However, with so many different online marketing tools available, it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. This is why in this opportunity, we have compiled 25 of the best options used by marketing consultants on a daily basis.

We will divide these tools into categories, according to their core features. Let us begin by discussing what’s arguably the most important category: marketing analytics tools.

Analytics Tools

Arguably, half (or more) of good marketing efforts is about proper understanding of your audience—so, analytics—.

With that being said, having the right analytics tools in your marketing arsenal is a must, and here are the best ones available today:

1. Google Analytics

A fairly obvious choice, but a very important one nonetheless.

The best part of Google Analytics is that it is totally free. Well, there’s the ultra premium Google Analytics 360 that can cost more than $100,000 annually, but for most small to mid-sized businesses (and even most large businesses), the standard version is more than enough.

Google Analytics allows us to analyze various performance metrics on our website, especially regarding our audience. These metrics include audience demographics, keywords/search queries, actions taken by visitors, bounce rate, and so on.

2. Built-In Social Media Analytics

Too often we look in other places while what we need is already on our hands. Most major social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter, among others, offer their own built-in analytics. More often than not, they are actually the best compared to other third-party social media analytics tools for the respective platforms.

The key to social media marketing is properly understanding your audience and how you can fulfill their needs, and tracking various user metrics with these built-in tools will help you in this aspect.

3. MixPanel

MixPanel is often considered as the main competitor/alternative of Google Analytics because indeed, both of them have similar core functionalities—at least on the surface—. However, there are several major differences where we can use MixPanel for different purposes.

For instance, Google Analytics mainly works by tracking user’s behavior around page views, while with MixPanel we can track various visitor actions—or “events”. MixPanel can update real-time data regarding these actions in mere seconds.

Meaning, if your marketing revolves around tracking real-time data like conversions, first-trial registrations, and so on, MixPanel can be a better choice.

4. Sumo

Formerly known as SumoMe, Sumo is an excellent all-in-one suite of analytic tools covering many different areas. Sumo especially focuses on content-related metrics like showing where your visitors click on your site, how much of your content they actually read, and so on.

If your marketing is content-heavy, Sumo is a great analytics tool to help optimize your content, increasing your site’s traffic and conversions in the process.

Besides its analytics function, Sumo also covers useful automation features like the email list builder and easy-to-use CTA buttons. A very useful tool especially for blogs and websites with heavy focus on content.

5. Whatagraph

Whatagraph is a comprehensive marketing data platform designed to help marketers easily understand and present data from various sources. It simplifies the process of creating intuitive reports and demonstrating the ROI of marketing campaigns.

The platform enables seamless connection to a wide range of data sources. Users can transform and prepare data for intuitive visualizations, create stunning presentations with a user-friendly drag-and-drop dashboard, and automate the sharing of reports. With over 45 integrations, Whatagraph makes generating reports using your existing data sources straightforward. Notable integrations include MailChimp, Semrush, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, TikTok Ads, Google Sheets, BigQuery, Ahrefs, GA4, and more.

Pricing options include the ‘Essential’ plan, starting at $249 monthly. This plan includes up to 20 source credits, 5 users, access to pre-made templates, more than 45 integrations, and the capability to transfer data to BigQuery, among other features. For more demanding users, ‘Advanced’ and ‘Custom’ plans are available. These offer additional source credits and users, custom branding, and a consolidated dashboard feature that provides a unified view of all your clients’ KPIs.

Social Media Marketing Tools

In the world dominated by social media, obviously we can’t miss social media marketing in our marketing efforts. Thankfully, a lot of useful—if not, powerful— tools are available to assist us here, such as:

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is certainly one of the most popular social media marketing tools available, with the core feature of monitoring and scheduling all your social media profiles in one streamlined dashboard.

Besides its automation functionalities, Hootsuite also offers analytics features to track the performance of your social media campaigns. The key feature, however, is the ability to schedule hundreds of posts of at once to automate your social media presence.

2. Buffer

Often compared to Hootsuite and with good reasons, mainly because both of them are centered on post-scheduling and automation.

Admittedly, Hootsuite offers more features, integrations, and even more supported platforms. However, this also means that Buffer is a simpler tool that is easier to use.

Buffer also offers analytics features, that is also simpler and focused on the performance of your posts.

3. Tailwind

Tailwind especially focuses on Instagram and Pinterest, and you can use it to schedule posts, monitor conversations, finding interesting content, and as usual, analyze your performance, among others.

The scheduling and automation features are pretty handy, as you can create an optimal schedule while using the analytics data like engagement, reach, and traffic.

With Instagram being one of the most popular social media platform today, Tailwind is a great choice if your business is active on both Pinterest and Instagram.

4. Socialbakers

An A.I.-driven social media marketing tool that especially focuses on analyzing audience behavior. With Socialbakers, you can custom-tailor your posts with more personalizations, improving engagement and conversion in the process.

Socialbakers is also capable of managing different social media platforms in one dashboard, complete with a real-time analytics feature.

With personalizations becoming increasingly important nowadays, Socialbakers is an excellent tool that can help you understand your audience better.

SEO and Content Marketing Tools

Yes, SEO is still alive and well, if not even more important than ever with the saturated market. However, it is also true that SEO has evolved to be more complicated than ever, and this is where these tools can help you.

It is also worth noting that SEO and content marketing are inseparable from each other. So, here are some of the best SEO and content marketing tools suggested by SEO expert Mike:

1. Yoast SEO

If your site is WordPress-based, Yoast is an excellent plugin that can “crawl” your website or blog, give suggestions where you can manually optimize your site, and give automated optimizations in some aspects.

This allows Google an easier time to index your site, as well as optimizing other important technical aspects like keyword density, meta description optimization, readability, and many others.

A very useful SEO tool so you don’t have to manually assess your site every time.

2. Feedly

Content monitoring is a very important aspect of content marketing: by knowing what’s currently trending and what kinds of content are effective, we can properly develop our own content.

With that being said, Feedly is simply one of the best content monitoring tools available. It’s easy to use with its intuitive and minimalist interface, and you can easily customize your preference to get the content you need.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts, as the name suggests, will send an alert to your email when a certain topic or keyword showed up on the web, according to your preference.

This is very useful when you are monitoring a certain topic or keyword. You can also get alerts when someone mentioned your brand, or even your competitors. This will be useful in monitoring the current trends, engagements, and your overall brand awareness.

Again, monitoring other content pieces is often the best approach in planning your own content marketing, and Google Alerts as a totally-free tool is a must.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an A.I.-powered content tool offering a pretty well-rounded set of features. However it focuses on topic suggestion by analyzing topics and/or your competition.

For instance, BuzzSumo can analyze the most shared content of your chosen topic on different social media platforms, this can give you a great insight on what kinds of content to develop. You can also check what kinds of content shared by your chosen influencers, which can really help in building relationships and getting those valuable backlinks.

BuzzSumo has been one of the most popular content marketing tools for some time, and with great reasons. Very well-rounded and very useful for content research and topic generation.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is technically a tool designed for Google Adwords—Google’s keyword-based advertising publication—, but is very useful for content marketing and SEO purposes. Why? Simply because it’s so good at what it does: researching and planning keywords.

With Google Keyword Planner, you an especially find out about the search volume of your target keywords, how the trend changes over time, and suggestions for topics and other keywords.

Again, being a totally free tool, there’s simply no reason not to use Google Keyword Planner.

6. Moz Link Explorer

Formerly known as Open Site Explorer, Link Explorer is a totally free tool from Moz to check domain and page authority, as well as backlinks profile.

Domain authority, in a nutshell, is a metric developed by Moz to predict a website’s SEO performance—namely, how high it will rank on the search engine result page (SERP). It’s not 100% accurate, so we will need to take it with a grain of salt, but it’s still useful to assess your current optimizations.

