Social media isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Love it or hate it, if you’re a marketer, you’d better get comfy with social media. And if you haven’t yet joined the ranks of those web-savvy marketing teams who use incredible tools like the ones on this list, then lucky you – we’ve dropped our top 7 on this list! You know how you’d feel visiting cavemen clunking around with stone tools? Yeah, so after using some of the tools on this list, that’s how it’ll feel to remember your social media marketing process before reading this article. Don’t believe us? Only one way to find out…
#1 Buffer
This platform began as a Twitter scheduling tool. It’s grown a lot since then – now, it actually supports all the major social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. This platform actually performs a wide array of diverse functions, so it’s a little hard to describe. For instance, Buffer’s Chrome extension lets you add content from the internet to a “Buffer queue” and share it with effortless convenience. It automatically shortens your shared links, provides performance-tracking analytics, builds a posting schedule for evenly spreading your content, and more. You can basically think of it as a social media dashboard—and one you didn’t know you needed until now.
#2 Biteable
When it comes to marketing, visual content gets 3x more engagement on Twitter than mere text. Pretty big deal, right? Good visual content can really help your marketing game up the success ladder. Biteable lets you create short videos to share on social media, and the process is designed to help you make those videos engaging and informative for your audience. Biteable provides a wealth of free video footage, music, templates, and basic templates that conduce to professional-quality video work without investing in the traditional—and really expensive—video content resources used by marketers in the past. Free and premium accounts are on the table here, but even the free account offers a lot to work with.
#3 Missinglttr
Missinglettr is a handy tool that automates creation of social content – sound too good to be true? So it actually scrapes your blog content and creates a year’s worth of social content for your convenience. Specifically, this means some number of individual posts that can be scheduled for spreading over your social channels. Wow! This way, you can focus your efforts elsewhere, like writing long-form content or building video content. Now, this is no replacement for a dedicated social media marketing team, but if you’re running low on manpower, Missinglettr’s impressive software can be incredibly helpful. It provides content templates, a custom URL shortener for exporting campaign assets to other campaigns, and some other neat features.
#4 Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a research tool designed to track content performance and who’s sharing your stuff. It helps you find your top-performing content across social media channels, locate influencers in particular arenas, receive keyword-based alerts, track your strongest competitors, research important keywords and trending topics for your audience, and plenty else. This is definitely one for the data-delving portion of your marketing team. With Buzzsumo, there’s no excuse not to know the relevant numbers in your marketing niche.
#5 Bitly
Bitly shortens links. Hey, that’s important! Some links are just virtually impossible to remember and share (unless you’ve got some kind of eidetic memory). Shorter URLS not only look better, but they’re easier to share across social media. Bitly idoes more than that though – it can track clicks, look at your website referrals, and even locate the geographical locations around the world where your content is getting the most clicks and hits. If you want proof this platform is valuable, Google built it into their Campaign URL Builder for both shortening links and tracking campaign performance. Yeah, Google doesn’t mess around. Bitly is good stuff.
#6 MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is your new content manager. Well, your new automated content manager anyway. Despite the weird name, this is an impressive social media management tool that reshares your content and optimizes social media traffic. It can be used across all the normal platforms like Facebook and Twitter via a web plugin, and it lets you schedule things like content resharing while monitoring traffic, boosting engagement, and handling your in-campaign ROI. It’s also got a scheduling tool that discriminates by category, which lets you mix different content types for the sake of consistent audience engagement (no one wants to read the same content repeatedly). MeetEdgar even has its own URL shortener with click tracking functionality – another gem on the list for 2021.
#7 IFTTT
IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.” This logically named tool empowers marketers to establish rules for running social media campaigns—rules for automatically initiating certain actions when a trigger event occurs.So let’s say you want to track a certain kind of notification over the course of the day. Manually, this would kind of suck. But IFTTT can add those alerts to a Google doc for your convenient perusal at day’s end. If you’re into automation and delegating busywork to AI in order to focus on the big picture, this tool is a must-have.
