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To succeed in a social media, you need the right skills, the right knowledge, the right training — and the right social media marketing tools.

Each social media platform operates as a silo. So without third-party social media marketing tools, you’ll waste an incredible amount of time just switching tabs, logging in and out of different social accounts.

The right social media marketing stack quite simply makes you a better marketer. Using the best tools for social media marketing frees up time to dedicate to creative tasks. At the same time, you get a clearer view of how those creative decisions are working out.

Here, we take a look at the different kinds of social marketing tools for business that will help you effectively connect with your social media audience and hit your goals in 2023. We’ve even got platform-specific marketing tools for social media to make sure your social strategy is on-point across every channel.

Social media scheduling tools

A social media scheduling tool is a software solution that allows marketers to create social content in advance and schedule it for automatic publication at a specified time.

Most social platforms have some basic native scheduling options. But third-party tools provide greater flexibility, functionality, and the ability to schedule content for multiple social accounts from one dashboard.

And by creating extra time in the content creation workflow, social media tools actually help with a lot more than scheduling.

Social media management tools provide a workflow that allows teams to work together more effectively. It’s easier to collaborate on content created in advance than it is on spur-of-the-moment posts. This can be especially important for large teams or organizations in regulated industries.

That built-in collaborative process also allows for content to go through a predetermined series of approvals. With some social media tools for marketing, everyone can work on social posts, but only senior team members can approve them to go live.

Benefits of social media scheduling tools

Create social content in advance and plan a cohesive posting schedule for multiple accounts.
Publish content automatically at a pre-defined time.
Manage cross-platform campaigns in a central location.
Create and schedule content in batches, so you consolidate your efforts and avoid multiple interruptions throughout the day.
Collaborate effectively with teams.
Create an approval workflow to review all social posts before they go live.
Suspend posts across all platforms with a single click if required in case of major news or a crisis.

Learn more about social media scheduling:

The 10 best social media scheduling tools
How to make a social media posting schedule
How to create a social media calendar
The best time to post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Social media analytics tools

Social media analytics tools are solutions that give marketers the ability to track, analyze, and understand the performance of social posts and campaigns. All social networks offer basic native analytics tools. But these require you to log in and out of each network individually, so you’re looking at your results in isolation.

Specialized social media campaign tools allow you to see the bigger picture. Rather than focusing on which of your Instagram posts performs best, you can see how your Instagram results stack up against your performance on Facebook or TikTok. You can then revise your strategy to connect with your followers where they’re most likely to engage.

Social media analytics tools also allow you to track customers and leads from your social content all the way through to a purchase or other conversion.

Benefits of social media analytics tools

Set clear performance benchmarks based on a unified view of all your social posts.
Learn how to improve your results over time.
Make it easier to calculate the ROI of your organic and paid social campaigns.
Track customers from first contact all the way through to conversion.

Learn more about social media analytics:

10 social media analytics tools
Tools to use instead of Facebook Analytics
Everything you need to know about social media analytics
Social media KPIs to track
Using UTM parameters to track social performance

Social media monitoring tools

Social media monitoring tools are software solutions that allow you to understand what people are saying about you online. They also help you gain insights about your competitors and your industry.

Social platforms will provide a notification if you are tagged in a social post. But not everyone who talks about your or your products on social media will include an @mention in their post. And they certainly won’t tag you if they’re talking about your competitors.

With social monitoring tools, you can keep an eye on variations of your brand name. In addition, you can track branded and industry hashtags, your competitors’ brand names and usernames, and any other relevant keywords.

You can also identify thought leaders in your industry and potential influencers or content creators to partner with, while building a library of curated content to share.

Benefits of social media monitoring tools

Stay up-to-date with the latest thought leadership in your industry.
Access a constant stream of relevant curated content based on hashtags, location, or keyword.
Get the full picture of what people are saying about your brand online, even if they don’t tag you.
Keep an eye on your competitors to see when they launch a new product, promotion, or campaign.
Identify potential partners to help build your brand.

Learn more about social media monitoring:

Top social media monitoring tools and how to use them
How to track what people are saying about your brand
How to track your social mentions

Start a free 30-day trial

Social media listening tools

Social media listening tools are similar to social monitoring tools. But they allow you to take your understanding of the social conversation even deeper. Beyond simply monitoring social discussions, social listening tools help you plan the best course of action based on what’s being said online.

