With your digital identity holding such prime importance in these times, it is your social media handles that are your primary marketers. Done right, social media marketing has the power to help your business reach the pinnacle of success. Done wrong- well, there are thousands of companies out there, unnoticed and undervalued. 

For establishing your business’s identity effectively on the social media, there are certain tools that you can very well use to manage various domains involved in SMM:

Buzzsumo

Putting general content out on your social media handles is easy. There’s lots of random stuff that you can redraft and post. However, the content you put out needs to be relevant to your target audience in order to generate the maximum views, engagement, and ultimately leads. Buzzsumo is one such invaluable online tool that allows you to find out what content is popular by topic on any website.

Here are some of the great functional offering from this tool:

  • By getting to know the words and phrases that your audience is looking out for, you can generate as many relevant keywords as you can. Apart from that, to assist you in your pay-per-click campaigns you can also get cost-based data. You can also find out the keyword trends over time.
  • It brings you the most popular content in your target niches, filtering the content to ensure that it resonates with your audience.
  • Finding influencers and thought leaders is also something that is enabled through this tool.
  • Helps you efficiently track your competitors, monitor mentions and know what people are talking about your products.

Canva

The content that you create, should not only be strong fundamentally, but should also be aesthetically appealing. Let’s face it- visual content is what draws us more often towards a particular post on social media. Creating visually appealing content for your social media pages seems to be a huge task in itself. On top of that, the templates and designs also need to be appropriate and unique to attract the audience. Canva is a free online graphic design tool that takes care of all these issues, allowing you to create your visual content with ease. 

Certain features of the tool include:

  • Thousands of templates for banners, presentations, posters, logos etc.
  • Distinct templates for facebook posts and covers, Instagram posts, Youtube thumbnails and channel art, and other relevant social media platforms
  • Easy branding of your image through the drag and drop and transparency feature

Hootsuite

A single platform to unite all your social campaigns, Hootsuite covers the social media manager’s role in its entirety. It’s three core functions include planning, creating and scheduling owing to which you can not only curate content and schedule posts but also measure the ROI and manage team members at the same time. From a single user plan to an enterprise account, Hootsuite offers a range of plans to choose from.

The tool also offers multiple analytical functionalities to suit your campaigns. In addition to this, various apps and extensions can be added to broaden the range of Hootsuite functions.

Bitly

One of the most convenient tools out there, bitly is a url shortener meaning that it converts long urls into short ones that are as little as 14 characters in length. The url shortening trend started because of platforms such as twitter imposing character restrictions. Using it is fairly simple; you go to the website, signup for a free account, input your url and get a shortened version of it known as a bitlink. The platform also gives you the option to customize it.

However, there’s a lot more that you can do with this tool;  

Bitly also allows you to track your links, displays the number of people who have clicked on it, the date and time of the click, and their location. To check the performance of your bitlink you simply need to visit the ‘stats’ tab on the website.

Crello

This useful tool comes with the tagline, “Become a designer in a minute with Crello“. Crello helps you create high quality images and animations for personal or professional usage, without you needing a graphic designer. It also helps you create short promotional videos. With a drag and drop feature and more than 25,000 templates to choose from, it can be used to create posts as well as long-form content for social media. The built-in library has thousands of pictures and videos to choose from. Best of all, Crello also has an inspiration page to give you a glimpse of sample designs for upcoming events, if you are stuck on ideas.

Apart from the ones mentioned above, here are some other great tools that you can check out:

Google Analytics – Monitoring keywords and website traffic among other functions

Buffer –  Social media management tool

Ahrefs –  Keeping track of your backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and competitor activities

SEMrush – A holistic tool that researches and provides data with regards to keywords, and competitors among other uses.

Publer – A tool for customisation, scheduling and analysing data on your posts on social media.

Zapier – A workflow automation enabler to integrate 2000+ web apps

Unbox Social – Social media analytics tool

Get Response – Email campaign and marketing service

Meltwater social/ Sysomos – Especially useful for brand marketers to manage their earned, owned and paid social media

Thanks, Ayush, Rajdeep, Praveen, Kritika Kamra, Saakshi N, Uday Dey, Piyush Bansal, Arbab Usmani, Siddharth Dwivedi, Aashish Ramamurthy, Karan Prasad, Harit Rathi, Hari Kumaran, Karthik B R, Deep Kakkad, Achir Saxena, Rahul Kohli, Soumyadip Banerjee, Shreyans Shah, Pragati Manjunath, Bharadwaj Parth, Prabhu Krishnamoorthy, Yoheswaran Gnanavel, Hamza Bhamla, Harshala Chavan, Khizer Ahmed Sheriff, Pragati Manjunath Karthik Shankar, Jatin Chhabra, Vineet Nandan Gupta, Tej Pandya for contributing their thoughts on the top Social media tools to grow your business

These were the highlights which summarise the discussion that happened in our Growth Folks group. The folks who have shared their views are themselves the Growth Marketers/Hackers. We would like to thank all of them for sharing this valuable growth learning.

Are we missing anything important? It’s a community-driven blog, if you have anything to add, do put down your thoughts in the comment section and it will be updated here.

Also Read: Top 5 E-mail Marketing tools to boost your marketing efforts