You can also use Link Explorer to analyze your competitors’ websites, which can be a vital step in your overall SEO efforts.

7. Social Mention

Similar to Google Alerts, but as the name suggests, this tool focuses on social media mentions. With Social Mention, you can keep track of the social media presence of your brand, listen to the conversations, and analyze your current performance to make your improvements.

Social Mention is also very easy to use: simply type in your search query, and you’ll get various data for the query like reach, sentiment, engagement levels, and so on.

8. SEMRush and/or Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs are similar tools—and direct competitors— to each other with similar core functionality: keyword research. Both also offer similar pricing ranges starting at $99/month. Being the “premium” keyword research tools, they offer more features compared to Google Keyword Planner, and so they are worth a shot if you are serious about keyword research.

While they offer similar core features in many ways, generally SEMRush a little better at keyword research, while Ahrefs is stronger in the backlinks research aspect.

Email Marketing and Automation Tools

Even in 2015 with all the newer marketing channels, platforms, and technologies, email marketing is still one of the most effective promotional channels out there. One of the biggest reasons is the fact that a huge majority of people simply prefer email messages to receive promotional messages from brands.

So, email marketing is still very important, and with the increasing demands for personalizations, also comes a great number of email automation tools.

Here are some of the best email marketing tools available today:

1. Omnisend

Omnisend is an email marketing and automation tool created mainly for ecommerce brands. It helps businesses run email, SMS, and push notification campaigns from one place, which makes it a good choice for stores that want to keep their marketing simple and organized. The interface is also easy to understand, so it works well both for beginners and for growing teams. Another good thing about Omnisend is that it offers useful automation features built for online stores. You can set up ready-made workflows for welcome emails, abandoned carts, order updates, and follow-up messages, which can save time and help increase sales. It also comes with signup forms, audience segmentation, and product recommendations, making it a practical option for ecommerce marketing.

2. SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a well-rounded tool dedicated for email and SMS marketing. It comes with a minimalist interface that is very easy to use, making it an ideal tool even for email marketing beginners.

Another good thing about SendinBlue is that the free version is actually useful. You can input unlimited contacts on the database, which is a huge plus, and you can send up to 9,000 emails per month. For most small businesses, this number is enough, and the premium plan is fairly affordable, starting from $25/month for 40,000 emails/month.

3. ConvertKit

ConvertKit is designed with the focus for content marketing, for bloggers, podcasters, Youtubers, and other content producers.

With that being said, ConvertKit is especially focused on user experience, ease of use, and personalization. You can create attractive forms and CTAs, as well as personalized emails for individual email subscribers.

ConvertKit is also great in its automation features that are easy to understand even for complete beginners. There’s a visual automation builder where we can build our automation campaign with just our mouse clicks.

4. Drip

Drip focuses on ecommerce CRM, so there are unique features to help convert site visitors into email subscribers, and in turn,into purchasing customers. So, Drip is especially focused on generating conversions, especially by sending automated email at the right time based on the prospect’s behavior and intent.

For example, we can analyze important behaviors like returning visitors, abandoning carts, people who took a certain actions, and so on to custom tailor the messages and plan a schedule.

Drip also offers great third-party integrations, for example, the ability to display Facebook Ads.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the most popular email marketing tools available today, and for its reasons.

For instance, MailChimp is very well-rounded with various features like automation, landing pages creation, smart scheduling to send your emails at the right time. It also offers excellent integration with popular third-party platforms. For example, you can easily integrate MailChimp with your WordPress-based site and ecommerce platforms.

Another reason why MailChimp is so popular is its affordability. The free plan allows you to list 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month, while the paid plans are offered from just $10 monthly. There are also some good Mailchimp alternatives that can be a better fit for your business.

6. Aweber

A very important aspect of email marketing is actually building that email list—the lead generation phase—. Yet, too often marketers focused on the process of email marketing than actually building a list, and this is where AWeber can help you.

You get all the essential features to grow your email list in AWeber, while there are also the usual email marketing tool features like drag-and-drop newsletter builder, automating features, and conversion focused signup forms.

Landing Page Tools

A very important aspect of digital marketing is the conversion-focused landing page. This is where you convert visitors into qualified leads and convert leads into actual, paying customers.

Thankfully, nowadays there are various tools can can help you design and optimize your landing pages, such as:

1. Unbounce

Unbounce is a pretty well-rounded landing page builder where you can build, test, and optimize custom landing pages as well as other useful features like building a website pop-up.

Very easy to use with its drag-and-drop approach, a lot of built-in templates, and great integration with various popular marketing tools like WordPress, AWeber, and MailChimp, among others.

2. GetResponse

As the name suggest, GetResponse is especially focused on conversion optimizations. With GetResponse, you can easily set-up a high-converting landing pages that is also mobile-responsive (which is very important nowadays).

GetResponse also features built-in analytics and A/B testing feature. Excellent third-party integrations with Facebook and Adwords, among other platforms, and there are also useful extra features like a webinar builder and email marketing tools.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a popular choice not only as a landing page builder, but as a well-rounded digital marketing tool.

For instance, you can build, modify, and optimize a website some scratch without any IT knowledge, and same goes with the landing page builder. HubSpot is easy to use and the extra features from SEO and content creation tools to A/B testing features to lead capture form builder are great for those who need an all-in-one marketing tool.

A downside for HubSpot is that it’s fairly expensive, but you can just your tier package according to your needs.

4. Leadpages

Another popular landing page builder choice where you can easily build a landing page with a drag and drop approach.

A lot of (more than 160) templates, great integration with 40+ marketing tools, and is relatively easy to use. The form builder is also very intuitive and you can use it to create high-converting forms.

Leadpages is relatively old and the interface is relatively outdated, but offers some nice features with an affordable price.

End Words

Obviously, there are still many more digital marketing tools available on the market, and even categories that haven’t been listed on this guide. However, these recommendations can give you a good starting place to understand how to invest wisely in digital marketing tools, according to your business’s needs and purposes.

The post 25 of The Best Digital Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Here, we will discuss 8 of the best social media marketing tools available, as well as how you can implement them in your digital marketing strategy.

Let us begin.

1. Animoto

Site: https://animoto.com/

Pricing: $9/month or $5/month if you subscribe for 1 year. (14-day free trial)

Promo code: 20% off all plans with the promo code YAAAAAS

What it does:

Videos are an integral part of social media marketing nowadays, not only for image and video-centric platforms like Pinterest or Instagram, but for all major social media platforms. Video is currently the most engaging and the most shared content medium, so it only makes sense to focus on it. 

On the other hand, video production is a thing a lot of social media marketers struggle with: first, it requires a pretty steep learning curve, and second, producing a video can be very expensive.

This is why Animoto comes in as one of the most affordable and easy to use video making tools. At just $5 monthly, you get a lot of layouts and templates to work on, licensed music and sound, stock photos and animations, fonts, and so much more. With the more expensive packages, you can also consult with an expert for 30-minutes, which can be useful for those needing advice. 

2. Audiense Insights

Site: https://audiense.com

Pricing: starting from $696/month

What it does:

A key aspect of any marketing is about understanding your audience. If you can understand what your customers actually need, the problems they are facing, and their behaviors, you can market any product to them. 

In this regard, Audiense is a very powerful tool that can provide very detailed reports about any audience according to your criteria, no matter how niche the audience group is. The A.I.-based tool will apply machine learning to instantly understand the population of your target audience, the connections between people within the group, and their behaviors. 

Audiense will also provide insights about key demographics info, interests (in brands, influencers/celebrities, hobbies), and can also compare the audience with your competitors.

Although it’s fairly priced, Audiense is a very advanced tool which justifies its value. Will turn your social media marketing game to another level.

3. HubSpot

Site: https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/social-inbox

Pricing: $20/mo or $15 if you commit for a year, but you pay monthly.