A simple tally of mentions doesn’t give you the full picture. Social listening tools help you understand the intent behind the social conversation. This means you can monitor and protect your brand reputation.

Social listening also provides important opportunities to engage with your target audience. You can identify pain points, and potentially even come up with new product ideas. It’s a good way to connect with engaged communities where they already talk about your niche.

Benefits of social media listening tools

Understand your audience based on what they talk about online.
Learn what people really have to say about you on social by tracking both tagged and untagged mentions, as well as relevant keywords.
Spot changes in your online reputation quickly, so you can play up successes and respond fast to missteps.
Join relevant conversations to start building relationships and stay front-of-mind.

Learn more about social media listening:

What is social listening and why does it matter?
How to conduct a social media sentiment analysis
How to do a competitive analysis on social media

Social media reporting tools

Social media reporting tools give you the ability to create professional social reports to share with team members and stakeholders.

Rather than simply listing off the numbers related to your social performance, social reporting tools allow you to create visual representations like charts and graphs. These make it easy to see at a glance what’s working, what’s not, and how that changes over time.

When you need to report performance across the organization, social media reporting tools help you create user-friendly documents or presentations customized to each stakeholder group. You can share all the nitty-gritty details with your team while providing a higher-level analysis for busy senior managers.

Benefits of social media reporting tools

Easily compare your performance across platforms.
Track organic and paid posts together to make the most of your best content and understand the value of your advertising investment.
Use charts and graphs to get a visual picture of your social performance.
Create ready-to-share reports that you can customize for different stakeholders in your organization.

Learn more about social media reporting:

Key social media metrics to track
How to create a social media report
Why you need a social media dashboard

Social media automation tools

Social media automation tools are programs that free up time for busy social media managers by automating basic or repetitive tasks. This allows you to spend more of your time and effort on higher level work like brainstorming new content ideas or fine-tuning your social strategy.

Social automation tools can also provide a better experience for your followers by giving them faster responses and more customized information.

One newer component of social automation is the ability to create content automatically using artificial intelligence.

Benefits of social media automation tools

Spend your time on creative efforts rather than manual labor or data entry.
Make the most of your social advertising budget by setting triggers to boost your best social media content automatically.
Automatically recommend the best products or services with AI-powered social commerce.

Learn more about social media automation:

Social media automation FAQs
How to manage multiple social media accounts
AI-powered content creation tools

Social media engagement tools

Social media engagement tools are solutions designed to help you get a greater response to your social media posts and improve engagement rates across your social channels.

One of the first rules of creating more engagement is that you need to reply to all comments and messages. Followers are more likely to comment on your posts if they see that you have responded to the comments that came before.

When you have a large social following, it can be a challenge to keep up with incoming public and private messages. Social media engagement tools allow you to manage comments and messages from all your social media profiles in one inbox. They also allow you to enlist help, since you can assign messages and comments to other team members.

Another kind of social media engagement tool is a forecasting tool that suggests the best times to post your content to get the most engagement. This kind of tool analyzes the performance of your past posts and crunches the numbers to predict what will work best in the future.

Benefits of social media engagement tools

Get custom recommendations on the best times to post on each account to achieve maximum engagement.
Respond to comments, amplify user posts, and share content with teammates for follow-up, all from one screen.
Monitor and respond to direct messages from multiple accounts in real-time from a consolidated inbox.

Learn more about social media engagement:

How to increase social media engagement
How to calculate engagement rate
How to boost engagement with Twitter polls

Social media customer service tools

Social media customer service tools are any tools that help you simplify or automate your social customer service. Even more important, they can actually help improve your response to customers.

Social is the preferred customer service channel for many consumers. And when they use it, they have high expectations about response time. Social media customer service tools help ensure you direct incoming queries to the right team member for the job.

Connecting your social media customer service to your CRM allows you to get a full picture of each customer interaction both on and off social. Social media customer service tools help your CRM and your social accounts (and teams!) talk to each other, so the information is shared with everyone who needs it. Each customer interaction builds upon the last, rather than having to start from scratch each time.

