The social media tools digital marketers actually use

First thing’s first: There are way too many tools out there for managing your social media presence. Some of them are wonderful, others are buggy, godawful wastes of time. I know I try to test every tool under the sun for my clients, and that’s why I joined five other smart marketing folks to collectively offer our best tool recommendations at the Social Media Summit 2016 social tools panel.

I love being on panels where I too learn new things. There’s just way. Too. Much. Good. Stuff.

Thankfully, the organizers caught it on video, so I spent some time recapping all the tools we mentioned.

But don’t get too overwhelmed: Go through the list and pick a few to focus on. It’s dangerous to use every single thing listed here, not only for your social media presence but also for your sanity.

Here we go!

Managing and scheduling

Hootsuite — The obvious tool. It’s currently the industry standard. Hootsuite can do about 80-90% of what most clients need, in my experience.

Buffer — An easy way to queue up content that will post to your social accounts gradually over time.

Edgar — It’s like Buffer, but the queue never runs out. Once Edgar reaches the bottom of your queue, it will post your previous content from the top of the queue again.

SocialOomph — This has many features, including Edgar-like rotating queues. I like its more affordable price, but it’s not that user-friendly.

Sendible — For larger companies. It has search, trending keywords, content curation, scheduling, and a rotating queue, too. Gail Nott loves it.

Post Planner — Bill Davis loves this tool. It’s easy to use for Facebook and Twitter accounts, has great suggested content as well as inspirational memes.

Planning

A schedule. Any schedule. — Doesn’t need to be complicated. Tess Owen made a simple grid that outlines different types of content for each day of the week.

Google Docs — Easy and ubiquitous document collaboration. Great to get editing and approval from clients.

Project management tools — If your social media management platform doesn’t meet all of your workflow needs, try tools like Trello or Podio.

Finding content

News360 — Pick your favorite topics, and News360 will show you the trending articles around that topic.

Feedly — Add your favorite blogs and news sites to Feedly to get all the headlines in one place.

Google Trends — Lists the trending searches across Google.

Wherever your target audience is — Your audience is already asking questions about your field of expertise, whether it’s on Reddit, Quora, MosaicHub, Facebook Groups or LinkedIn Groups. If you know the answer to the question, point a video camera at yourself and record a response. Then turn that into a YouTube video, or type up a blog post.

Creating content

Canva — A dead-simple web-based graphic design tool.

Animoto — Quick, fun video maker. With video becoming more central in social media, Geoffrey Purkis says this is one of the most important tools in your arsenal.

Finding and growing followers

Crowdfire — A great follower management app for Twitter and Instagram. You can find new followers based off your industry’s influencers, or your competitors. You can quickly unfollow people not following you back. And in my opinion, its Instagram scheduler is far better than Hootsuite’s.

Hashtagify — Tori Terhune loves this tool to discover what hashtags people are using in specific niches. She also suggests using Google’s keyword tool to brainstorm words to then search in Hashtagify.

Tweetfull — Gail uses this tool to automatically favorite tweets based on keywords and user sentiment.

Finding influencers

BuzzSumo—Look up trending topics and search influencers in your niche.

Ninja Outreach — Reach out to influencers in your industry and manage those leads through this contact relationship management tool.

LinkedIn search — One of the best ways to find industry leaders in your field.

Analytics and measuring success

Google Analytics and Facebook Insights — the obvious tools. Use them.

Hootsuite — Yep, Hootsuite again. I find the free reports and statistics usually get the job done. Occasionally I’ll splurge for a paid report.

Simply Measured—An enterprise platform for social media analytics, but they also offer free reports. I like this Facebook competitive analysis one.

TweetReach — Free tool for measuring the reach of a hashtag.

Union Metrics — One of the few decent analytics tools for Instagram.

HubSpot — A robust platform for larger businesses, though the free account offers good competitive analysis. Start with the marketing grader.

Sidekick by HubSpot — Get email tracking and analytics for your Gmail or Outlook. You can also schedule emails.

Google Alerts — Set an alert every time your name or your brand is mentioned on the web.

SocialMention — It’s like Google Alerts for social media. Search entire online presence.

Miscellaneous

Lights — Yes, lights. Tess recommended carrying a good, portable lighting tool like this for your social media photos and video — particularly selfies.

BNI — Geoffrey points out that your fellow human beings can be your greatest asset. BNI is one of many great networking organizations to add to your toolkit.

Hearsay Social — A social media management platform for industries that have strict compliance demands, such as finance and insurance. It’s a good tool with an approved content library, but personalize the posts so it doesn’t sound like everyone else.

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These are all the tools we mentioned on the panel, and Tess recorded even more thoughts here. But of course, there’s loads more tools out there. If you’re looking for a tool that will help you with a specific problem, check out this much-longer list of tools, or feel free to email me.

Feeling crazy overwhelmed with social media? Then join me on this webinar on how to keep your social media marketing tasks under a half an hour a day. It’s possible. I promise you.