15+ Best Social Media Marketing Tools

92% of marketers said that social media marketing is vital to their business.

As social platforms are on the rise, so are its users (nearly 3.8 billion users). Therefore, it’s quite essential for you as a business leader to understand how to take advantage of social media.

However, it can be quite time-consuming. Additionally, it spans many diverse tasks, ranging from number-based activities, like analyzing, content developing, customer listening to graphics designing.

So how to find the right skills and manpower to execute a great social media strategy for your business. That is why you need social media tools to help you out.

Don’t worry!

In this article, you will know what sorts of underlying capabilities you should look for when considering your business’s best social media tools and a top list for practical appliances.

Which social media tools are the best for your business

Today, many excellent social media tools are allowing you to accomplish almost every task as a social media marketer. However, if managing your personal social media is a task by itself, choosing the right social tool for your business is even trickier.

How to know the perfect tools that align with your organization’s goals and needs that you will not regret later?

Let’s hammer it out!

Starting with the different types of social tools, you need to distinguish and have an overall view of the big picture. In general, there are 4 main functions of social media tools you should know, they are:

• Social Listening tools: Monitor many social media platforms to know what’s being said about your brand. Users can understand their audience’s persona and insights fully
• Social Publishing tools: Spear your content to the world, including sharing content, schedule posting across multiple platforms
• Social Engagement tools: Build sustainable relationships with your followers and potential customers by identifying opportunities and quickly responding.
• Social Analytics and reporting tools: Track metrics that affect your business, ranging from market reports, trending topics, competition’s content, the performance of all your social platforms
• Social Management tools: Manage multiple social profiles in one place, schedule posts in advance, run contests, track analytics across platforms, and the list goes on

Separately, each tool tackles social media from a different angle. Together, they work perfectly, helping your brand achieve all social media objectives.

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Below are some key questions you need to ask yourself to seek the perfect social media tools for your business.

What goals can your business achieve for using social media tools?

Apparently, when you’ve already defined your goals, you’ll be clear on what objectives you need to gain, who you want to reach, and the most effective way to get them.

Think about your business goals, then narrow down your choices based on that goal criteria. Do you want to focus on increasing brand awareness, driving traffic to your site, or generating leads?

Before beginning any campaign or setting up a plan, as a marketer or business owner, visualize the results you hope to achieve afterward: immediate, short-term, and long-term goals

The objectives can come from one of the problems that your business is trying to tackle on social media platforms or just a future goal needed to achieve.

Must-have features you need on social media marketing tools

Each social media tool offers specific features which serve for different online platforms and purposes.

After listing your problem, goals, and objectives, you can know exactly what you need from social media tools to execute them. A tool that meets all your needs will definitely be more effective than one with an exhaustive list of features that you probably won’t use.

For example, if you’re a social media planner and your goal is to “drive more traffic”.

Objective: Create and publish many compelling and informative content for your audience.

Needed features of social media tools:

• Good listening features
• Analyze targeted audience interests and behaviors on social platforms to create needed content and post at the right time
• Schedule, publish and manage posts on all kinds of social media channels from one place
• Easy to create videos and design photos for posts, including the ability to create social media graphics (if you have no knowledge of design)
• Allow readers to share interesting contents with friends without leaving the page

Remember, you need to determine which features are “must-have” and which are “nice-to-have”. List it all down then do some online research to find the best options you have.

Read more: Must-have apps Shopify store owner should not miss

What is your budget

A small business does not always have enough financial and human resources, so not every tool or payment plan works for everyone.

Having a solid foundation of your needs and budget to measure between different tool options can save your time and money.

Some tips for planners when it comes to tool costs:

• Consider billing options for the possibility of the annual payment
• Check the cancellation options if you’re able to get a refund for unused time or condition to cancel monthly or annually
• Make use of free trial periods for actual experiences
• Choose the tool on your price range

Read more: 4 Keys to Create a Marketing Budget that Gets Results

Top 15 Best social media marketing tools to try

HubSpot

What makes Hubspot is an excellent social management tool for business and agencies is its all-round functionality.

It enables users to monitor brand mentions and relevant conversations, track engagements automatically, and set your post calendar to publish it at the right time to the right people.

Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, or publishing using other tools or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. Thus, you can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.

Outstanding features:

• Schedule a post for any time or publish directly to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube
• Connect campaigns to social posts to trace traffic to the correct source
• Easily toggle between social networks while using
• Able to view all inbox activity, customers’ interactions
• Allows users to access specific data about their social media performance with ease

Pricing:

Month billing

• Starter plan: €20 per month

• Professional plan:€800 per month

Annual billing

• Starter plan: €18 per month

• Professional plan: €792 per month

• Enterprise plan: €3,300 per month

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media tool that enables managers to control their marketing efforts better. It features multi-level access making it easier for users to coordinate and delegate tasks to other people in teams.

Furthermore, it provides full post scheduling capabilities, an in-depth analytics platform, and even social listening functionality. Hence, Sprout Social becomes one of the most effective ways to improve your engagement, client relationships, and stick to your social marketing plan.

Outstanding features:

• An all-in-one social media management tool, including publishing, analytics, engagement, and team collaboration.
• Able to track internal data, including reply time, the total number of replies, and sentiment

Pricing: No credit card is required for the free trial, try for free on 30 days

• Standard: $249/month

• Professional: $399/month

• Advanced: $499/month

• Enterprise: Custom

BuzzSumo

Simply understanding, Buzzsumo serves for research purposes. This tool allows all users to discover the most shared content on social media channels based on the vast and up-to-date data.

The search areas are not limited to your site but also others’ domains. Content writers can use the collected information to generate ideas, create high-performing content, and monitor their contents’ results

Outstanding features:

• Explore the content shared mostly on all social media channels
• Find influencers who are related to particular topics
• Track the competitors and analyze based on their content
• Allow users to know everything about trending topics, audience’s interested content
• A power tool to analyze competitors’ post keywords and insights

Pricing: Offer 7-day trial and unlimited month searches, no commitments, easy cancellation

Month billing

• Content Creation: $199/month

• PR & Comms: $299/month

• Suite: $499/month

• Enterprise: $999/month

Year billing

• Content Creation: $159/month

• PR & Comms: $239/month

• Suite: $399/month

• Enterprise: $999/month

Mention

Media listening isn’t a new idea. Before social media became a must for a brand, monitoring what was said about your business through media outlets is already a big issue.

That’s why Mention is designed to monitor what people say about you, business, and your competitors. With in-depth insights and reports of your brand mentions, Mention can help build relationships, generate leads, and protect your reputation.

Outstanding features:

• Track over 1 billion sources across the web daily
• Measure the competitor’s share of voice online
• Explore more of customers’ online insights through keyword research to improve and build social media strategy based on their insights around crucial topics
• Provide detailed dashboards
• Give relevant information and grant access to your team, share reports & public views. etc.

Pricing: Offer free version, no credit card required, 14-day trial, and anytime cancellation

Month billing

• Solo plan: $49 per month

• Pro plan: $99 per month

• ProPlus plan: $179 per month

• Company plan: Custom

Annual billing

• Solo plan: $41 per month

• Pro plan: $83 per month

• ProPlus plan: $149 per month

• Company plan: Custom

Buffer

Buffer is one of the most renowned ones on scheduling any type of post across from any platform.

The core value of Buffet is content scheduling and posting rather than adding too many features into it. Buffer offers 2 main products, they are:

• Buffer Publish: Allow creating posts, adding to the Buffet, and then scheduling
• Buffer Analyze: A specialist analysis tool to measure social media performance and create reports for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The great thing is that Buffer allows you to plan and publish your content for every social channel all from one simple dashboard.