What it does:

Take care of your customers by connecting with them on platforms where they spend most of their time. You can set up keyword monitoring and email alerts so that the right team can get details about your customers at the right time. Create and manage your marketing campaigns, CRM and social media content all from one place. HubSpot’s Social Media Marketing Software can take care of creating, optimizing and scheduling content for Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

With AI-powered content creation for social media, you can stop worrying about content ideas and focus on engaging with your audience. For Instagram and Facebook, AI suggests hashtags that your audience is interested in. This saves time and eliminates guesswork. All you have to do is share raw ideas with the AI assistant, and it will create the rest of the content for you. You can also access reporting from within the dashboard. These reports are designed to help you grow with your audience.

3. Canva

Site: https://www.canva.com/

Pricing: Freemium (starts at $12.95/month, 30-day free trial)

What it does:

Good visual designs are also an important aspect for any successful social media marketing: good photos,well-designed images, and value-packed infographics are highly engaging and shareable. However,sometimes a social media marketer doesn’t have access to a graphic designer, and this is where Canva comes in.

Canva is, in its core, a cloud-based Photoshop where you can create images from scratch easily. This is because you can find many professionally-made templates from business cards to posters to infographic maker.

The infographic maker is a very useful feature where you get a huge library of various graphic elements, and you can easily create a beautiful infographic with just a drag-and-drop approach. 

4. BuzzSumo

Site: https://buzzsumo.com/

Pricing: starts at $79/month ($948 annually) 

What it does:

There’s a reason you’ll probably find BuzzSumo not only on the top of many social media marketing tools lists, but also on many digital marketing lists in general:because it’s so useful.

BuzzSumo’s core functions is to analyze the internet and especially social media platforms for trending topics and keywords, as well as finding key influencers for these topics. In a nutshell, we can use BuzzSumo to find out what kind of content (or post) that will perform for a certain topic. 

So, how will BuzzSumo plays in the world of social media marketing? For instance, you can use BuzzSumo to analyze your performance and impact on various social media platforms, as well as analyzing your competitors’ social media presences.

BuzzSumo, however, is technically a content marketing tool, and since nowadays we can’t separate social media marketing, content marketing, and influencer marketing (another area where BuzzSumo shines), this is an especially powerful, all-purpose digital marketing tool. 

5. Built-in Analytics on Social Media Platforms

Most major social media platforms offer their own analytics, which are especially useful to analyze your performance and make the necessary adjustments. The best thing is, they are all totally free.

Instagram Insights 

Instagram’s analytics, dubbed Insights, allow you to check various important metrics like the performance of your posts (and your growth over time), how users interact with your posts (number of likes, shares, etc.), and check important demographics data of your audience (their location, gender, age range, etc.)

By analyzing this data, you can evaluate your performance on Instagram and develop a better approach.

Twitter Analytics

Similar to Instagram insights, Twitter analytics will provide useful data about your performance on the platform. For example, Twitter will show you your top performing posts, demographics data of your audience, and the performance of your engagement with your followers (which is an especially important aspect with Twitter). 

Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook’s analytics tool is very detailed and powerful, as basically you can get any information related to your posts and followers: number of engagement, likes, followers growth, posts performances, ads performance (if you invest on Facebook Ads), and there’s also a feature to compare your Page with similar other Pages (called Pages to Watch), which is very useful in analyzing your competitors’ performance.

6. Hootsuite

Site: https://hootsuite.com/

Pricing: Freemium (premium starts at $19/month)

What it does:

In this age of automation and personalization, having a social media management app is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. 

There are numerous social media scheduling and management tools available on the market: Buffer, SproutSocial, and Hootsuite, among others. Most of them offer similar core functionalities with just a few unique features.

So, why do we pick Hootsuite over all the other similar tools? Hootsuite is a more well-rounded option over its competitors offering scheduling, analytics, and monitoring tools all in just one dashboard. 

As a scheduling tool, Hootsuite offers pretty complete features from the ability to queue post according to a timed-schedule, AutoSchedule feature to automatically queue your post according to optimal times, and so on.

However, Hootsuite is especially strong in its analytics features. Above, we have discussed how native analytics of the social media platforms are already powerful, but Hootsuite offers so much more. For instance, you can monitor all the different platforms in one single dashboard, making it easier to compare the performance between each platform. You can create custom social streams by including or excluding specific keywords, assigning locations, filtering by languages, and so on. This can be useful to get insights according to your specific needs.

The free plan includes control over three social profiles and 30 scheduled posts, while the most affordable plan ($29/month) offers unlimited scheduling and 10 different social profiles.

7. Statusbrew

Site: https://statusbrew.com/

Pricing: 14-day free trial (lite starts at $69/month)

What it does:

Statusbrew has 1:1 feature parity with industry leaders like Sprout and Hootsuite. The tool provides a unified experience for managing social media from a single hub.

The scheduler allows you to curate various content types, including carousels, threads, polls, and stories, for multiple networks, with bulk scheduling options available. The internal tagging feature makes it easy to organize and categorize content by campaign, streamlining the entire process.

Their Inbox is similar to other tools that sync engagement from connected networks in real-time, but it stands out with its intuitive interface and automation features. You can set up automated actions, like automatically hiding or deleting negative or spam comments on brand profiles. Queries that require attention, such as pricing requests, can be routed to specific team members with active alerts. Plus, engagements can be organized into different views for better visibility and management.

The analytics dashboards are easy to navigate and give a clear view of the combined impact of your social media efforts. With over 230 metrics in the widget library, you can create custom dashboards for the specific metrics your brand or clients care about. These dashboards can be shared via live links or downloaded as PDF or CSV files for further analysis.

8. Mention

Site: https://mention.com/en/

Price: Freemium (starts at $29/month, 7-day free trial)

What it does:

Mention is a marketing analytics platform focusing on—-as the name suggests—- brand mentions. Mention will monitor not only the major social media platforms, but also millions of blogs, forums, and sites (based on Mention’s claim, they monitor over 1 billion sources daily) for any mention of your brand (or your competitor’s) name.

You can also use Mention to check the popularity of certain keywords and topic, and also to get more insights about your competitors. You can customize Mention using Boolean approach to track queries and brand mentions according to your preferences and needs.

A very simple tool, function-wise, but really is the best at what it does.

9. Affable Discovery  

Site: https://www.affable.ai/

Pricing: credit-based pricing, starts from $90 for 30 credits (1 credit for 1 monthly influencer analytics)

What it does:

Affable is an A.I.-driven analytics tool that can identify and analyze ideal influencers and audiences for your business. You can submit your preferences and needs for influencers (i.e., X number of followers located in a specific city, have used a specific product, 80% of female followers, etc.), and Affable will deliver a list containing 10 influencers who matched your criteria, along with reports for key metrics like engagement rates, follower demographics, etc. 

Influencer marketing is now also an integral part of social media marketing, and Affable can save your time and resources in finding the right influencers for your business. Since you also get a detailed report for these influencers’ followers, you also get a new source to get more audience.

10. Narrato

Site: https://narrato.io/

Pricing: Three plans, starting from $36 per month (4 user seats included)

What it does:

Automatically generated social media content by an AI Content Genie. That’s probably one of the most unique social media marketing tools offered by Narrato. This unique AI tool creates social media posts (and also blog content), complete with relevant emojis, hashtags, and images. Simply share your website URL and content themes, and watch as the AI Content Genie delivers a new batch of content every week. If there’s something that needs changing, you can easily edit and add your own touch right on the platform before publishing.

Narrato offers a variety of AI tools to streamline social media content creation. You can create content using notes, themes, or URLs, and generate posts for holidays or quotes. The platform tailors content specifically for LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. It also features an AI Twitter thread generator, AI meme generator, and AI image generator, alongside a comprehensive library of CC images and GIFs. For any other social media marketing needs, there are custom AI templates.

