Social Media Marketing Tools

Social Media Marketing (SMM) tools provide under-appreciated features not common to all social media management suites. They can be hyper-specific and dedicated to one thing like brand activation or contesting. They might be focused on gaining followers on a single platform (e.g. Instagram).

Applications in this category fall under several names. Social media advocacy tools encourage employees and brand customers to promote companies across their own social media profiles and feeds. Beyond that, social media promotion might include contesting, sweepstakes, or polls. Social media curation tools help marketers find and reuse user-generated content. UGC can then be cast into a feed, social media wall, television, or even a Jumbotron.

SMM software has become an essential part of many Martech stacks. These type of tools can benefit businesses in a number of key ways, including:

• time savings

• Improved organization and centralization

• increased brand awareness

• a greater understanding of engagement levels

They are also often easy to learn how to use, making it easier for whole teams to adopt the new tool. Social media marketing tools that focus more narrowly on one capability area can also be quite affordable, even for small businesses.

Some vendors offer all-in-one, or suite-style, SMM platforms. These platforms typically include a social media monitoring, engagement, and analytics piece. Examples of vendors that provide social media marketing suites include Hootsuite and Buffer.

On the other hand, some vendors offer point solutions that focus specifically on one of the following social media marketing areas below:

• social media publishing and scheduling

• social media monitoring and listening

• social media analytics and reporting

• social media customer service

• paid advertising Tools

• content creation tools

There are also platform-specific tools that integrate and work with one or more social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Many social media marketing tools are specialists. Thus they may provide just one or several of these things:

• Social media aggregation, RSS Feed, or social dashboard

• Social media widget, browser extensions

• Location-based services and analytics

• Chat and social media messaging

• Unified social inbox

• Social media brand search tool

• Media (e.g. gif) uploading, distribution

• Social contesting and sweepstakes

• Social media games

• Social media incentives and prize fulfillment

• Social media brand activation

• Hashtag campaign

• Contesting and campaign analytics

• Social wall for events or website

• Link shortening for campaigns

Before deciding to purchase one SMM product over another, consider the following key factors:

• Pricing model: Not all social media marketing tools have the same type of pricing structure. For example, some tools like Agorapulse and Buffer charge a monthly or yearly fee and have a fixed number of users. Other tools like SproutSocial charge per user per month. Generally speaking, social media marketing suite tools tend to be more expensive than products that focus on a specific area, like content creation.

• User-friendliness: While many SMM tools are quite user-friendly, some can take longer to learn how to use than others. If your team members are going to be the main end-users of the product, make sure they have the opportunity to trial the solution first. Selecting a tool that’s easier for end-users at your company to use will help increase the adoption of the tool and lead to faster results.

• Features: Some SMM tools offer a suite of capabilities while others focus on specific areas like content creation, social listening and monitoring, or publishing and scheduling. First, identify what your must-have features for a new social media marketing tool are, this will help you decide whether to invest in a suite-level product or a more narrowly focused tool.

Social media marketing management vendors often provide free tools and free limited versions of their flagship management suites. Beyond these, the pricing of social activation tools is typically tiered. Tiers may support variable amounts of user accounts, the volume of outreach, or include additional advanced features.

Some tools will charge a given fee per month or year, while others charge per user per month or year. Enterprise-level plans usually provide dedicated account management and 24/7 customer support.