Social media management and automation have become an essential part of any digital marketers skillset.
However, doing this work manually is laborious and finding the best tools to streamline the process so you can be more productive is vital.
If you can efficiently automate the mundane processes and batch process the scheduling of your content you can free up a lot of time and still get maximum exposure across the popular watercoolers of the modern age social networks.
Social media tools are not to be seen as a perfect and easy solution though, if you don’t set them up properly so they appear organic and human they can actually harm your authority on social media, even the best tools aren’t going to help you unless you combine them with a good strategy.
Jarvee
Want an entire social media team at your fingertips? Then this may be the tool for you!
Jarvee is a very comprehensive social media management tool that pretty much blows away the competition. Jarvee supports pretty much all of the social networks that matter including Instagram a service often not included.
Jarvee works as both a social media automation tool allowing you to schedule your posts in bulk across all of your social accounts and also allows you to setup automated criteria for following, unfollowing, liking and various other processes to increase your engagement and exposure.
One great advantage of Jarvee is the ability to connect accounts on Quora, Pinterest, Tumblr, and YouTube, which are often not included in other popular social scheduling services.
Right now nothing touches Jarvee!
Jarvee is a downloadable Windows application that can be run on a computer or Windows server, the only caveat here is that you do need a Virtual Private Server.
Jarvee is hands down the easiest way to grow your social media followings fast with the least amount of manual effort and time spent.
Visit Jarvee.
BleuPage
A very user-friendly social media management tool that allows you to put your social posting on auto-pilot.
Benefits include being able to automatically connect your WordPress site, connect RSS feeds, and works with popular autoresponders like Mailchimp and Aweber.
BleuPage also features a drag and drop media designer tool built in, and social media analytics and insights tools to help you report on the performance of your posts.
Reasonably priced allowing you to manage up to 50 unique accounts for less than $50 is good value for money if you are frustrated with switching between lots of accounts and having to log in and log out constantly to manage your different projects and clients.
BleuPage features licenses for individuals as well as larger social media marketing agencies that want to manage a large number of accounts in one place.
The software is web-based and runs in the cloud so no need to download anything or run a VPS 24-7.
Check our BleuPage review.
Agora Pulse
Schedule your content on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube from a single dashboard. Agora Pulse includes advanced reporting on engagement and growth.
Agora Pulse is broken up into several areas, Publish, Engage, Listen, Report and Collaborate.
Allowing you to:
- Publish content on 6 different social networks
- Engage in conversations, comments and build new connections
- Listen by monitoring various streams, hashtags, and relevant topics.
- Report on performance across all verticals including growth, engagement and measure ROI.
- Collaborate and work as a team sharing the social media responsibilities with different team members.
- Audience – Turn your social media tool into a fully fledged CRM and manage your customer relationships.
Other benefits include a very intuitive user-interface, cloud-hosted SaaS so there’s no software to download, install and update, everything is managed in the web browser.
Visit Agora Pulse.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a unique tool and features one of the best social media calendars I have used. CoSchedule can be used within your WordPress ecosystem as a plugin which helps connect your content to your social tool by proxy however you don’t need to be running a WordPress website or blog to benefit from CoSchedule as you can use their social media calendar directly via your account on their website.
The calendar is a great overview that I feel most social media tools are lacking and allows you to set rules so your evergreen content can be re-shared on social media multiple times to get the maximum exposure for your best content.
Another great feature is the headline analyzer built in to help you create engaging titles.
Try CoSchedule (14 day free trial).
Buffer
Buffer is a great tool if you want to share content from your browser with your social followers and supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Buffer has a freemium business model with their free version allowing up to 3 social accounts with 10 posts per account, however, Instagram requires you upgrade to the pro version that allows you to schedule more posts and across multiple accounts per social network.
This tool ideal if you are on a budget and want to start curating the best content you find while browsing the web with your followers.
Buffer also has two sister products, Pablo – a tool for creating beautiful graphics to share on social media and Reply – a social communication service that aggregates all of your social messages in one place to make it easier for you to engage and respond quickly.
Visit Buffer.
HootSuite
HootSuite has been around since the early days of social media marketing and has long been seen as one of the most popular entry-level social media management applications.
HootSuite is great for managing multiple accounts across different platforms and allows you to schedule your posts.
HootSuite has a great list of resources for helping you get the most out of the tools, therefore, it scores well for user-friendliness as even absolute beginners should be able to hit the ground running with this one.
HootSuite is an affordable option and great for those who are just experimenting with growing their social presence and don’t require anything too intensive or lots of automation features.