Outstanding features:

• Automatically send out the posts you add to your queue, according to the posting schedule you put in place
• Customize the days and times to send your posts
• Tailored posts for each social network
• Analyze customer reaction to each post and send the content’s performance report
• Use the chrome extension to add articles or content from different sites to the Buffer queue
• Reply to posts from inside Buffer

Pricing: Offer 14-day trial, save up to 20% for annual billing

Buffer Publish:

Annual billing

• Essentials: $5/month for 1 channel

• Team: $10/month for 1 channel

• Agency: $100/month for 10 channels

Monthly billing

• Essentials: $6/month for 1 channel

• Team: $12/month for 1 channel

• Agency: $120/month for 10 channels

Buffer Analyze:

Annual billing

• Pro plan: $28 per month or $336 per year
• Premium plan: $40 per month or $480 per year

Monthly billing

• Pro plan: $35 per month
• Premium plan: $50 per month

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is well-known as one of the best social media marketing tools by making it simple to manage multiple profiles from one dashboard.

Moreover, it allows for collaboration across team members. Alongside the major advantage of viewing all comments and mentions in one place, you can also assign tasks, schedule updates and posts across different channels.

Outstanding features:

• Monitor multiple streams in one place
• Schedule posts in advance
• Connect with customer base through media listening and analytics
• Provide detailed analytics data which is easily accessible
• Allow team collaboration
• Able to manage customer service on social media efficiently

Pricing: Offer 30-day trial

• Professional plan: $99 per month

• Team plan: $249 per month

• Enterprise plan: Custom

Miricanvas

Miricanvas stands out among design marketing tools with its diverse range of high-quality design templates, catering to various needs including PowerPoint presentations, posters, and videos. Thanks to its user-friendly and fast usability, MiriCanvas has garnered appreciation from both non-designers and professionals, boasting over 12 million users globally.

Outstanding features

• With MiriCanvas unique trendy stickers, customizable color themes, stylish fonts and animations, users can easily enhance their designs, ensuring social media templates more visually impact.
• When using MiriCanvas’s AI Drawing feature to find images for social media, you can create the desired image with just few clicks.
• By using MiriCanvas AI Writing function, you can find the information you need directly within the design tool editor without the need to search on Google.
• MiriCanvas high-quality background remover allows users to easily crop the parts you want to share on social media.

Pricing

• Free plan
• Pro plan: $11.99/month

Social Champ

Social Champ, which started out as a basic social media scheduler, is now more than an all-in-one management tool. With a sleek user dashboard and vibrant UI, every social media manager needs the tool.

You can create, schedule, and analyze your content on nine major social media platforms, including Mastodon. Beyond its scheduling capabilities, the tool lets you track your top-performing posts using platform-specific metrics with monthly or weekly graphs using the Monitoring Analytics feature.

Moreover, Social Champ also offers a feature for the ‘best time to post’, so you can schedule your post at the ideal times of the day based on your analytical history.

Outstanding features:

Schedule Instagram/Facebook Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Twitter Threads —all within one centralized dashboard. The tool offers an exclusive Champ AI Suite. Create meaningful captions with AI Content Wizard, generate beautiful images with AI Imaginator, and analyze the tone of your content using Sentiment Analysis. Respond to all your comments, reviews, and messages within a unified Social Inbox.

Pricing: Offers 7 days free trials on all paid plans.

Month Billing:

Free plan

• Champion plan: $29/month
• Business plan: $99/month
• Agency: Custom

Yearly Billing:

Free plan

• Champion plan: $26/month $312/year
• Business plan: $89/month or $1068/year
• Agency: Custom

Canva

Canva is a great free social media tool with a user-friendly interface that easily allows users to create attractive images for their campaigns.

Canva is an easy-to-use tool, even for those who do not know design. The tool comes with numerous ready-made templates and creative graphics for you to use anytime. In other words, Canva is a web-based graphic design tool offering a drag-and-drop interface.

Outstanding features:

• Create your brand’s visual identity with logo, colors, and fonts
• Drag-and-drop interface
• Provide up to 60,000+ free templates
• Enable custom templates
• 60+ million premium stock images, photos, videos and graphics

Pricing: Offer free version and available free trial without requiring a credit card

Month billing

• Pro plan: $14.99

• Team plan: $29.99

Annual billing

• Pro plan: $119.99

• Team plan: $300

DocHipo

DocHipo is a free graphic design software for marketers and content creators to create stunning social media graphics. You can choose from a massive collection of beautifully designed social media templates, segregated by industry, occasion, and so on. Select the template you like the most and customize it using DocHipo’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

Outstanding features:

• Massive collection of templates across various social media document types
• Premium-quality design assets that help you create memorable social media graphics
• DocHipo supports real-time collaboration amongst multiple users while designing for social media
• Ability to remove background from a picture in one click
• Ability to resize a document into multiple other social media dimensions in just one click
• DocHipo offers multi-company capability, i.e., a user can be part of multiple companies under one log-in

Pricing: You can sign up for free without a credit card. DocHipo offers a super affordable Pro plan.