End Words

There are certainly many more social media marketing tools used by marketing consultants with various pricing packages, various functions, and various sets of features. The 8 tools we have discussed above covered various important areas of social media marketing from audience analytics, content creation, performance analytics, and influencer marketing purposes. All of them can act as a benchmark when you are considering other tools for their respective purposes. 

The post Top 10 Social Media Marketing Tools appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

The solution? Personalization, automation, and scheduling management, and these are where a social media management tool like Hootsuite can shine.

However, Hootsuite certainly is not a perfect tool with its own pros and cons. There are other alternatives with better pricing and unique features. In this guide, we will discuss some of the best HootSuite alternatives in the market.

Before we begin, let us briefly discuss Hootsuite as the benchmark for the alternatives.

A Brief Overview of Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the pioneers of social media management platform, and arguably the most well-known. Hootsuite remains competitive among its competitors due to its well-rounded set of features: it can manage your social media profiles, provide a reliable automation scheduling, and one of its key strengths is its superb analytics features where you can analyze your performance on various social media platforms in one dashboard.

Pros of Hootsuite:

1. Complete set of social media tools from analytics to scheduling
2. All major social media platforms are supported (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, WordPress alternatives, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.). No extra installations necessary
3. Intuitive user interface, very easy to manage all your social media profiles in different tabs.
4. Easy auto-scheduling
5. Powerful analytics reports in one single dashboard
6. Extra applications you can install to enrich your experience

Cons of Hootsuite:

1. The free plan is fairly limited with just control over 3 social media profiles, basic scheduling an analytic features.
2. The premium plan starts at $29/month, and to use extra apps and features you will need to pay more, the cost can get quite expensive with all the extras
3. The analytic tool, although very powerful, will have a significant learning curve.
4. Training is not mandatory but will cost another $21/month at the very least. It is, however, worth noting that Hootsuite Academy’s certifications are very valuable and well-respected

Pricing:

1. A free plan is available, with control over 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages
2. Premium pricing starts from $29/month with 10 social profiles and unlimited scheduling for 1 user. Pricing changes with more social profiles and more users.

As you can see, the main issue of Hootsuite is about cost. So, are there any Hootsuite alternatives that are more affordable with similar or even better features?

Best Hootsuite Alternatives

1. Sendible

Another strong contender as one of the best Hootsuite alternatives is Sendible, another all-in-one social media management tool that can handle scheduling, content curation, and analytics. Priced roughly the same as Hootsuite, and Sendible’s dashboard is somewhat of a cross between that of Sprout Social (a single dashboard approach) and Hootsuite (multi-column approach), where you have one priority inbox but you can also add customizable streams for different profiles.

Pros of Sendible:

1. Integration with all major social media profiles, especially powerful for Instagram
2. Easy and versatile scheduling features like the ability to upload a CSV file for scheduling a lot of posts at once
3. Unique content curation feature, integration with Canva
4. In-depth analytics and reporting feature
5. Great social listening feature with a dedicated Monitor tab

Cons of Sendible:

1. No free plan offered, 14-day trial is available
2. Steep learning curve, the analytics feature is not as user-friendly as Hootsuite

Pricing:

1. No free-plan, but there’s a 14-day free trial
2. Starts at $29/month for 12 social profiles and 8 scheduling queues.

2. Socialoomph

Previously called TweetLater, Socialoomph was originally a Twitter management and automation tool, but has since expanded to other social media platforms. Due to that history, Socialoomph is especially powerful in Twitter management with various advanced features like the ability to tweet via mail and a keyword search tool.

It is also an affordable social media management tool for other platforms with easy-to-use scheduling management.

Main features of free account

Pros:

1. Relatively affordable at just $15/month for the cheapest plan.
2. A good choice if you focus on Twitter marketing, although it can also integrate with other platforms from Facebook to Linkedin, among others
3. Unlimited scheduled posts even for the free plan

Cons:

1. Limited analytics and reporting features
2. A lot of its advanced features are focused for Twitter

Pricing:

1. Free plan available (1 social profile only)
2. Pricing starts at $15/month (also for 1 social profile but extra features), the “professional” plan starts from $25/month for 10 social profiles

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social and Hootsuite are very similar to each other in so many levels. Both are excellent at both scheduling and analytics, but their approaches are quite different. For instance, with Hootsuite we can customize different tabs and columns, each corresponding to a social media profile. On the other hand, with Social Sprout all posts from all platforms are integrated to just one “stream” or feed.

In the analytics department, Hootsuite is a little bit more versatile with the ability to customize various aspects of your reports. On the other hand, Sprout Social’s reporting is more simple and practical.

In short, Sprout Social is probably one of the best Hootsuite alternatives if you prefer simplicity and minimalist approach.

Pros of Sprout Social:

1. Can integrate with all major social media platforms
2. Simple, easy to use interface with minimalist design approach
3. Included social CRM features, some are very useful like the ability to view and share customer records.
4. Advanced scheduling tools that are unique to Sprout Social
5. Integrated messages/inbox collecting all messages from your social media profiles in just one place. Useful feature to easily engage with your followers.

Cons of Sprout Social:

1. A little lacking in LinkedIn integration
2. Relatively expensive with the cheapest plan priced at $99/month

Pricing:

1. No free plan, but there’s a 30-day free trial (no credit card required) for all the premium plans
2. Starts at $99/month including 5 social profiles. To unlock full features including content library and in-depth competitive reporting, you will need to pay $249/month

4. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse’s tagline is “managing social media has never been easier”, showing its focus on simplicity. The inbox interface is very simple and resembling your standard email inbox, so you can easily see which posts you have read, and which still demands attention. There are also analytics, reporting, and automation scheduling features, all designed with simplicity in mind.

Pros of AgoraPulse:

1. Integration with major social media platforms
2. Powerful analytics features that are easy to use at the same time, arguably the best among its competitors
3. Feature to categorize your audience based on different variables (most engagements, most mentions, etc.). AgoraPulse can do this automatically through a badge system, but you can also do it manually.
4. Powerful social listening and engagement features, you can easily keep track of your conversations 24/7

Cons of AgoraPulse:

1. Very expensive with the cheapest plan costs $89/month. However, for big agencies,arguably Agorapulse’s premium plans deliver better overall value
2. Not very powerful in the CRM department

Pricing:

1. No free plan, but free-trial available
2. Starts at $99/month or $89/month when paid annually for 10 social profiles, extra costs for add-on profiles and users

5. Buffer

Buffer is also a well-known social media management tool and probably the closest competitor to Hootsuite.

Buffer’s strength lies in its smart scheduling feature, with an intuitive user interface where you can easily add your posts in various forms (videos, photos, articles, etc.) and scheduled with a virtual queue. Buffer can then figure out the best possible time to post your content according to your target audience.

Pros of Buffer:

1. Integration with various social media profiles (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more).
2. With the smart scheduling feature, you don’t have to individually schedule each post, as Buffer will determine the optimal time
3. Integration with Pablo, a useful image editor that will automatically resize and format your images for the respective social media platform
4. RSS feed integration with all the available plans
5. More affordable than Hootsuite with the cheapest plan costs

Cons of Buffer:

1. Analytics features are sub-par compared to Hootsuite only $15/month and billed monthly
2. Limited scheduled posts for the premium plan (the cheapest plan limits 100 scheduled posts).

Pricing:

1. Basic free plan for 3 social media profiles and 10 scheduled posts
2. Premium plan starts from $15/month for 100 scheduled posts, 8 social media profiles and 1 user. The most expensive plan is $99 per month for 25 profiles and 2000 scheduled posts, 6 users.
3. Free trial for all the premium plans

6. Plann

Plann is a comprehensive platform for managing your Instagram presence, offering scheduling, analytics, and strategic tools focused on
a visually appealing interface similar to Instagram. With a user-friendly drag-and-drop workspace,
users can create a custom-branded feed that reflects their unique style and helps them succeed on social media.