You’ll also know when customers contact you through multiple platforms, so you can ensure a consistent response.

Benefits of social media customer service tools

Assign inquiries to the best team member for a speedy and knowledgeable response.
Use a library of saved replies or reply templates to reduce customer service workload.
Integrate social strategy with your CRM.
Monitor and analyze the performance of your social customer care team.

Learn more about social media customer service:

Social media customer service tips and tools
Social CRM: What it is and how to do it
Best customer service software solutions
Customer service metrics to track

Social media chatbots

Social media chatbots are essentially virtual robots that provide automated messaging between followers and your brand. These tools used to be quite basic. They have improved significantly in recent years with the incorporation of artificial intelligence.

The original chatbots could only spit out pre-written responses. No, they can now use AI to suggest products, resolve queries, and even make sales. When conversations get too complicated, chatbots can pass the conversation over to a human. Your customers and followers get all the information and help they need, and your team focuses its efforts on the toughest cases.

Benefits of social media chatbots

Respond instantly to simple inquiries.
Offer basic customer support even when your office is closed.
Engage followers in an intuitive way using the channels they prefer.
Reduce the workload for your social team.
Increase sales through social commerce.

Request a free Heyday demo

Learn more about social media chatbots:

How to use bots for sales and customer service
Using Facebook chatbots for business
Using Instagram chatbots for business
How to use chatbots for business
How to create an FAQ chatbot to save time

Instagram marketing tools

Instagram marketing tools are third-party solutions that unlock functions of this social platform not available natively.

For example, you can use Instagram marketing tools:

for more precise photo editing
to create a specialized layout and design elements
to get more technical with your video editing
to perform more detailed Instagram analytics than the app itself allows.

Instagram marketing tools can also be useful for managing influencer marketing campaigns. Further, they can be used to maximize the budget for your Instagram ads.

Linking out from Instagram posts is always a challenge for marketers. Try using Instagram marketing tools to create a linking page that makes it easier for viewers to learn more about the content in each of your posts.

Benefits of Instagram marketing tools

Schedule posts, stories, and Reels alongside other social content.
Access more elaborate editing tools than you can find in the native app.
Post to Instagram from desktop as well as mobile.
Collaborate with team members on Instagram posts.
Create an effective linking solution.

Learn more about Instagram marketing tools:

Complete Instagram marketing guide
Instagram apps to level-up your posts
Instagram tools for marketers
Instagram analytics tools
Instagram automation tools

Facebook marketing tools

Facebook marketing tools are solutions to manage Facebook paid and organic campaigns with less overall effort. From detailed analytics to autoresponders, Facebook tools just make the process of marketing on Facebook easier. Who doesn’t want that?

Since Facebook is so ubiquitous, Facebook marketing tools are a must in any social marketer’s toolbox.

Benefits of Facebook marketing tools

Create, schedule, and collaborate on Facebook posts in advance.
Analyze and report on Facebook performance.
Organize, sort, and respond to Facebook messages alongside other DMs.

Learn more about Facebook marketing tools:

How to do Facebook automation right
Facebook tools to grow your business
Facebook ads tools
How to schedule posts on Facebook
How to use a Facebook auto poster

Twitter marketing tools

Twitter marketing tools make it easy to manage your Twitter presence, no matter how many accounts you have. This is especially important for larger brands, which may have separate Twitter accounts for customer service or for different regions.

Things happen fast on Twitter, and it’s important to keep tabs on all of your accounts, all the time. It’s a huge advantage to be able to run them all from one screen.

Twitter is an important network for social listening, which is another area where Twitter marketing tools can help. By creating customized searches and streams, you can monitor the overall Twitter conversation in your industry alongside your own accounts.

Benefits of Twitter marketing tools

Manage multiple Twitter accounts from one dashboard.
Reply to messages from all your Twitter accounts in one inbox.
Keep tabs on relevant Twitter conversations alongside your own Tweets.
Monitor competitor accounts without following them or adding them to a Twitter list.