IFTTT
IFTTT which stands for If This Then That is a tool I talk about a lot on this website and isn’t specifically a social media tool as such but because it allows you to automate pretty much any process on the web it can be used as part of your social media automation strategy.
Create recipes that publish content on social media networks like Twitter when specific actions happen like when you publish a post on WordPress.
The only thing to be careful with this tool is to avoid double posting or having an overlap if you decide to create lots of recipes reposting on X if something posts on Y.
This video shows you how to browse through various applets you can use with IFTTT to automate your life. This gives a good insight into the kind of services you can connect.
Visit IFTTT.
Shareaholic (Chrome Extension)
This handy Chrome extension makes it easy to share any page you are viewing on Chrome with 1 click across 100’s of different social networks and bookmarking sites.
Social media marketing isn’t just about sharing your own content, it’s just as important if not more important to curate the best content from your industry to gain more authority in the space.
So to make it easier to share any website or article with your followers across social media accounts use this easy to use Chrome extension and you won’t have to rely on websites adding social buttons to their own web pages or copying and pasting the URL.
Get Shareaholic.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great tool for analyzing your competitor’s website to find out what content and topics are performing best for them so you can take inspiration from the content ideas and blog posts that you can see are driving the most traffic.
Find out how many Likes, Tweets, Shares, Pins, and backlinks each of the posts has to judge virality and whether the content is something that could work for you.
Given that major brands like BuzzFeed, NationalGeographic and TED use BuzzSumo, you can rest assured that this tool is worth your time and money.
Visit BuzzSumo.
Bit.ly
Bit.ly is arguably the best URL shortener service and is a handy tool to have if you want to share your articles on different social channels and track the number of clicks on each so you can do split testing and report on your performance by comparing click-throughs at different times, with different content and on different social networking websites.
This also masks your URL making it a discreet way of sharing links online without being penalized for having a negative backlink profile.
Visit Bit.ly
KnowEm
KnowEm is a simple tool that allows you to check for the use of your brand product, personal name or username across 500 or so different social networks so you can secure your handle and URL before anybody else beats you to it.
A great tool to use when brainstorming new brand and web domain ideas.
Visit KnowEm.
Hashtagify
One of the best tools to analyze the popularity of hashtags in your industry and find related tags you can use to reach your target audience on social networks like Instagram and Twitter where using hashtags is a primary part of increasing content visibility.
Visit Hashtagify.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare offers industry-leading social media analytics for Instagram and Facebook as well as several other social media tools.
This tool allows you to measure key social metrics and performance including growth and engagement. Iconosquare enables you to quickly and easily moderate comments and manage multiple Instagram accounts from one screen.
If you want to find influencers in your niche on Instagram and Facebook then you will be happy to hear that this product includes a feature indexing influencers based on their following and engagement which is a great way to tap into influencer marketing in 2023.
Iconosquare excels at Instagram and Facebook analytics and insights but they are regularly adding new features, including a handy Instagram audit tool and brands index.
Visit Iconosquare.
vidIQ
If you need a tool to help you grow your YouTube channel and audience as well as do competitive analysis on other YouTube channels in your niche then vidIQ is the best tool around for helping you dig into the data and tap into the second biggest search engine online, yes that’s what YouTube is!
vidIQ provides the tools you need to reach your video marketing goals, maximize organic reach, build brand awareness and tap into audience insights.
They also offer a free Google Chrome extension so you can get the data on channels and videos while you are browsing YouTube.
Visit vidIQ.
Falcon.io
Falcon is one of the most impressive looking social media management tools I have ever seen however it’s aimed at large social first marketing agencies with very large monthly budgets to spend on their social SaaS tools.
A comprehensive tool including a social scheduling calendar, detailed data and analytics, ad management tools, trend monitoring and much more.
Pricing is unfortunately not publicly disclosed however the last time I checked their services start at around a cool $1000 per month so this is definitely only for the very serious and dedicated social marketing consultants and agencies with a good number of clients to justify the costs.
Visit Falcon.io
Conclusion
Social media marketing is a powerful way to gain more authority, exposure, and traffic, however, it helps to have a few tools to do some of the heavy lifting but I am not advocating for social media overload and advise picking up one tool at a time and avoid making the process too complex by having overlapping tools that essentially offer the same thing.
If you are interested in how to analyze your competitors’ social media accounts and websites then check out this guide.
Of course if you aren’t the kind of person who wants to manage social media yourself you can always outsource to a social media marketing agency instead. It’s important to know what your strengths are and to outsource things that don’t suit you.
Have any suggestions? let us know!
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