Pros of Plann:

1. User-friendly interface: Plann is designed to be simple and easy to use, making it accessible to people with little to no social media experience.
2. Content planning and scheduling: With Plann, users can plan and schedule their content ahead of time, saving time and ensuring a consistent presence on their social media platforms.
3. Performance analytics: Plann provides performance analytics that helps users track the success of their social media campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t.
4. Multi-platform support: Plann supports multiple social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Facebook, allowing users to manage all their social media accounts in one place.

Cons of Plann:

Limited features compared to other platforms: While Plann offers a range of features, it may not have all the features that more comprehensive social media management platforms offer.
Limited analytics: While Plann provides performance analytics, they may be limited compared to what is available on more comprehensive analytics platforms.

Pricing:
Plann offers a range of pricing plans, starting with a free plan that includes basic features, and going up to a premium plan that includes all features for $15/month. The Build plan is great for small team members, making it ideal for businesses and teams managing multiple social media accounts.

7. Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a social media management platform that’s a one-to-one replacement for Hootsuite. It lets you manage large amounts of real-time social media engagement in an organized way, all from a single, unified inbox. What sets Statusbrew apart is its advanced features in setting up custom automation for social interactions, scheduling, and publishing tasks. This means you can focus on creating great content while Statusbrew handles the rest, ensuring your brand stands out on social media. This tool is recognized as one of the best Hootsuite alternatives in the market due to its latest industry-standard features. 

Pros of Statusbrew:

1. Easily manage tons of conversations on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, Youtube, and GMB.
2. AI sentiment analysis to understand the audience behavior and preferences
3. Unified Inbox to provide a bird’s eye view of each conversation across different channels
4. Bulk scheduling to plan out the content up to a year in advance
5. Team approval workflows to avoid any kind of internal errors
6. Social listening & brand keyword monitoring
7. 190+ reporting metrics, custom widget creation with sharable live links
8. Integrations: Zendesk, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more

Cons of Statusbrew:

TikTok & Email Intergration is missing.

Pricing:

• Plans start from just $69 per month 
• There’s a 14-day free trial available
  

8. Planable

Planable is a visual social media management platform that stands out with its collaboration-first approach. While Hootsuite focuses on analytics and scheduling, Planable’s strength lies in its approval workflows and team collaboration features. The platform displays your content exactly as it will appear on each social media platform, making it incredibly easy for clients and team members to review and approve posts without any confusion.  This makes it an excellent Hootsuite alternative for agencies and teams managing multiple clients.

Pros of Planable:

1. Integration with all major social media platforms 
2. Exceptional collaboration features with multi-level approval workflows, perfect for agencies managing multiple clients
3. Visual content calendar with drag-and-drop functionality and live mockups showing exactly how posts will appear
4. Intuitive interface that’s extremely easy for clients and non-technical team members to navigate
5. Client-facing views that can be shared without exposing internal comments and workflow
6. Customizable reports that can be tailored to highlight the metrics that matter most to your clients

Cons of Planable:

1. Analytics features are more basic compared to Hootsuite and available only in higher-tier plans
2. Advanced features like in-depth competitive analysis and social listening are not as powerful as dedicated enterprise tools
   

Planable’s public pricing (USD) is workspace-based (you pay per workspace, per month):

• Free plan: $0 (includes all features, but limited to 50 total posts to create/schedule).

• Basic: $33 / workspace / month (includes 60 posts/workspace/month, unlimited users).

• Pro: $49 / workspace / month (includes 150 posts/workspace/month, unlimited users).

• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

Add-ons (per workspace/month):

• Analytics: $14 / workspace / month

• Social inbox: $9 / workspace / month

Conclusion

There are many excellent Hootsuite alternatives available on the market: some are more affordable, some others provide better overall value in features. Hootsuite, however, remains a strong social media management tool used by many digital marketing consultants with its well-rounded set of features and relatively affordable plans.

The post Best Hootsuite Alternatives for Your Business Success appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Having a solid social media presence can help you connect with your target audience and broaden your brand’s reach. But did you know that it can also be a potent tool for indirectly improving your search engine rankings? That’s right — if you use social media correctly, you can give your website a powerful boost in search engine results. But it takes a bit of know-how to use social media effectively for this purpose. 

This article will shed some light on how social media affects Google rankings and explore the ins and outs of social media as an SEO tool.

What is the impact of social media on Google ranking?

In today’s digital age, it’s no secret that social media can be a powerful promotional tool, but when it comes to search engine rankings, does activity on platforms like Facebook and Twitter really make a difference?

You may be surprised to learn that it actually does—although not in the way you might think.

You see, social media doesn’t necessarily have a direct impact on Google ranking, but it can certainly help in other, indirect ways:

Social sharing can generate more backlinks.

When you share something on social media, you’re increasing its visibility. And the more visible your content is, the more likely it is to be noticed by other content creators and industry influencers. If the content is then found to be useful by these people, they may link to it, which can lead to ranking growth. 

In short, the potential for social sharing to affect rank is determined by how visible the shared page is among potential creators, and if they find your content useful enough to reference or link to it. 

The quality of a page is reflected in its social media interactions

A study, conducted by CognitiveSEO, analyzed 23 million shares and found that those websites with higher levels of engagement (shares, likes, comments, etc.) ranked higher on search engines.

Hence, the more social media interaction a page receives in the form of likes, shares, tweets, and comments, the higher it is likely to rank. This is because high social engagement strengthens your web page’s reputation in the eyes of Google. These social signals often act as “brand signals,” something Google values very highly. 

Using social media can drive more traffic to your site.

A large part of SEO strategy is focused on increasing website traffic. And social media platforms are perfect for referral traffic and driving users to your website pages. 

As more and more people join social media platforms, it’s becoming increasingly likely that your target audience is active on one or more of these networks. In other words, if you want to reach a wide audience, social media is the place to be. 

Plus, when you’re just getting started with SEO, social media can also be an excellent way to attract visitors to your website quickly if you’re going down the paid ads route. While it can take months for SEO to start working, using social media can help give you the traffic, leads and sales you need right away. So if you’re struggling to bring visitors to your website, learning how to use social media could be the key to getting them there.

How to leverage social media for SEO?

Successfully ranking in Google can often feel like a magician’s game of smoke and mirrors, but by making smart moves on social media you can avoid that dreaded bottomless pit beyond page one of Google search. Here are some effective strategies that could help you get your name out of organic search obscurity.

Strategy #1 Optimize your social media profiles for maximum searchability

Why does it matter?

It’s possible that you’ve been using social media for a long time, but have you ever wondered why you aren’t getting the results you want? You may still be doing everything right, but your social media profile may not be properly optimized for visibility and search. 

How to implement this strategy?

Profile optimization doesn’t mean cramming in keywords or resorting to underhanded tactics, but rather making small changes that can have a big impact. Here are a few things you can do to guarantee that your social media profile is properly optimized for visibility and searchability:

Give as much detail as you can to your social media profiles.

Take advantage of the prime real estate available to you on your social networks. Some platforms, like Facebook, provide a lot of room for users to personalize their bios, while others, like TikTok, have a more minimalist approach. In either case, account for all available space and include the most relevant and current information about yourself or your company.

Even if you only have a few characters to play with, do your best to at least include industry keywords, your location info, and links to your website, blog, or current campaign.

Publish content that will earn backlinks

To earn backlinks, post content that is truly remarkable and worth sharing. Think beyond the traditional blog post or article – items such as infographics, visual resources predominantly videos, and research reports tend to perform well on social media and are great link bait. You can use a video maker to create and share visually appealing video content. These types of content when shared on social media can help you attract links from high-authority brands.

