9 social media marketing services and tools that you should try today

Read this article in Speed Reading Mode

This year has seen more than 2.46 billion active users on social media from around the world. That’s a large audience at your fingertips. In this single market, getting heard on the web is the biggest battle of them all, and to win, it takes the right social media marketing services and tools to make some noise.

As a social media marketing agency, here are 9 of our favourites.

1. Hootsuite

Vancouver-based company Hootsuite offer one of the best tools going. From Twitter to YouTube, you can easily monitor your feeds, messages, likes and even schedule multiple posts at once to save time without losing content consistency.

The cherry on the cake, though, is Hootsuite Ads. This enterprise-strength platform lets you optimise your Facebook advertising, helping you make iterative changes to your strategy to generate the best results.

2. Buffer

Like Hootsuite, Buffer lets you curate and schedule your content for multiple social channels from one location. Connect various accounts and schedule quality content throughout the week, then sit back and watch it grow using their advanced analytics tool.

Buffer also integrates with Google Chrome. This extension lets you directly share and schedule content you read on the web via the Buffer app without the need to copy and paste URLs. Oh, and did we mention that their blog is a tapestry for useful social media information?

3. Inboundli

The key to social media branding is to position your company as a thought leader. According to the 2017 content preferences report, sixty percent of users give credence to content authored by a third-party publication or analyst.

In the realm of social media marketing services, Inboundli is a one-of-a-kind third-party content sharing tool. It not only saves time on publishing interesting reads from other sources, it also uses AI to learn what you do and don’t like, feeding you tailored content to share.

But, Inboundli is a social media aggregation tool, not a curation tool. It’s impersonal. Sure, it will help you build a steady stream of posts but at the end of the day, it won’t help you connect with your followers on a deeper, more human level. Bear this in mind.

4. Narrow

460,000 people sign up to Twitter every single day and on average, the community fires off more than 400 million tweets in any given 24 hours. With such a rapidly growing audience, most of which are bots and automated profiles, it’s certainly difficult to engage with a meaningful audience that cares.

Narrow, then, helps you set apart the humans from the robots, letting you engage with human operated profiles. By using audience research tools like keyword tracking, the platform can help you find the most suitable followers, allowing you to generate a real, honest following.

5. Buzzsumo

Social media marketing services and tools don’t get better than Buzzsumo. This tool lets you scan popular content based on the keywords you search for, helping you understand what content engages well with your audience and what doesn’t.

6. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a great tool for mapping out your social calendar. Build social timing templates to push content onto platforms at preferred times and visually see what content is getting published and when.

Social calendars can be messy and unorganised, and with multiple users, it’s difficult to comprehend who is publishing what and where. CoSchedule, however, gives you a clear, concise overview of your entire social media operation. Keep track of who is publishing what, document your use of keywords and CTAs and always deliver your content on time.

7. Canva

For the amateur graphic designer, Canva has everything you need. Design your own cards, eBook covers, banners and logos using their user friendly and highly editable templates. And if that doesn’t float your boat, Buffer offer a similar tool, Pablo, which lets you create wondrous pieces of content to share across your platforms.

Pick colour palettes and edit photos, too, not to mention the variety of fonts ready and waiting. Considering that three quarters of social media marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing, having the freedom and flexibility to quickly create visual content is a necessity for social media success.

8. Adobe creative cloud

For those advanced graphic designers, an Adobe creative cloud license gives you complete freedom over all your design needs. From designing magazines to photo editing and video production, the creative cloud has it all under one roof.

HubSpot states that visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content, making Adobe something of a necessity for those looking to create engaging content.

9. Influencer marketing

More and more people are turning to personal recommendations to make smart purchasing decisions. To give you some context:

92 percent of people trust recommendations from individuals (even if they don’t know them) over brands.
47 percent of online customers use ad block technology. The way to reach them is to provide content they want from people they trust.
74 percent of consumers use social media to make purchasing decisions.

IMA – one of the top influencer marketing agencies – uses top bloggers, vloggers and social media influencers to create campaigns and help brands engage with their audience. Their clients earn millions of impressions and, according to their portfolio, they’re hitting ROIs of more than 400 percent.

It takes more than just tools

Social media marketing services and tools only go so far. For campaigns to be successful, it takes a master content curator to dot the I’s and cross the T’s.

Sixty-two percent of companies are outsourcing their content marketing to specialist firms, allowing them to concentrate on important things like business growth without compromising their online brand presence. As put by Neil Patel,

‘You’ll find that you can save plenty of money by letting someone more experienced do the work.’