Month billing

• Pro plan: $10 per user/month

Annual billing

• Pro plan: $7.5 per user/month

AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is a powerful tool to manage all the social media messages, schedule, and publish content. It is widely known and used by agencies, businesses, and marketers.

Besides the publish functionality, AgoraPulse also creates stunning and detailed reports all in one easy-to-understand dashboard. That feature makes it much easier for you to monitor and manage their social networks.

Outstanding features:

• Integrates well with all the vast networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube
• Allow different users varying levels of access
• Provide in-depth data reports in PDF and CSV formats
• Flexible publishing options for queued, scheduled posts
• Easy find, filter, and manage comments, mentions, and other important messages
• Real-time collaboration
• Unparalleled customer service

Pricing:

Month billing

• Standard: $69

• Professional: $99

• Advanced: $149

Annual billing

• Standard: $49

• Professional: $79

• Advanced: $119

LastPass

It’s quite normal for a social media marketer to take charge of numerous social accounts on different sites and platforms. Some can use the same password for everything. However, it can bring back many potential hazards of security and data loss.

LastPass allows you to have top security across all your social networking sites. The benefit of using LastPass is that you only have to keep up with one password, the LastPass one. Users never have to worry about remembering more than one password.

Outstanding features:

• Automatically install in your browser toolbar after being downloaded
• User’s LastPass account is backed up and synced across all devices for access
• Allow users to add, view and manage all saved passwords on LastPass account
• High security

Pricing:

Single users & families: Offer 30-day trial of Premium for the free version, 30-day trial free

• Premium plan: $3 per month

• Families plan: $4 per month

• Teams plan: $4 per user/ month
• Business plan: $7 per user/ month

Quuu

Quuu is a fantastic social media tool for team promotion if you would rather not spend time creating and arranging content. You can tell Quuu to share related material to your social media platforms on a regular basis.

There are more than 500 groups on this social media marketing site where you can find content ideas that are most important to your field. If you use Quuu Promote, other Quuu users who are interested in the same niche will be shown your content. They may then share it on their social networks.

Outstanding features:

• Choose your interests, and Quuu delivers a personalized stream of articles. No more endless searches!

• Human editors meticulously choose content, ensuring relevance and avoiding clickbait.

• Integrate with popular social media platforms and schedule posts in seconds.

• Share high-quality content, and watch your likes, comments, and shares soar.

• Spend less time searching, more time creating and connecting with your audience.

• Multi-platform support.

• Analytics to track performance.

Pricing:

Pro: $19.79/Month

Pro: $197.90/Year

Planable

Planable is a user-friendly collaboration platform designed to streamline social media management for teams. It was developed to address the challenges faced by businesses and organizations in creating, reviewing, and scheduling content across various social media platforms.

Was founded in 2016 by Vlad Calus, Xenia Muntean, and Nicolae Gudumac. The founders recognized the need for a more efficient and collaborative approach to social media management, leading them to create a platform that would simplify the process for teams.

Outstanding features:

• Create and edit social media content directly within the platform.

• Easily review and approve content before publishing.

• Schedule posts across multiple platforms from a centralized dashboard.

• Facilitate real-time collaboration among team members.

Pricing:

• Free Trial: Available to test the platform.

• Basic: $11/month

• Pro: $$22/month

• Enterprise: Custom

Audiense

Audiense is a powerful analytics tool that lets you learn about your audience’s personality and divide them into groups without any problems. Their smart audience selection takes into account important things like people in your target audience who aren’t engaging with the content. If you are able to target your consumer groups more precisely, you will have a greater chance of success. Through its personality insights function, you are able to have a greater understanding of the behaviors and thoughts of your audience.