Make your profiles and captions keyword-rich

As social media matures, it is becoming more and more search-oriented. This means that keywords are increasingly important when it comes to creating visibility for your posts. Perform keyword research to find your key phrases and use them to tweak your posts for maximum exposure. For example, if you want your brands to come up when people search for “Hawaiian specialty pizza,” here’s a demonstration of how to do that with a Facebook caption.

Of course, you don’t need to add keywords to every caption or description, but being conscious of those keywords will allow you to include them in your posts naturally.

Strategy #2 Prioritize quality over quantity in what you publish

Why does it matter?

SEO has changed a lot over the years, and search marketing is now very different from what it used to be. The bots and algorithms that power Google’s search engine are constantly upgrading to better comprehend the intent behind user queries, as well as the relevance and quality of the content they’re looking for. 

This is why it’s crucial to ensure your website or blog content is effective for both social media and SEO by creating informative and engaging articles. After all, the more intriguing and helpful your content is, the more likely people are to share it.

How to implement this strategy?

Although pumping out content regularly is vital, it’s quality that counts – not quantity. Take the time to research your materials and produce well-written pieces that resonate with your readers. 

For your content to be meaningful, you need to understand what your readers want, how they search, their buying habits, and other insights that can help you design content that responds to your audience’s needs. So, before you put your fingers to the keyboard, do your research — and then craft content that’ll be relevant and beneficial for your readers. That way, you’ll produce insightful articles that stick with people long after they’ve read them. 

Strategy #3 Make it easy for people to share your on-site content

Why does it matter?

As a society, we’ve become increasingly reliant on social media to share our thoughts, feelings, and experiences with the world. This trend is reflected in the way we consume and share content online. So if you want your on-site content to be successful, make sure you have social sharing buttons integrated into your web pages in some way.

How to implement this strategy?

Add social media sharing buttons to every piece of content you create, whether it’s a landing page, product page, or blog article. If possible, try to make these buttons more visible and easier for readers to find. That way, your readers will have less to dig through and can easily share your content with their own networks. An example of a site that does this well is Quantic, which has social share buttons that follow visitors as they scroll down a page.

Strategy #4 Equip yourself with the necessary toolkit

Why does it matter?

A social strategy is important if you’re looking to maximize your brand’s reach, but it won’t be worth the pixels it’s written on if your business doesn’t have a solid toolkit for executing that strategy. Without an inventory of reliable, specific tools that correspond to your brand’s goals, your social strategy may fall flat before it even has a chance to succeed.

How to implement this strategy?

If you really want to push past mediocrity and get your social channels in top shape for SEO, then you should definitely consider adding the following tools to your marketing toolkit:

• Social media analytics tools. If you want to get a complete understanding of your social media performance, you need to track key metrics for each platform. These tools will give you insights into what’s working well and where improvements are needed.
• Monitoring tools. When it comes to interacting with customers and building brand loyalty, monitoring tools are key. These systems, designed to manage customer reviews, actions, and messages, can be extremely helpful in keeping your brand visible and responsive. 
• Project management tools. Using versatile collaborative task management tools like Wrike or Monday will help to keep your behind-the-scenes social media processes organized. After all, the more organized your operations are in the backend, the more consistent you’ll be in delivering your messages to your audience and hitting your KPI’s.
• Social listening tools. These tools also allow you to monitor what’s being said about your brand online and take action based on the insights you gather.

Strategy #5 Outsource your SEO and social media efforts

Why does it matter?

As SEO and social media increasingly intersect, your social media strategy must be integrated with your SEO efforts. But with all the different social media platforms out there, it can be difficult to know where to start and how to maximize your efforts. That’s where hiring a virtual assistant or digital marketing agency can be beneficial. The right agency will help you create a social media strategy that aligns with your SEO goals and helps you navigate the ever-changing world of Google rankings. In other words, they can help you make sure that your social media is actually helping your SEO – something that is not always easy to do on your own.

How to implement this strategy?

There are many digital marketing agencies that can help you with social media optimization for SEO. However, not all agencies are created equal. Here are some things to look for when going over agency social media proposals:

• Are they proposing strategies that are unique and tailored to your business?
• Do they have a solid understanding of your target audience and how to reach them?
• Have they had a good history of helping other businesses achieve success with social media optimization?
• Is their team made up of experienced and creative professionals who can execute the proposed strategies effectively?

Checking for these things will help you narrow down the field and choose the agency that is best suited to help you achieve your social media goals.

Fire up your Google rankings through social media

The stories of search engine rankings are written in code by an army of engineers and marketers at one end and with millions of businesses fighting to shape their share of the Internet on the other. It is a battle that requires not only the use of advanced technology but also a keen understanding of marketing and customer psychology. Social media is just one of the many tools you need to have in your arsenal to succeed in this battle.

The post How to use social media platforms to improve Google rankings appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Social media often refers to social networking platforms which organize the sharing of ideas and communication. These platforms focus on building Internet-based social communities.

Users sometimes access social media via desktop computers, though most activity today happens on mobile devices (e.g., smart phones and tablets). As more users interact with a social media network, the platform grows and becomes more powerful. Using social media users and brands create, share, and participate in highly relevant discussions.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing can be an effective strategy for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and existing customers. Your customers are likely already in touch with brands through social media. If you are not interacting to your audience through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, there is a lot you are missing out on! Great marketing tactics on social media can bring additional benefits to your business, including building loyal followers and generating more revenue.

One definition for Social Media Marketing is:

Social Media Marketing is the method of creating content that you tailor for each individual social media platform to drive user engagement.

Important Social Media Terms

1. Content: Content refers to anything that you post. It can be a Facebook status update, a picture on Instagram, a tweet, or a pin on Pinterest.

Content usually relates to information that connects with an audience. It is usually in text or visual form, with the goal of conveying an idea to your audience. Content can be delivered through different media such as internet, cinema, television, radio, Smartphone’s, audio CDs, books, e-books, magazines, and live events, live speeches, conferences, and stage performances.

2. Hashtags: By now, there are many ways users can classify posts on most social media channels. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest all use hashtags to describe the subject of your content or associate it with current trends.

They make it easy for users to discover and share your content.

A hashtag can describe information on social networks like Twitter and different social services. They allow users to use dynamic, user-generated tags that make it easy for others to find information on a selected topic. Users create hashtags by inserting the hash (#) symbol before a word or phrase.

For example, on Instagram, the hashtag #bluesky permits users to find all posts that are labeled using that hashtag.

3. Shares: Shares are the currency of the social media world. To many companies, they are all that matters on social media.

You can keep improving your reach, impressions, and click-through rates. However, these metrics do not tell you whether individuals are spreading your information to others.

When individuals engage and interact with your content, that’s great. But, if they share it with others, that’s even better.

A great tool to track shares and the overall impact of content is BuzzSumo.

4. Engagement: Engagement is general term that relates to how effective your content is. An engagement can be a like, suggestion, comment, or share.

All of these are relevant metrics. However as mentioned before, shares are the most important.

Engagement on social media implies that customers and stakeholders are active participants instead of just passive viewers.

How Social Media Marketing Can Help you Achieve Your Marketing Goals

Social Media Marketing can assist with achieving a range of goals, including:

• Increasing website traffic
• Generating conversions
• Raising brand awareness
• Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
• Improving communication and interaction with key audiences

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media, the easier it will be for you to achieve each marketing goal on your list!

Social Media Marketing Checklist

• Social Media Content Planning —Getting started with social media marketing is the first step. Consider keyword and competitive analysis to assist in brainstorming content ideas that excite your audience. What are competitors in your industry doing to drive engagement on social media?

• Share Great Social Content —Content reigns supreme. Ensure you post often and offer valuable information that your potential customers find useful and attention-grabbing. The content that you share on social media can include pictures, videos, infographics, how-to guides and other relevant information.