Learn more about Twitter marketing tools:

The best Twitter tools for marketing
How to use Twitter Analytics
How to schedule Tweets
How to manage multiple Twitter accounts from your desktop

TikTok marketing tools

TikTok marketing tools are resources that allow social media marketers to do some exciting things not possible within the native platform. For instance, TikTok natively only allows scheduling up to 10 days in advance. But TikTok marketing tools can expand this timeline significantly or even indefinitely.

TikTok marketing tools also allow you to schedule TikToks from your phone (Yes! From your phone!).

If you’re taking TikTok marketing seriously, you’ll likely want more detailed analytics and reports than you can access within the app, especially in a graphical format that’s easy to share with colleagues. TikTok marketing tools provide this data on both mobile and desktop.

Benefits of TikTok marketing tools

Schedule TikToks for any time in the future.
Schedule TikToks from your phone as well as your desktop.
Get recommendations for the best time to post on TikTok.
Get graphical TikTok analysis and reports that are easy to share with colleagues and stakeholders.

Learn more about TikTok marketing tools:

TikTok tools to improve your marketing
TikTok tricks and the tools to use them
How to use TikTok Analytics
Tools for scheduling TikTok posts
How to set up the TikTok Pixel

LinkedIn marketing tools

LinkedIn marketing tools are critical for anyone maintaining a LinkedIn Business Page. Why? Because LInkedIn offers no native scheduling option. And since LinkedIn is a business-oriented social network, there’s no advantage to posting on the fly, and every advantage to taking your time to create, review, and schedule quality content.

Beyond scheduling, LinkedIn marketing tools help you better understand your LinkedIn analytics, ease reporting, and even get recommendations on the best time to post to your company page.

Benefits of LinkedIn marketing tools

Schedule LinkedIn posts, which is not possible without third-party tools.
Get custom recommendations on the best time to post for maximum engagement.
Understand your LinkedIn analytics in the context of your overall social marketing strategy.

Learn more about LinkedIn marketing tools:

How to use LinkedIn Analytics
How to use LinkedIn Live
How to schedule LinkedIn posts
How to use the LinkedIn Insight Tag

Need more than social media marketing tools for business? Back up and check out our list of 15 essential digital marketing tools for teams and budgets of any size!

Save time managing your social media marketing strategy with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can easily:

Plan, create, and schedule posts to every network
Track relevant keywords, topics, and accounts
Stay on top of engagement with a universal inbox
Get easy-to-understand performance reports and improve your strategy as needed

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The post Social Media Marketing Tools: The Complete 2023 Guide appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.

Originally posted on February 28, 2023 @ 8:40 pm

You should have a social media promotion strategy in place for many reasons. But the tl;dr of all of them is: people are on social media. The rumors are true.

And research shows 26% of people use social media to find products to buy. So not only are they there, but a quarter of them are looking to spend some money.

So how do you cash in? You think I’m going to say you need to learn TikTok dances to sell your engine oil, right? Wrong. Really, all you have to do is follow this guide, and we promise no TikTok dance lessons are included.

Why promote your business on social media?

Okay, but first, why even bother promoting on social media?

For starters, there are now 4.62 billion people using social media globally. That’s a 10% rise from last year and a lot of potential eyes on your promotional materials. Even that alone is a big business benefit of social media.

Having a huge audience of carbon-based life forms is one thing, but here are the real benefits of social media.

Attract new customers

Guess what? Customers are already looking for you on social media. 49% of all internet users regularly look up brands on social media networks.

All you gotta do is be where they are (social media), deliver the quality content they want, and have a half-decent (okay, fully-decent) product or service. That’s only three things!

Build brand loyalty

Consumers vote with their wallets. A whopping 82% of shoppers reported wanting a consumer brand’s values to align with their own. Inclusiveness, for example, is integral to 73% of Gen Z and 72% of Millennials when it comes to buying decisions. So, as a brand, you can promote content that aligns with your corporate values.

People aren’t looking for 500 posts about your latest sale. They want to know what your environmental and charitable commitments are. They want to see what you stand for and how you treat your employees. So don’t be shy; one of the best ways to promote on social media is to shout your values from the rooftops.

Social media is the perfect way to communicate your values and build brand equity with customers across your marketing funnel.

Drive leads and sales

Many companies use social media to promote business goals, including increasing their revenue. It delivers a big ROI, and I cannot lie, friends. What’s the point of building an audience and showing off your wares unless it results in money, anyway?

