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.

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.

What is Retargeting?

First, we should clarify the common misconception regarding retargeting and remarketing. Although they are related to each other, retargeting is not necessarily remarketing, and vice versa.

The term “remarketing” refers to the marketing efforts targeted to the same prospects again and again. When you see the same restaurant ads repeatedly on those billboards beside the road, that is remarketing.

Retargeting, on the other hand, is a new form of remarketing for the digital world. With retargeting, we are shown repeated online ads on the same traffic for a dedicated time. While retargeting is fairly new, it has grown to be the biggest aspect of remarketing in recent years. Generally, there are three main applications of retargeting:

1. Retargeting the audience who have visited your site
2. Retargeting those who have visited your competitors’ sites
3. Retargeting the audience that has taken certain actions depending on your business’s needs (i.e. retargeting those who have tried a free-trial demo on your site)

Why Retargeting?

Since retargeting is technically a form of remarketing, we should first understand the benefits of remarketing. Let’s take the classic iOS vs Android debate, for example. No, we are not going to discuss which one is better, however, there is a high likelihood that the one you prefer is the one you are more exposed to.

If most of your friends are using Android phones (and they recommended it to you, consciously or subconsciously), you are more likely to be an Android user. The idea is, we are more likely to enjoy what we are familiar with.

So how do we build on this with retargeting? Let’s use another example. Let’s say you just browsed on Amazon for a new TV set. Then, for whatever reasons, you decided to stop looking for a TV set that day. A proper retargeting campaign might target you, and when you later on opened your Facebook later that day, a TV ad shows up, effectively reminding you to buy that TV.

If you are familiar with the marketing funnel concept, you might understand that with every step of the buyer’s journey, the possibility of a conversion will be smaller. Retargeting, in essence, is an effort to optimize the chance of conversion in each funnel stage.

Retargeting is also a very effective tactic to build brand awareness, while a study by ComScore suggested that retargeting can increase site visitation by a whopping 726%.

How Retargeting Works

There are two popular ways to run a retargeting campaign: through Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. There are other platforms that offer retargeting services, but considering the size of Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, they should be your first choices.

Retargeting works mainly with the help of a code snippet in the form of a cookie in your customer’s browser. The cookie will then collect their information and based on that gathered data, you can then target those visitors with your promotion.

How about targeting your competitors’ audience?

The best method is using keyword-targeting. Here, you can target a certain keyword related to your industry while excluding your own visitor. This is a pretty reliable method, especially if you are in a competitive industry.

The second, and arguably the easiest method, is to use social media: for example, we can target those who have followed or liked our competitors.

Setting Up Google Ads Retargeting

Google Ads offers a built-in retargeting feature, so you can set up a retargeting campaign easily following these steps:

1. Click on ‘shared library’ on the left of your Ads dashboard
2. Click ‘view’ under Audiences, and you can choose ‘Set Up Remarketing’. Leave the box unchecked for now
3. Google will offer to send you instructions, get it if you want. Check the ‘Use the Google Analytics tag’ box
4. Set up a new list after clicking on ‘Remarketing List’
5. Click on ‘Visitors to a page with a specific tag’, then create a new tag
6. Set the campaign duration
7. Hit “Save,” and you will get your retargeting cookie on the next page

After you’re done, simply copy and paste the retargeting cookie code into the HTML body tag of your site.

There you have it, you’ve set up a Google Ads retargeting campaign!

Setting Up Facebook Ads Retargeting

Facebook Ads are even easier with less necessary steps and Facebook will walk you through every step. Here are 3 things you will need to know before starting a Facebook Ad Campaign, but you can set up your campaign easily through the following steps:

First, click on ‘Tools’ in your ad manager, and select ‘Pixels’

Enter your domain name, and Facebook will walk you through all the necessary steps. You will then get your retargeting cookie code snippet.

The biggest benefit of the retargeting campaign is higher conversions in each stage of your funnel. It is specifically targeted for those who have shown interest in your brand, product, or your niche, so you know they are shopping.

While the concept of retargeting and code snippets might be confusing at first, it is actually quite easy to learn as Google and Facebook have taken the necessary steps to make this comprehensive system easy to operate. However, it takes years of experience to understand where to invest marketing dollars to get the most return, that’s where B2B marketing consultant can help your business on creating content, generating demand, and enabling sales using budget with maximum efficiency.

The post Beginner’s Guide: Setting Up Google Ads and Facebook Retargeting appeared first on Mike Khorev - SEO Consultant.