• Use A Consistent Brand Image —Social media marketing permits your business to project your brand across a variety of various social media platforms. Whereas every platform has its distinctive community, your business’s core identity, whether it’s a friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should be consistent.

• Social Media for Content Promotion — Social media marketing is an excellent channel for sharing your best website and blog content with readers. Once you build a loyal following, you will be able to post all your new content to keep your audience up to date. Plus, relevant blog content can assist you in gaining additional followers. It isn’t surprising that content marketing and social media marketing benefit one another.

• Sharing Curated Links — Using social media for marketing may be a way to leverage your own content to achieve followers, fans, and customers. It also offers a chance to link to outside articles. Your audience may enjoy engaging with different sources of relevant information. Curating and linking to outside sources builds trust, and you may even get more likes and shares in return.

• Tracking Competitors — It’s necessary to key an eye on your competitors. They may offer valuable information for keyword analysis as well as social media insights. If your competitors are using a certain social channel or technique that appears to be working for them, considering trying similar tactics. Just do them even better!
• Measuring Success with Analytics — You can’t verify the success of your social media marketing without proper data. Google Analytics is a good social media marketing metrics tool that may assist you in measuring the effectiveness of your marketing techniques. Creating UTM tags for your social campaigns can help you to properly monitor their performance. And be certain to use the analytics tools offered in every social media platform for even more additional insights (e.g. Facebook Analytics). This can help you to determine which content is performs best for your audience.

• Social Media Crisis Management — Things may not always go smoothly on social media. It is best to create a playbook in place, so your team knows how to handle a potential tricky situation.

Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

1. Failing to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy!

Every social media marketing strategy needs:

• Goals
• A target audience
• Tactics
• Time investment
• A Committed Team

2. Your Target Audience:

Your target audience must be relevant so that they can one day become your customers. If you target everyone, then you will be focusing your time and energy engaging with the wrong people.

3. Dealing with Negative Feedback

Types of Negative Feedback:

• Criticism is feedback based on individuals ‘opinions regarding your products and services. Criticism might escalate if neglected or not addressed quickly. Examine the problem and let individuals understand that you just are looking into it. A way to deal with criticism is to create a feedback channel to collect users’ opinions.

• Crisis hits once somebody is irritated and decides to take things to the next level. It’s typically a result of your earlier neglect. First, make certain that there is an issue and it’s not somebody attempting to personally harm you or your business. If you made a mistake, show regret and apologize for what happened. Next, let individuals understand what you are aiming to do improve things. Provides a timeline and specify goals you’re aiming to work towards.

4. Promoting yourself too much:

Don’t promote yourself a lot as users are quick to differentiate between any two products.Let your products speak for themselves.

5. Spamming:

Over promotion can lead to the spamming of your website. Avoid spamming and promote your content in genuine way.

6. Too Little Interaction:

Stay in touch with your customers or target audience. Otherwise, they may leave to other companies in the absence of proper interaction.

7. No Real Followers:

There are many ways to increase the followers of your account. However, fake followers don’t contribute business revenue. Moreover, building fake followers can be waste of money and time. So, avoid buying fake followers as a best practice.

Best Social Media Platforms for Marketing in 2019

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Youtube
• Reddit

Conclusion

It is necessary to learn from your content promotion mistakes. Many of today’s social media platforms value quality content and a positive user experience. Continue learning to stay top of your marketing game and get a marketing consultant to help you out. Eventually, you will build out your name and brand in the social media world.

The post Quick Social Media Marketing Checklist: A Comprehensive Guide to Key Terms, Goals, and Mistakes to Avoid appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

As if they have sniffed a business opportunity where you thought none existed.

If you are not on Instagram Stories, perhaps this is exactly what has happened.

Launched in 2016, smart businesses have created a strong presence on this platform, leveraging its huge popularity among internet users to widen their audience and improve customer engagement.

Maybe your competitors are using this 400-million-daily-user feature as a promising marketing platform to grow their business and gain a sizeable lead over you.

That said, not all is lost for you. Join this platform today and kick start your campaign.

If you follow a carefully planned marketing strategy instead of flying by the seat of your pants, you might well be able to make up for the lost time fairly quickly.

Here are a few tips to give voice and personality to your brand and impress consumers through your business Stories.

Offer Something To Your Consumers

Did you know that more than 50% of businesses on Instagram use Stories to market their brand? It follows that competition here is stiff. To catch users’ attention, you might have to give them a good reason to follow your campaign, like including a special offer ad in your business Stories.

Show Video Ads

If you want to raise awareness of your brand, consider showing video ads in your Stories. Still, it’s important to create a good ad that will be 100% self-explanatory.

Create Stories to Encourage App Installs

Make interesting Stories to drive app installs among young people who are more likely to shop via their phones than older people.

Want to know more Instagram Stories hacks?

Check out the following infographic which shows how other businesses have used Stories to boost their brand image and sales.

URL: https://99firms.com/blog/how-businesses-use-instagram-stories/

The post How To Design A Successful Instagram Stories Campaign appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

Want to figure out how to get the best out of your social media campaigns?

It’s time for you to run a Social Media Audit. If you don’t know what an Audit is I’ll guide you step-by-step on how you can run a social media audit to find out all the missing data points that you need to consider before starting your next campaign and make it a huge success.

So let’s get started!

What is a Social Media Audit?

In simple words, a social media audit is when you closely look at the activity, engagement, audience retention on all your social handles and figure out a missing point. The ultimate goal is to find out the best social media strategy for your business so that you generate a positive ROI for all your social media campaigns.

It includes everything starting from basics like the overall engagement ratio and the advanced stuff like the sentiment of your potential customers.

Let’s now dive deep and see how step by step you can run an audit even if you have never done it before.

#1. Measure Overall Results

This is the first step in any social media audit that you run. You need to check the metrics for all your social handles. Metrics like the shares, comments, clicks, video views, post reach, number of followers gained etc.

You can do it manually, or you can use any third party social media monitoring tools like Sprout Social or Agorapulse to check the metrics. Have a closer look at all the metrics and churn out the data.

For example, you can check what all posts are going viral on Facebook, what all videos are more viewed on Youtube, or is your buy Instagram service giving you the best engagement or not? After you determine what works on various social platform, you can now repeat it over and over again to get the best out of it.

#2. Analyze Demographics & Interests

You have a different audience for all your social platforms. You target audience on Facebook might not be your target audience on Pinterest. So in this part of your audit, you need to figure out who is your target audience on all the major social channels.

Next, you need to identify their interests what is that makes them crazy (again this will depend on the platform). For example: On Instagram, your audience will always love stories, but you need to find which type of stories are seen by a majority of the people, what is their age group, what they are doing on Instagram and do they have any buying intentions from you?

#3. Analyze Consistency and Quality Across Platforms

Now that you know that people are interacting with your content it’s time to analyze your performance on all the social platforms.

Let’s understand it in detail:

You need to check do you have a equal brand presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or not. Do you have properly written bios on all the platforms or not. Analyze do you reply peoples messages on Facebook much faster or is it Twitter direct messages?

Also check into the type of content that you share among various social platforms. Are you only posting boring blog posts link or posting some informative content? You need to ask all this questions to take your social media campaign to a whole new level and get the best out of it.

Keep updated with the platforms new features don’t miss out on any major feature and always see how you can keep a balanced brand presence across all the platforms.

#4. Review Your Budget & Calculate ROI

This is the most crucial part of an audit. In fact, this is the main reason why you need to run an audit every 6 months. As business owners, or marketers, or bloggers our ultimate goal is to generate the maximum amount of positive ROI from our social campaigns.

For the ROI you need first to calculate all your expenses on third-party tools, Ad spends, apps and tools to create images, tools to curate content, and consultant or agency fees.

