Managing a brand’s social media account can be a tough task: you need to monitor trends, track mentions about your brand, plan, create posts, and launch ads. Oh, and don’t forget to communicate with your community — answer their questions and help them solve their problems.
Luckily, you can optimize a lot of these steps. We’ve featured some of the best social media marketing tools that will help you minimize your effort without costing you results.
Content:
- Social media monitoring tools
- Brand24
- Famm.io
- YouScan
- Keyhole
- Mention
- SMM tools to create and schedule posts
- SmarterQueue
- Plann
- Social Champ
- Planable
- RecurPost
- Hootsuite
- Zoho Social
- SMM tools to communicate with users
- Facebook chatbot by SendPulse
- Juphy
- Buffer Reply
- SMM tools for analytics
- Popsters
- Rival IQ
- Agorapulse
Social media monitoring tools
There are two main reasons to make constant social media monitoring a part of your SMM strategy.
First, monitoring social media allows you to collect significant data about your audience: their interests, pain points, behavior, and more. This information helps you tailor your strategy to meet the needs of your audience, make better promo campaigns, and create posts that engage and resonate with your base.
Additionally, social media monitoring is an essential part of reputation management. By tracking mentions about your brand you can both handle negative feedback faster, and find loyal customers to nurture into brand advocates.
Brand24
Purpose: online reputation management, media monitoring, and tracking your competition.
Pricing: free 14-day trial; $49/mo for Plus, $99/mo for Premium, $199/mo for Max. Pricing plans depend on the number of keywords you can monitor, mentions your account gets, number of the account’s users, how often the system crawls the web searching for your chosen keywords, and extra features.
Key features:
- mention and hashtag monitoring across social networks, news sites, blogs, videos, forums, and reviews;
- mentions categorized into positive, negative, and neutral;
- customizable alerts for mentions;
- integration with Slack;
- automated daily and weekly reports;
- export data as PDF reports, Excel files, and infographics.
We’ve tested Brand24 to track “SendPulse” mentions. Apart from monitoring the results on the main dashboard, you can export the data to use externally. Thanks to the data infographics, the statistics look user-friendly and are easy to comprehend. Check it out:
Famm.io
Purpose: online reputation management, media monitoring, and analytics.
Pricing: free Starter Pack; $29/mo for Medium, $99/mo for Fammio Pro. The price depends on the number of keywords and mentions tracked, update frequency, and social networks that you use.
Key features:
- brand mention and keyword monitoring across news sites, social media, and Telegram;
- Mention Dynamics graph for analyzing your performance;
- ability to find influencers and content creators;
- real-time mention alerts;
- data export to CSV.
You can start using Famm.io in just three steps. First, choose whether you want to monitor brand visibility or find content creators. Second, fill in your brand’s name. Then, enter your competitor’s name and desired keywords. And voila:
YouScan
Purpose: social media monitoring, image recognition, visual insights, analytics.
Pricing: free 7-day trial; $1000/mo per Standard; $1500/mo per Pro; $3000/mo per Insight that comes with Visual Insights; $5000/mo per Ultra. Pricing plans depend on the number of topics that you can track, the number of mentions per topic, the number of automatic rules, and extra features.
Key features:
- track brand mentions in real time;
- get insights from visual content — logo recognition, OCR, object and scene detection;
- integration with messengers, HelpDesk and CRM;
- informative and customizable dashboards, ability to create your own reports;
- smart alerts — get notifications around important events.
This tool for social media listening allows you to analyze both text and visual content to get actionable insights about your brand.
Keyhole
Purpose: online reputation management, media monitoring, analytics.
Pricing: hashtag and keyword tracking — $199/mo for Professionals, $599/mo for Corporations, and from $720/mo for Agencies and Enterprises when billed annually. As for account and profile analytics — $39/mo for Professionals, $99/mo for Corporations and Agencies, and custom plan for Enterprises. If you pay for a year at a time, you can save up to 25%.
Key features:
- hashtag tracking and analytics;
- monitor all media mentions of your brand and competitors’ brands and uncover the sentiment of each mention;
- influencer analytics;
- audience analytics: country, gender, devices, and more;
- data export to PDF, CSV, and Excel;
- email notifications about negative posts that include your search terms, and sudden spikes in activity.
Thanks to their deep analytics, Keyhole provides valuable insights and specific data about your audience. For example, we’ve learned in which countries SendPulse gets the most mentions:
Mention
Purpose: media monitoring, content scheduling, communication with users, and analytics.
Pricing: there is a free plan and several paid plans starting from $29/mo. If you pay for a year at a time, you’ll get a discount equivalent to the 2-month cost of the plan. A free 30-day trial is available as well.
