17 Top Social Media Tools for Marketers

 

As a marketer, you are responsible for creating an online presence to represent your clients in the best possible way. Fortunately, there are amazing social media tools that both marketers and small business owners can use to help save time and effort, and eventually assist in delivering content to your target audience.

And believe me, you need the top tools.

Being a good marketer in the digital world is more important than ever. According to a 2016 Tapinfluence study, 74% of people turn to their social networks when considering a purchase. This makes that online presence vital.

And with so many tasks involved from content creation, graphics, engagement, and reporting, it can be pretty overwhelming to keep up with everything you are required to do every day.

This is where those top social media tools come in very handy for all the marketers out there.

Content Creation Tools

Creating content for different social media platforms is a whole set of skills that the average marketer does not usually have. It’s a skillset all unto its own! But being able to create quality content is a huge plus. This is why I love these content creation tools.

1.  Canva

Canva is by far one of the top graphics creation tools used by marketers and business owners for daily tasks. Canva is a free online editor tool that has hundreds of free templates for most social media platforms. Creating stunning graphics can literally take just a few minutes with Canva’s drag and drop features and ready-made designs.

You can even publish your graphics to multiple social media platforms quickly right from Canva, too. Currently, Canva works with Facebook groups and pages, LinkedIn profiles and pages, Tumblr, Pinterest, Slack, and WeChat.

Cost: Canva is basically free to use. However, you can purchase premium elements, or you can upgrade to the Pro Plan for $12.95 per month if you need to create animated designs, upload your brand kit, and access these premium elements on a regular basis.

2.  Eye Dropper Tool

It’s embarrassing but I have to say that I have the worst eye for design ever. I usually cannot decide which color to use for any given graphic I am working on. The Eye Dropper Chrome extension comes in very handy here – you can simply use this tool to pick colors from existing web pages with nice color schemes.

I usually create an inspiration board on Pinterest where I keep the designs I like and use it for inspiration on future projects.

Cost: Free

3.  Remove.bg

Removing backgrounds from photos used to be painstaking and required a good knowledge of Photoshop – plus paying for the software. With remove.bg, you can automatically remove the background of photos in 5 seconds or less. I am personally using it on a daily basis and it has been so easy and accurate so far. I have even created a video tutorial on how to use it here.

The only drawback, in my opinion, is that it only works on faces or pictures with people on it. LunaPic is my second go-to tool for transparent images.

Cost: Free

4.  Over

Yes, I am Canva’s biggest fan but their app doesn’t live up to expectations compared to their desktop version. Here comes Over, the best app for your graphics work on the go. With Android and IOS version, tons of templates, a user-friendly interface, and a scheduling feature, Over is by far the best app I have used for my social media tasks.

Cost: Free with in-app purchase

5.  O-DAN

Finding and using stock photos is a daily task for social media managers. They can be used to create graphics and for adding a visual to your marketing without having designing or photography skills. However, you can easily spend hours searching on different sites like Unsplash and Pexels.

O-DAN is a cross-searching website for high-quality stock photos. It literally performs your search on multiple websites simultaneously providing you with tons of results from all of them so that you can save time juggling between all of them.

Cost: Free

6.  VSCO

If you are using Instagram for marketing (and you should), then you know that Instagram is all about Aesthetics. Quality content and hashtag optimizing are essential, but they won’t be enough if your profile is not visually appealing.

VSCO is one of the most used apps for photo editing to create beautiful visual content. What is more impressive than their photo editing features is the community that they created on Instagram. #VSCO is one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram with over 180 million posts. You can take advantage of this by finding inspiration for your marketing projects.

Cost: Free download with in-app purchase

7.  Animoto

People are up to 85% more likely to make a purchase after viewing a product video. Creating engaging videos for your marketing plan has become inevitable. With its ready-made templates, fairly low cost, and ease of use, Animoto has been a great tool for marketers no matter what their videography skills are.

Thanks to a tool like Animoto, we marketers can now create videos in minutes and share them on clients’ social platforms to engage the audience, drive traffic, and increase sales.

Cost: $5, $33, and $49 for annual billing.

8.  WordSwag

Inspirational quotes are an essential part of every marketing content strategy since most people love to read and share them. It is one sure way to boost engagement for your social profiles.

While you can definitely use Canva to create quotes on the desktop, you might look for something quick and easy to use on mobile. WordSwag is a mobile app available on both Android and IOS that lets you create beautiful text layouts for your brand.

Get inspired by the app’s huge collection of font combinations, effects, designs and branded quotes for your clients.

Cost: $3.99 for Android & $4.99 for IOS

Scheduling Tools

It can be really hard to search for content, create graphics, and post at the optimal times every day. Batching and scheduling content is key to organizing your tasks and being able to get it all done for social media managers and marketers.

