Essential Tools for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the fastest growing form of marketing. It’s the ‘in’ thing and it looks like it’s here to stay. It's led to a new generation of social media marketing tools. Developers and designers are desperately trying to take advantage of this trend. Some want to advertise themselves, whereas others just want to sign as many people as they can up to subscription plans.

There are also open-source tools where anyone can take the code and manipulate it. There are little gems in each of these forms, so here are some essential tools for social media marketing you should try.

Crowd Factory

Crowd Factory offers a number of tools for enhancing any social media marketing. New marketers starting from scratch can use social gestures to gain new customers. You can automatically monitor your Return on Investment (ROI) throughout your campaign with this tool.


socialTALK

socialTALK is good if you’re struggling to brand yourself. Use this app to manage your work schedule and customize your approval process. Other things you can do include making videos, adding text to your campaign, and creating images. You can publish everything manually and spread it to multiple platforms from a single initial source.

They have a scheduling function available. This allows you to schedule when your posts appear, which is handy if you want to take advantage of peak times.

After you’ve used it for a few days, use the analytics dashboard. It tells you everything you need to know about how effective your campaign has been.


Objective Marketer

Objective Marketer believes in more than just marketing. It believes in using results to tailor your next strategy. There’s an analytics program included which measures how effective your last campaign was.

It’s a tool which works with WordPress blogs, blogs on other platforms, YouTube, and Facebook/Twitter. There are detailed reports on niche areas of your campaign and a user management option. Marketers will just love the addition of the multi-channel execution functions!



Shoutlet


Shoutlet will help you manage your social media communications and marketing campaigns from a single area. Start by building your campaign with this tool and manage it using the analytics tools included. You can manage multiple campaigns across different networks at the same time.

There’s a Facebook ecommerce tool included, but it doesn’t really work as well as it should. Stick to using the social CRM and mobile features. Unlike other tools, it provides you with an email marketing system if you want to take a successful campaign away from social media.



Wildfire Interactive

Interaction is the cornerstone of social media. Wildfire Interactive believes in this too. It’s why it focuses on making social media campaigns which users can interact with. It makes the creation process simple and focuses on special offers, contests, and raffles. All you have to do is click a few buttons.


Spredfast
Spredfast is pretty self-explanatory. If you need to get your message out and have it spread as far as possible, this tool does all the work for you. You can manage and inspect each post to see how it’s doing. It monitors some of the talk your post produces. It focuses on directing your message across a range of major and minor social media channels, including Facebook and Twitter.



Direct Message Lab

Direct Message Lab is a social media campaign management system. It also combines interaction by letting you post and manage contests and special promotions. You can advertise and actively measure each advertising method to see if you’re reaching your goals. Don’t pay any attention to the tool’s name. It’s misleading and isn’t very direct.

If you can cut through the meaningless jargon they constantly spout, you can use these features to great effect in building your social media campaign.


StrongMail Social Studio

This marketing tool brings together a number of features. You can share content, manage campaigns, and review results. There are numerous little tools and functions you can use to add weight to your marketing efforts. It has a fairly steep learning curve and it takes some experimentation on your part to find out how everything works.


Sprout

Sprout is an authoring tool focusing on the visuals. In plain English, it's an alternative way to building interactive apps and ads. If you already have a successful social media campaign, you might want to use Sprout to add an interactive ad to the mix. You can post these ads across all social media channels, and even across mobile devices. It’s a good tool if you want to add something different to your arsenal of social media tools.


Korah Morrison, working for College-Paper.org – the best student’s helper, and love to write for great blogging sites like HackingTag Publishing!