Key features:
- your brand, campaigns, and competitors tracking;
- mentions alerts;
- content planning calendar;
- responding to direct messages, reactions to posts and posts you’ve been tagged in;
- customized reports with seven ready-made report layouts to meet your needs.
This social media marketing tool helps you track your brand mentions as soon as they go live. All the updates are displayed in the feed:
SMM tools to create and schedule posts
Planning social media posts and activities in advance can save you a lot of time and help organize your resources.
There are many use cases for social media marketing tools to create and schedule posts. For example, you may be on vacation, you still need to keep a consistent presence on social networks. Or maybe, you’ve done some analytics and found the best time for publishing your posts is at a time that is not convenient for you. To solve these issues, make use of special SMM tools.
SmarterQueue
Purpose: full-service social media management.
Pricing: starting from $16.99/month for 4 profiles, with flexible add-ons to suit your needs.
Key features:
- publishing;
- scheduling;
- post recycling;
- content calendar;
- manages Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest;
- social inbox;
- content curation;
- analytics;
- listening.
SmarterQueue is a powerful scheduling tool designed for smart social media managers. SmarterQueue streamlines scheduling with smart automation; smoothly turning your categorized content queue into a perfectly blended social media schedule. SmarterQueue offers everything required for data-driven social media management in one place, saving users on average 8 hours per week, and boosting engagement by 10x.
Plann
Purpose: all-in-one auto-scheduler, social strategist, designer, and content calendar.
Pricing: The platform offers a 7-day free trial and different paid plans with varying levels of functionality and support — Power User for $12, Build for $24, and Grow for $60, paid annually.
Key features:
- visual planner and scheduler to plan, create, and schedule social media posts in advance, saving time and increasing efficiency;
- intuitive image and video editor that enables users to create and edit high-quality visuals for their social media posts;
- hashtag manager that provides users with insights into the best hashtags to use for their posts and hashtag analytics to help you know what’s working and what’s not;
- competitor analysis that allows users to track their competitor’s social media activity, identifying opportunities for growth and improvement.
In general, Plann’s easy-to-use interface and responsive customer support team make it simple for users to manage their social media accounts effectively.
Social Champ
Purpose: social media automation, content curation, monitoring, and analytics.
Pricing: $10/month for Professional, $29/month for Champion, $99/month for Business, and $199/month custom plan for agencies. With an annual payment, you can save up to 10%. A 7-day free trial is available for Professional and Champion plans, and demos are available for larger plans.
Key features:
- Bulk Upload from a CSV file — schedule thousands of posts in one go through for the future, and much more.
- Auto-post content via RSS feed — automate daily posting from your favorite blogs.
- Repeat on Twitter and Facebook.
- Content Suggestion — find excellent quality and productive stories to share.
- Link Shortening and Tracking — get links auto shortened and tracked using UTM codes.
- Analytics — track the performance of your posts and download the report in PDF.
- Team Feature — involve your team members to manage your social accounts without sharing the passwords with them.
- Chrome Extension — share content directly from any website.
- Engage — social inbox to reply to all your customers’ queries and comments on different pages and platforms from one place.
Below is the dashboard of Social Champ.
Planable
Purpose: social media planning, collaboration, and approval.
Pricing: free plan – up to 50 posts; $33/mo per Starter; $83/mo per Premium; custom plans available for Enterprise users. Pricing plans depend on the number of users you have, and the number of workspaces you need for every brand you manage.
Key features:
- pixel-perfect social media posts preview;
- sleek calendar view to plan, schedule, and organize using the drag&drop function;
- hassle-free collaboration right next to the post (internal comments, mentions, file attachment;
- separate workspaces for each brand or client;
- customizable multiple levels of approval.
This social media content collaboration tool will help you create content 6X faster. No more spreadsheets, no more back and forth emails, no more never-ending client phone calls.
RecurPost
Purpose: social media scheduling.
Pricing: starting at $15/mo for three profiles with recurring updates.
Key features:
- single post scheduling;
- recurring scheduling;
- content calendar;
- auto-posting at best time;
- tweet variations;
- automated posts from RSS feeds;
- importing updates from other tools;
- white-label reports.
SMM entails multiple steps like planning and creating content, monitoring trends, tracking brand mentions, and managing community engagement. RecurPost can help you automate all these tasks seamlessly and make SMM hyper convenient for you.
Hootsuite
Purpose: scheduling posts, content curation, posts promotion, monitoring, and analytics.
Pricing: $19/mo for Professional, $99/mo for Team, $599/mo for Business, and a custom plan for Enterprise. A 30-day free trial is available for the Professional and Teams plans, and demos are available for the larger plans.
Key features:
- easy drag-and-drop content calendar;
- Compose Box feature to schedule 30 or fewer posts to be sent automatically throughout the day or week;
- Boost feature to identify and promote your top performing Facebook content right from your dashboard;
- custom reports;
- export data to Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and CSV;
- 150+ integrations including Trello, Slack, and others;
- mobile app.
