns more effectively. They allow you to select the most active social media users and show your ads to them. You can find your audience in other groups and sell your products to those people who will most likely buy them. Both services cost money.
9. Comment tracking tool
The other day one of my colleagues needed to quickly track comments on Instagram. He found the service called Chotam and was quite happy with it. The tool tracks comments in groups on Facebook, VKontakte and Instagram, and promptly emails them to you (or sends them to your Telegram channel or dialogue). Chotam gathers all comments in one place, which is very convenient if you work with several accounts (groups) or use your PC.
This is a subscription service.
10. Social media monitoring tool
It’s convenient to use monitoring tools to find out what people say about you on social media. We are currently using Wobot. It allows you to monitor mentions in certain cities, and it also detects the tone of feedback and collects statistics. Wobot charges you some fee for its service.
By the way, I have written a whole article on social media monitoring, and, among other things, it covers feedback collection.
11. Social media analytics tool
You can use Popsters to analyze VKontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. The tool determines the passions of your audience and helps find the most compelling content. Popsters can select the best posts of your group (in terms of likes, comments, or reposts), evaluate the engagement received by posts with different types of content (photo, video, text) and text length, choose the best time for posting. And much more. For example, it provides the statistics for any group on VKontakte.
This tool also is not free.
Let’s recap
In order to be effective on social media:
- Draw mind maps in Drichard
- Cut URLs in Bitly
- Process images in Pixlr
- Choose winners of contests with Randompromo, Fanpagekarma, and a random number generator
- Schedule important posts with Onlypult
- Promote your Instagram account with 1mlnlks and Tooligram
- Order reposts via Sociate
- Parse target audience with Cerebro Target and Pepper Ninja
- Track comments via Chotam
- Monitor social networks with Wobot
- Analyse your work in Popsters
Fine-tuned tools make work much easier and increase efficiency. We are sure you have heard of some other convenient and useful tools. Tell us in the comments which ones help you manage your social networks