There are amazing schedulers online that you can choose from according to your marketing goals and budget. Below are some of my favorites:

9.  AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a highly rated scheduler that posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

In fact, AgoraPulse is more of a comprehensive social media tool rather than a regular scheduler. Some of the features you will get access to are scheduling and publishing, social brand monitoring, repeating posts, reporting, and collaborating. The features I love most are repeating posts for reviving evergreen content and customizing posts according to different social networks while scheduling your content.

Another cool thing is that AgoraPulse provides amazing free tools that are very helpful:

• Facebook Page Barometer: get a quick snapshot of how well fans are interacting with your Facebook page.
• Twitter Report Card: Instant feedback on how your Twitter efforts are paying off compared to competitors.
• Facebook Page Contests: Easy to use tool to create Facebook contests, quizzes, and sweepstakes.

Cost: Starts from $39 for solos to $239 for large organizations per month

10. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is another great scheduling tool that I constantly recommend. Like most schedulers, you can schedule and post content to social networks, get deeper insights with analytics, add people, and repeat posts.

It is worth mentioning that Socialpilot’s beginner plan allows connecting 50 social accounts, which is the best value for money you can get. SocialPilot is definitely one of the top tools for social media marketers, especially if you are just starting out or have a limited budget.

SocialPilot also provides a free content curation tool for everyone even if they are not members.

Cost: Starts from $25 to $83.33 with annual billing

11. ContentCal

ContentCal is a great tool for planning, scheduling, and posting your content to all social media networks. If you have more than one client, you can manage multiple accounts, categorize content in special calendars for each client, and collaborate with others on marketing projects.

One particular feature that I really appreciate in ContentCal is their built-in approval system, which lets you assign approval roles to certain people before your content goes live.

Cost: Starts with a free plan for hobbyist up to $399 for agencies

12. Later

My absolute favorite when it comes to Instagram scheduling. Later started as a dedicated platform for Instagram but then publishing to Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest was added.

Later is very user-friendly and can publish to Instagram automatically without the need to download an app for publishing notifications. Another cool feature is quick schedules where you simply set a schedule of weekly time slots and then just drag and drop content to schedule the entire week in even less time.

Most marketers and social media managers get intimidated by Instagram and finding the best way to optimize it for a brands’ best interest. Later will provide you with detailed and actionable insights, posts, and free courses to make you an IG expert.

The only thing that I don’t really like is that Later doesn’t support scheduling for more than one account at a time, which makes it take longer if you are trying to post a message to multiple networks at once.

Cost: Free, $9, $19, $29, $49 for monthly billing.

Other Top Social Media Tools for Marketers

Other miscellaneous helpful tools for marketers to make your life easy and help you save you hours of precious search time.

13. ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is a software that allows you to create high converting websites which eventually makes the sales process much easier and cost effective. Using Clickfunnels can also help your target audience understand your service, how it solves their problem, and how they can purchase it.

Turn your boring website into a selling machine quickly without all the technical issues that irritate most people. Plus, you get a 14 day FREE trial.

Cost: $97 and $297 monthly plans

14.  Upsocial

I just discovered this tool recently and I’m totally in love. If Instagram is a part of your social network, you know that hashtags are extremely important for growing a community and connecting with your target audience. Searching manually on Instagram can be very time consuming and overwhelming.

Upsocial is an effective hashtag search tool that helps you discover popular hashtags and copy them to your Instagram posts. If you are looking for a full review on the best way for using Upsocial, you can check this video.

15. Download for Instagram

Content curation is a great strategy to implement for your marketing efforts. It basically means sharing trending content in your niche. And since it’s trending, you already know that your target customers are interested in viewing and engaging with it.

People used to take screenshots of images they liked, cropping and posting them to their accounts. That was an exhausting process until tools like download for Instagram made it easy for all of us. This simple Chrome extension will save you lots of time by letting you download quality pictures instantly. What I love even more is that you can download in bulk.

Just make sure to credit the original content creator by tagging and mentioning their account name in the description. Crediting people is not only ethical, but it also helps to create a bigger community by building relationships with influencers in the market.

You can use trending content as inspiration for future content creation, too.

Cost: Free

16. Grammarly

Clear and mistake-free writing became easy thanks to Grammarly. We’ve all witnessed incidents where a spelling mistake, sloppy writing and other writing issues ruined a company’s reputation. With a service like Grammarly, you can now make sure that your message is clear and accurate.

Grammarly also has a plagiarism checker detects plagiarism in your text.

Cost: Free to $29.95 for monthly plans.

17. BuzzSumo

Keeping up with current news and trends isn’t an option for marketers. Discover new content ideas, trending news, Twitter influencers, and monitor your brand with BuzzSumo so that you don’t miss anything, especially if you are tracking a busy topic.

Cost: BuzzSumo offers free limited results, and paid plans start at $99/month after a 7-day free trial.

Conclusion

Being a social media manager or a digital marketer can be so much fun if you use the right tools to effectively execute your marketing strategy. There are literally hundreds of tools online that you can use, but the tools mentioned above are the ones that I have found to be the best to work with for beginners and advanced users alike.