Social networks have long been firmly established in the list of business tools. 80% of Internet users visit social media websites daily, and 58% make a purchasing decision based on what they see there.
The era of social commons is not far away. And we better be ready for it.
In social networks, a brand can tell about itself in details, show the backstage of its life, communicate with the audience, conduct surveys, and advertise itself. They even allow you to sell products directly without redirecting you to other sites.
In order for the activity of the brand on social media to produce results, companies have to go through rather time-consuming processes. One of them is social media. SMM specialists use a variety of SMM tools that help them effectively promote a particular product, brand, or service on social networks.
To help you, we put together a list of all the necessary tools that will help you manage your social media presence and do so in an efficient and cost-effective way.
Let’s divide tools into several groups:
Ideas for campaigns and posts are not born from thin air. Кeep the pulse – be in the stream of events to not miss the topics of concern to the audience.
Some of the most convenient tools and platforms for tracking trends:
– Quora – to find the hottest topics for posts and campaigns
Quora is like a live encyclopedia – it opens doors to the fundamental questions relevant to every industry.
The main plus is that all explanations are given by regular users, without complicated terms – all on the subject and in the case. On Quora definitely need to look through popular topics, relevant to your company, brand, or the general market.
Search for information with relevant keywords. You can participate in discussions or ask questions with links to your accounts in social networks.
Quora has introduced communities of interest to the platform — you will definitely find many useful things there. Moreover, you can subscribe to topic interest you and get lots of great content on a daily basis – threads with discussions, decisions, and thoughts that can become a brilliant idea for a campaign or post.
– Google Trends – to catch up with the latest trends
Hoarder of news and articles – a great way to see what they are talking about in the industry, and figure everything out. But catching the trends in the first seconds of the flight will not work here(there will not work).
Google Trends, on the contrary, helps to understand what your audience is looking for and what they are talking about right now. On the service page, you can select the industry and country, and see which topics are “firing” at the moment. Be prepared for anything – from politics to the privacy of the stars.
– HubSpot – to up your inbound marketing game
The company is one of the creators of the CRM-services for marketing automation, and in its blog reveals the issues that marketers around the world are facing. How to sell your product? How to get the interest of the audience and evaluate the effectiveness, coverage, and virality of advertising? Or how to organize work within the company, and communication between departments? Inbound marketing can solve all those problems, which — despite all the misconceptions — is still on the rise.
In general, a lot of usefulness, not only for marketing specialists but also businessmen with a lot of experience who do not mind learning new things.
HubSpot’s blog includes four topics: marketing, sales, service, and news & trends.
Each SMM Specialist will find here the most relevant ideas that will make your posts brighter and also grow their professional knowledge.
Trends section of HubSpot informs curious learners about the latest research, developments, and trends from the tech sector, and where it converges with business, life, and entertainment.
– Grammarly – to fix mistakes in your texts
When you have chosen what your post will be about, it is essential to present it beautifully. Typos, lexical, or grammatical errors will seriously damage your reputation.
If you run pages in English, Grammarly is indispensable. It just makes things simpler: add text to the service window, and in a couple of seconds it will underline words that may have errors and suggest the correct options. If you add the Grammarly extension to the browser, the service will notice the roughness in the text automatically – in Google Doc files or in content editing sections.
The free version of Grammarly reveals the most obvious errors, and the paid version – checks things more thoroughly.
– Trello – to manage tasks
Trello is an organizing tool that helps you manage teams and plan ideas, media, and general tasks. You can collaborate with your team by sharing ideas and have the opportunity to receive real-time feedback. Your projects are organized into boards so that you can quickly visualize what your team is working on, or at what stage of the process you are.
You can use a free version, but if you need sharing files more then 10Gb, you will need to get the paid version.
– Hashtag Generators – to find the right hashtags
Hashtags are a useful tool in SMM. By understanding how to use hashtags correctly, you can reach a broad audience and efficiently organize information in groups.
Hashtags make it easy to find the right information among an endless stream of posts and help draw attention to the brand.
Although Twitter was the first social media network to use hashtags to group posts on related topics together, it is on Instagram that hashtags have flourished. Now, hashtags are supported by many social networks, such as Facebook, Vkontakte, Pinterest, Youtube, Vimeo, Flickr, Tumblr, etc.
It is not hard when it comes to hashtag usage. Instagram, for example, encourages you to use up to 30 hashtags per post, but many social media experts believe you should use at least 20 per post.
Hashtag generators help you search and find the best hashtags for your content. Here are some hashtag generator tools you can use to find the perfect combination of hashtags for each of your posts.
There are many different hashtag generators, but All-hashtag and Seekmetrics are the ones we use in our daily work.
– UTM Codes and URL Builder – to track your links
UTM codes are an essential part of any social media campaign.
In short, the UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track the source, medium, and campaign name. This enables Google Analytics to tell you where your visitors came from as well as what campaign directed them to you. For example, a UTM code will let differentiate if the traffic came from Twitter, Facebook, or another website.
An easy-to-use service to add UTM tags to your links. For easy tracking of advertising campaigns in Google Analytics. It is possible to copy an already shortened link.
You can easily find a URL builder online for free. All of them will do the job perfectly.
– Buffer – for scheduling your posts
Buffer is a powerful SMM Tool that allows you to schedule social media posts across a variety of popular social networks.
Moreover, it can be connected to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Here, you can choose the optimal time for posting a publication and manage content more efficiently.
Another advantage is the ability to set different levels of access for team members. Subscription starts at quite a low monthly price, but there is also a free basic set.
– Google Analytics
Although Google Analytics is not a social media analysis tool, it is one of the best ways to track campaign performance on social media and even help you measure your Return On Investment(ROI) in SMM.
Good news — you are probably already using Google Analytics to monitor and analyze traffic. You can receive and create reports specifically for tracking social networks.
For example, you can see how much traffic is coming to your site from each social channel or use the UTM settings to track specific campaigns on social networks.
– Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is built into your Facebook page and it’s a great tool that gives you a good overview of statistics such as engagement, page views, and top posts. All the admins can see Facebook Insights of the page, and it can help you track the number of active users to understand page performance better.
This gives you a good idea of what’s working and what’s not so you can tailor your strategy to fit your target audience.
– Instagram for Business
In Instagram for business accounts, you can follow analytics publications. You can find information about the number of page views, actions when viewing stories, as well as demographic data – gender, age, and geographic location of subscribers.
It will help to improve the content and make it as enjoyable as possible for the audience.
Statistics will begin to be collected from the first publication that you will make after switching to the Instagram business account. And you can see statistics for each publication separately or for the profile as a whole.
– Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics is a strong analytical tool. You can analyze your post. The metrics give you information about your audience: gender, occupation, interests, and other categories. It gives you unique insights into your demographic. Gives information about international events.
Now you should be convinced that when using useful SMM tools, working with social networks turns into a pleasant rest, rather than an oppressive routine. It allows you to craft effective content strategies and avoid unnecessary hassle.
And remember that the main requirements for the effective promotion of brands on social platforms are planning and consistency. By studying analytical and statistical data, you can optimize the quality of the materials posted, as well as the option of presenting content. By automating publications, you can significantly simplify the process and save a lot of time. Special tools for SMM are there to help you. Use them for good and enjoy the job.
Maryam Israelyan
Haik Petrosyan
Armenuhi Ivanyan
