Top 8 Social Media Marketing Tools in 2020
by Mike Khorev
Social media marketing has become very competitive and saturated in the past half decade or so. Thankfully, there are now various social media marketing tools that can help us get ahead, with various functions.
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. 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. 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.
8. 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.
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.
Mike Khorev
I'm a growth marketing consultant who helps B2B, SaaS, IT, technology and software companies generate more leads, sales and grow revenue online. I offer expert advice on marketing your company the right way through performance-based SEO, digital marketing, social media, search engine marketing and many other online practices. Connect with me on LinkedIn and schedule a free marketing strategy session!
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Great post. With 60% of the businesses out there complaining the struggle with choosing perfect media marketing tools. Thank you for sharing such an amazing stuff.
Great post Mike, I was struggling with which marketing tool I should use . After reading your post I got more options than I needed. I am using Canva right now and it is really making my designing tasks easier and faster. Keep posting such things to encourage all the people who are trying to do social media marketing.
Nice research, about social media marketing tools that really help in growing Business faster. I a very useful social media tool that is Animoto. This tool allows you to create professional-quality videos with pictures and video clips.