Compare the results from start to end. Let’s say for example, suppose you ran a contest for $300 and generated 500 leads who is paying you $20 subscription fee every month you’ll be able to see a positive ROI on your social media campaign. However, if the opposite is true, you need to closely check the metrics what is that you are missing to make your campaigns big.

Conclusion:

I hope you like this solid packed 4 steps strategy to run an audit and I know you’ll make it big in your next social media campaign.

The post How to Conduct a Social Media Audit appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

It is much more about listening and talking with customers than offering discounts.

Another way that having a social media presence can benefit you, is because you automatically have the ability to sell directly, on a different platform. So you can recreate your store on Facebook and people can shop directly through there, or you can talk about one of your products on Twitter, and people can buy it from the tweet itself. But these social networks also have the necessary tools in place that let your customers share your products and their recent purchases with their followers and their friends with a simple click of a button.

It may be difficult to measure the concrete returns based on the indirect aspects of using social media. This includes the returns that you get from replying to question your customers have, or engaging in conversation with your audience. But all of these components will help you build brand loyalty and increase the sense of community.

According to research, about 47.7% of social media users made their most recent purchase directly through Facebook and their eBay Daily Deals. And this number is higher on Facebook than any of the other big platforms. A distant second on the ranking was Instagram, followed by Pinterest and the rest of the big platforms.

There are countless of ways for you to improve and increase your business thanks to social commerce. If you want to learn more ways, take a look at the infographic below.

Link to the infographic: https://www.16best.net/blog/social-networks-and-their-importance-in-ecommerce-gateways/

The post The Importance of Social Media in Ecommerce appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.

With that reality, we now have to invest in social media advertising to get better results, especially in the short term. Does this mean organic social media marketing is completely dead? Not necessarily, as there are several benefits of organic social media marketing, especially if you are low on budget. However, it’s safe to say that there will be limitations to organic reach, and you will need a longer timeframe to see results.

Yet, social media advertising can be really expensive, and can even lose you money when not managed well. For the rest of this guide, we will discuss four key steps on making the most of your social media advertising campaigns. Let us begin with the first one.

1. Choose The Right Plattform

Seemingly obvious, but many businesses fail to recognize the right social media platform for them, especially which platforms to advertise in.

Some social media platforms are better for B2B environments,like LinkedIn and Twitter and some others are better for B2C, like Instagram and Facebook. While some work for both types, it is important to choose the most effective platforms depending on your niche and/or industry.

Also, it is important to note that each platform offers different advertising options with various pricing options, so you might also want to choose the one(s) that can fit your budget.

Facebook is generally the most popular platform to run an advertising campaign, with over 4 million active advertisers to date https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/facebook-advertising-statistics/. Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin are also great platforms with excellent ROI, and generally these 4 should be your first choices.

So, how can you decide which platform to use for your business? Here are a few tips to help you get started:

• In general, although not always, Linkedin and Twitter (and YouTube) is better for B2B advertisements, while Facebook and Instagram will strive in B2C environments.
• Linkedin performs extremely well in generating lead, but we can’t say the same about conversions
• For engagement, YouTube is arguably the best platform due to its native video contents.
• Twitter is great for quick, short-term advertisements for both leads and conversions
• As you might have guessed, Facebook is generally the most well-rounded platform with flexible targeting options

2. Determine Your Goals

Advertisements are costly, in fact, they can be really expensive. So, the first thing we should do is to determine our advertising goals, and make sure our money are well-spent to achieve those goals.

Now, we can make the process of determining goals really simple or really complicated, but in essence, we should first understand the concept of marketing funnel and https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/what-is-the-buyers-journey.

We can use advertisement to strengthen different stages of the marketing funnel. So, although there can be countless different advertising goals, we can generally put them into just three big groups according to the buyer’s journey:

• Awareness

There are generally two approaches here: getting more traffic, so that more people are aware of your business, and improving your brand image https://www.feedough.com/brand-image-explanation-examples/

• Consideration

Arguably the broadest part of the marketing funnel. Here, you can advertise your contents to provide more information to your customers. A simple ad designed just to sell your product will also do the job. The key here is how can you increase the interest in your products/services.

• Conversion

Here, you are targeting those who already show interests in buying, and aim to finally get that conversion.

So, which marketing funnel stage will be your advertising goal? Or is it all of them? As you can see, different advertising goals will lead to different approaches, so it is really important to decide on those goals first.

3. Targeting

We have discussed how social media advertising can be really expensive when not managed well. So, what’s the solution? The answer is targeting

By targeting the right audiences, you can get more attention, and so you can make sure your money is well spent.

The basic idea of targeting is really simple: you target audiences that are similar to your previous successful campaign. But what if you’ve never had any successful campaign before? Well, that’s an entirely different story, and you might need to do further trial and error. However, a good place to start is to target your closest competitor’s audiences. (link to competitive analysis article)

Back to topic, if you do have a successful audience profile, most if not all major social media platforms do offer the option to target custom audiences. In Facebook, we got the custom audiences and lookalike audiences features. In Linkedin, we got the matched audiences feature, while Twitter call theirs tailored audiences.

Yet, there are cases when we want to target people outside our successful audiences. For example when we are launching a new product for different market segment. We can also tailor the target audiences based on that need.

So, your targeting should be based on the goals you’ve decided on step 2 discussed above, and that’s how you can make the most of your money. The targeting options offered can be really detailed, and you might get overwhelmed if you are not careful. The more detailed your targeting is, the higher the chance of a successful campaign. Here are a few guides that might help you:

• A very in-depth guide for Facebook ad targeting by Advertisemint
• Another one from Marketingprofs, discussing Facebook and Instagram targeting options.
• A different take on Facebook ad targeting by Adespresso

4. Retargeting

Retargeting advertising is a relatively new form of online ads designed to target the previous visitors of your site. You can make certain actions as the trigger of the retargeting ad, and so the ad will only be shown to users that took (or not took) that certain action.

For example, if you are a SAAS company selling an e-commerce software, you can retarget visitors that attempted to sign-up for a free-trial, but leave before the whole process was done.

In that case, say if you have set up a retargeting ad with Facebook, that user will see an advertisement that reminds them to try your product when they logged in to their Facebook.

As you can see, retargeting ads are effective, because they target audiences that are already interested in your product/service, or at least have been aware of your site. How effective can they be? Statistics suggested that retargeting ads are four times more likely to get conversion, and on average, will get three times more clicks.

How can you set up a retargeting campaign? Most of the major social media platforms offer their retargeting campaigns using their social media pixel.

5. Measure Everything and Refresh Your Campaigns

It is absolutely essential to keep track on your campaign(s), and continuously testing your contents to make the most of your money. Always refresh and alter your contents, as overused and stale ads won’t be very effective.

There are various tools available to help you measure your progress, or you can use the social media dashboard to perform analytics. Here are the key areas you should focus on:

• Ad Copywriting

Are you currently using the absolute best copy that could go with your ad? Check user responses, and adjust when necessary.

• Creative

You can use A/B testing to test various images. Even the smallest design changes can make a whole lot of a difference.

• Landing Page

Is your landing page optimized for conversion? Is the bounce rate high? There is no use of excellent advertising if your landing page doesn’t work.

Conclusion

Unless there will be a drastic change or a new game-changing platform, we can be sure that social media marketing will only get more expensive in the years to come. We should remember that each social media platform is essentially a business, and they are also trying to make money.

While we can’t achieve much results with organic social media marketing anymore, especially in a short-time basis, what we can do is optimizing our paid social media marketing campaigns to make the most of our money, get a better ROI, and make more profit.

If we can use our budget wisely, social media is still a very powerful way to advertise our business, and the most important thing is to understand our advertising goals and act accordingly to have effective investments.

The social media marketing game might have changed and you can work with a digital marketing expert to ensure you are getting the highest ROI.

The post Social Media Marketing Tips: How To Make The Most of Your Money appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.