Along with it, Audiense also produces a product known as Audiense Connect. This program assists you in managing all of the vital data for Twitter, including insights, analysis of the competition, management of your Twitter admirers, and applications, among other things.

Outstanding features:

• Identify hidden groups and influencers relevant to your niche.

• Divide your audience for targeted content and campaigns.

• Uncover ideal brand ambassadors with detailed influencer analysis.

• Listen to real-time conversations to understand brand sentiment and industry trends.

• Analyze your competitors’ social strategies to gain valuable learnings.

Pricing:

Pro: $39/month

Upfluence

Upfluence serves as a helpful tool throughout all aspects of influencer marketing. You can look for the right leaders, keep an eye on their efforts, and find out how well they’re doing.

You can use this tool to look for stars on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. Location, language, measurements, and social media activity of influencers are just some of the things that its smart filters can help you choose from your list.

For managing a campaign, Upfluence helps you decide how much money to spend on the campaign, work with influencers throughout it, and finally pay them. For those of you who run a business that helps clients with influencer marketing, this tool can be very helpful.

Outstanding features:

• Understand your audience by digging into demographics, hobbies, and discussions.

• Slice and dice your audience for laser-targeted campaigns.

• Identify the perfect brand ambassadors with detailed analysis.

• Hear what people are saying about your brand and industry in real time.

• Analyze competitors’ social strategies and learn from their moves.

Pricing: Custom pricing

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is an intelligent analytics tool that gives you insights, monitoring of social media, sentiment analysis, and reports that are driven by AI to help you learn what your customers and viewers are thinking. If you run a firm that works with big brands and does all of their marketing, this tool is perfect for you.

Brandwatch is aimed at businesses and advertising companies. For small and medium-sized names, this means that the price seems high. Brandwatch also lets you make easy-to-understand data reports, find relevant data with different filters, and find social media influencers in your business.

Outstanding features:

• Track brand mentions, competitors, and keywords across diverse platforms.

• Uncover emotional tone of conversations and identify improvement areas.

• Discover key industry influencers and potential brand ambassadors.

• Analyze competitor strategies and audience engagement.

• Generate comprehensive reports and data visualizations for informed decision-making.

Pricing: Custom pricing

TapInfluence

TapInfluence’s real-time dashboard allows you to plan posts, contact influencers to participate on activities, and monitor their progress. Its data gives you an edge by comparing how well your campaign did to the norms in your business.

The advantages that come with using TapInfluence and Upfluence are comparable to one another. Moreover, it now has enhanced search capabilities as well as content organization for projects including influencers. You can see the influencer’s reach and connection rates, as well as get further information on their audience, likes, revenue, businesses that they collaborate with, and other relevant information.

Outstanding features:

• Filter by demographics, interests, & engagement metrics.

• Plan, launch, & track campaigns in one place.

• Facilitate content creation with briefing & approval workflows.

• Analyze campaign & influencer impact with in-depth reports.

• Manage access & tasks for efficient campaigns.

Pricing: Custom pricing

Meltwater

Meltwater, established in 2001, is a pioneer in social media monitoring and listening tools and has emerged as a market leader in media monitoring and social media listening. While these features are what Meltwater is primarily known for, its capabilities extend far beyond. Meltwater offers a comprehensive suite including social media management, PR distribution, journalist database management, influencer management and discovery, sales intelligence, and more. Needless to say, the Meltwater suite is packed with industry-leading features, making it an essential tool for social media marketing in today’s competitive landscape

Outstanding features:

• Extensive media monitoring across online and offline sources
• Advanced sentiment analysis using NLP algorithms
• Robust social media listening tools for tracking conversations and sentiment
• Customizable dashboards tailored to specific KPIs and regions
• Competitive intelligence features for benchmarking against rivals
• Detailed insights and analytics for measuring ROI and optimizing strategies

Pricing: Custom pricing

Final thought

Today, there are many great tools out there, with new ones popping up all the time.

The key is to focus on finding tools that support your marketing efforts and aiming at the final business goals. You should invest your time and effort in getting to know each of the tools you choose to use most effectively.

Don’t be afraid to try new tools to your kit!