With an integrated marketing strategy, you can use social media to help influence purchasing decisions. So much of our daily attention and spending has shifted online during the COVID-19 pandemic, and that’s expected to continue. In 2022, 58% of all internet users purchased a product or service online weekly.

How to promote your business on social media

How can you best take advantage of the massive pool of potential online customers? With a social media marketing strategy, that’s how.

Here’s your roadmap to social success (for your business, anyway).

Create a social media marketing strategy

You need a plan, man.

Crafting a social media marketing plan doesn’t need to be complicated. At a minimum, your plan should include:

A list of measurable goals
Customer personas (who are you trying to reach? What do they like or dislike? Who are they? You will probably have several personas)
A competitive analysis
A content strategy for the topics and types of content formats you’ll share
An editorial calendar, listing posting frequency, as well as who’s responsible for content production

If you’ve got 9 minutes, you can learn everything you need to know about creating a social media marketing plan in the video below:

Use a social media management tool

Automating social media marketing with tools means you can accomplish more with a smaller social marketing team. This saves time and money, but also, let’s face it, your sanity.

Hootsuite lets you plan, schedule, and track the results of all your content across all social media channels. It also has other nifty features, such as social listening, to find out what people are really saying about you online. You can even reply to comments and messages on all your accounts from one central inbox.

Identify the best social media platforms for your business

There’s a place for every business on social media, but it’s not everywhere. It’s in your best interest to know the select few platforms that will bring you the results you want and focus on those.

“So, what are the best social media sites to promote your business?” Is what you’re dying to ask me, right?

That ain’t something you can Google, my dude. But the answer is simple: where do your ideal customers hang out online? Likely, only 1 or 2 key platforms will drive 90%+ of your social media ROI.

If you’re not sure where your ideal user base hangs out, dig into some market research first. We recommend using Hootsuite’s handy (and free!) Getting to Know Your Audience download.

Engage!

Social media should be social. People are looking for a conversation, a chat, a way to disassociate from the day-to-day grind with some online interaction.

Don’t hide behind boring promotional content. Get out there and talk to your customers. Ask for opinions on new product launches or fresh new ideas. Then, acknowledge the feedback you’ve received, and show how you’re implementing it.

Taco Bell kills it with social media promotions examples. Their Twitter feed is full of engaging content. For example, they heard the many cries for the loved and lost menu item Mexican Pizza. Then, Taco Bell re-implemented the dish due to popular demand.

You and the Mexican Pizza are about to be back together. Get ready for its return tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/yce574sIu0

— Taco Bell (@tacobell) September 14, 2022

There’s no better recipe for brand loyalty than making your audience feel heard.

Monitor progress

You can’t know what you don’t measure. You need to take your own subjectivity out of the equation, and to do that, you need to only look at the numbers. Monitor your progress using data and analytics.

By keeping a close eye on your analytics, you find out what your audience responds to best. And identify areas to tweak your strategy.

At a minimum, check in monthly on:

The basics: follower counts, gains or losses, engagement rates, reposts and shares, comments, and likes.
The advanced stuff: omnichannel campaign performance, sales attributed to social media marketing, and brand equity development.

It’s okay to change your goals over time or switch strategies when your original plan isn’t working out as you hoped. Just be sure to back up your decisions with data.

Social media promotion ideas

Think only the “cool brands” are killin’ it on social? You don’t need to have a fancy tech product or make the world’s best Mexican Pizza to attract a valuable audience. You just need to consistently and cohesively promote your brand.

If you’re stuck for social media post ideas, we’ve got plenty you can straight up steal. In the meantime, take a look at these social media promotion ideas to incorporate into your strategy.

Plan a giveaway

There are many types of social media contests you can run, from the simple “like and comment to enter” to asking people to share your post, tag a friend, or fill out a form on a landing page. The sky’s the limit. You can even ask people to hop up and down while rapping Doja Cat songs. You can’t be sure they will, but you can ask.

You’ll want to be sure the contest aligns with your goals, whether that’s getting your brand name out there, amassing information about your target audience, or getting feedback on your product offerings.

Before running a contest, make sure you read the platform’s rules for doing so and abide by them.

If you’re stuck for ideas, steal one of these brilliant Instagram giveaways.

Steal this strategy

Decide on a goal. Do you want to get more followers? Get email addresses? Go viral? Gather user-generated content?
Format your contest to meet that goal. Getting more followers could be a simple “like and share” photo on your feed. Other contests may require more planning.
Analyze the results after it’s over. Did you meet your goal? Why/why not? What could you improve next time?

Work with influencers

Influencer marketing is here to stay. As of 2022, the global market value for influencer content is currently 16.4 billion, which doubled from 2019.

Some say influencer marketing comes across as insincere, and in some cases, it can. You definitely want to steer clear of the “product placement” look. Yikes. But when done well, influencer marketing is a genuine and effective type of digital marketing.

Take Mac, for example. They’ve chosen to partner with trans-activist, fashion model, and makeup aficionado Lauren Sundstrom. At 30k followers, Sundstrom might not have the biggest following Mac could have indulged, but choosing an influencer who aligns with your brand is much more important than one with massive reach who may not.

Notice how Sundstrom doesn’t try to hide the fact that this is an ad? Her followers appreciate the transparency and know that they can trust her.

Steal this strategy

Start small: Reach out to micro-influencers (10,000 followers and under) and offer free products in exchange for a post. This strategy can work well for smaller businesses looking to build a cohort of brand ambassadors.
For bigger results, set aside a marketing budget for influencers and develop a unified campaign to launch simultaneously with multiple influencers.
Choose influencers that align with your brand values for authentic partnerships.
This works for all companies, not only fashion. Get creative!

Leverage user-generated content

What’s the toughest part about managing social media for business? Keeping up with social media’s insatiable demand for new content.

So why not let your customers make it for you?

Not only does this save you time (and brainpower), it helps build a community around your brand. If you have an authentic connection with your customers, they’ll enjoy seeing their photos featured on your page.

This is how you promote your services without shouting to everyone, “Hey! This is what I do!”

Article, an ecommerce furniture supply company, does this well. Without a physical display store for people to peruse Article’s wares, they rely solely on digital marketing. To get people really picturing Article pieces within their homes, the brand encourages UGC in a big way.

They’ve created a branded hashtag, #OurArticle, which has over 27k tags on Instagram. Article is constantly reposting content from this hashtag, asking for permission to do so, and crediting the original accounts.

Steal this strategy

Ask for permission before sharing customer photos.
Focus the caption on your customer, not promoting yourself.
Tag your customer to credit them for the photo.

Nail your brand

Okay, so this one is the long game. And it’s not only a social media tip for small business owners and big companies alike, but it’s a strategy that’ll pay off in all aspects of your marketing.

One of the best things you can do for your business is to get your brand nailed down. You’ll want to have a brand book or a set of brand guidelines that you and anyone you hire can easily refer to make sure your content is consistent with the story you’re telling.

When everything points in the same direction, visually and narratively, consumers will be able to recognize you and understand what you’re about with minimal effort. Eventually, your brand will be imprinted in their minds as the product or service that solves a specific need.

You just have to look at big juggernauts like Coca-Cola, Mcdonald’s, or Nike to see this in action. What does a white silhouette of a bottle on a red background remind you of? What do red and yellow make you think of? And have you ever seen a swooshing checkmark and not thought, just do it?

These brands are nothing if not consistent, and it pays off.

Pair your organic with paid advertising

Your organic content strategy is only going to get you so far. In order to really capitalize on the reach social media is capable of, you’re going to want to introduce a paid advertising component to your social strategy.

Ad spending on social media reached over $173 billion in 2022! The market for it is bonkers for a good reason; with a solid advertising strategy, you typically get more out than you put in. Plus, there are plenty of stats to back it up.

Social media ads can be inexpensive if you have a smaller budget. But if you have money to spend, you can do that too. Social advertising has pretty flexible rates; it’s really up to you to decide how much you’re going to put behind it. And they offer powerful targeting options, so you can reach your target audience without wasting valuable dollars.

Source: Coco and Eve

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The post 5 Ways to Nail Your Social Media Promotion Strategy appeared first on Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard.

Originally posted on March 1, 2023 @ 3:41 pm