With lots of its features and integrations, Hootsuite provides a quality environment for managing social media at every stage. For example, this is how Hootsuite helps you create and schedule posts:
Zoho Social
Purpose: creating and scheduling posts and analytics.
Pricing: $15/mo for Standard, $35/mo for Professional, $275/mo for Agency, $400/mo for Agency Plus billed monthly. You can get a discount by paying for a year at a time. A 15-day free trial is available.
Key features:
- publishing calendar;
- repeating posts weekly or monthly;
- targeting the audience by timezone or location;
- SmartQ Slot that predicts the best time for publishing;
- built-in URL shortener;
- real-time social media monitoring dashboard;
- direct messages from Facebook and Twitter;
- customized reports.
These valuable features will help you get the most of your content on social media by finding optimal time for publishing, targeting a specific audience, and keeping them engaged.
SMM tools to communicate with users
It’s important to respond to users on time. This is not only about reputation management: if you don’t take notice of direct messages in social media, you risk losing potential customers.
There are two main options to cut down the time you spend on communicating with users. The first one is to simplify and unify your operations: create answer templates and organize all the messages and mentions in one interface. But thus you still need to keep enough staff.
Luckily, you can automate your communication with potential customers using chatbots. Set up auto-replies to frequent questions, such as your address, product availability, or use an onboarding quiz. You can also make personalized messages which are more effective than standard messages: in sales, personalization provides a 40% growth in the value of the average order.
Facebook chatbot by SendPulse
Purpose: auto-replies, user onboarding, and keeping customers in the loop.
Pricing: the Basic plan gives you three bots and up to 10,000 messages per month for free. The pricing for the Pro plan with unlimited messages and bots depends on the number of active subscribers and starts from $9.60/mo when billed annually.
Key features:
- interaction with a single person or a group of people;
- auto-reply flows and chatbot flow test;
- detailed statistics about user interactions with the chatbot;
- personalized messages;
- autoresponders triggered by keywords in the dialogue;
- chat panel to monitor bots and chats.
With SendPulse, you can place a Facebook Messenger widget directly on your website and sign up users. You can create complex campaigns consisting of several messages to create an outstanding experience for your subscribers. Messages can include, not only text, but also an image, list, button with a link, and more.
Moreover, you can create a fully functional store right in your Messenger. After a short conversation with a user, the bot will generate a personalized offer. Product cards or even catalogs will lead users to your website.
Facebook chatbots from SendPulse can also reduce the workload of your customer support team. Now your support team will have time to deal with higher priority issues rather than waste their time answering routine questions.
Juphy
Purpose: social media inbox management.
Pricing: the Starter plan costs $20 per user per month, while the Growth plan costs $36 per user per month when billed annually. The platform also provides a 7-day free trial.
Key features:
- team collaboration with user permissions and internal chats;
- engagement, channel, team performance reports, and stats;
- unified inbox to manage all your social media comments and DM’s within a single platform;
- canned and automated responses to answer frequently asked questions to streamline the customer support process;
- multiple workspaces to manage different projects and get real-time notifications about comments, reviews, and DMs.
This social inbox management tool allows you to work using a single dashboard without switching platforms, which is especially handy for small teams and marketing agencies.
Buffer Reply
Purpose: managing conversations on social media.
Pricing: $50/mo for Pro, and $225/mo for Business billed monthly. You can add a user for $25/mo and a social account for $10/mo. If you pay for a year at a time, you can save up to 20%. A 14-day free trial is available.
Key features:
- collaborative team inbox for messages from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter;
- conversation assignments;
- internal notes for team members.
This SMM tool is useful if you need to communicate with users frequently, and you have a customer support team that helps users on social media. You can assign specific messages to a support specialist who is more competent in the subject, and share dialogs with other specialists as a teaching tool.
SMM tools for analytics
Of course, social media management is not only about monitoring, planning, and communicating with users. You need to measure performance of your campaigns and analyze your activities — know which posts get the most engagement, generate leads, and know where you need work — to improve your SMM strategy and have better business results.
Many social media platforms have their own in-built analytics tools, like Facebook Analytics, but they are not always sufficient. Luckily, there are social media marketing tools that will help you.
Popsters
Purpose: social media content analysis, competitors analysis, and benchmarking.
Pricing: $9.99/mo unlimited pages analysis in one social media. Making an annual payment will save you 24%. A 7-day free trial for each social network is available.
Key features:
- content analysis, engagement rate, and common metrics;
- competitor and comparative analysis in 11 social media;
- post feed with sorting and filtering features by any metric or attachment;
- quick analysis — up to 30 seconds to get data;
- report export to PDF, PPTX, XLSX.
Popsters allows you to check statistics of any page and get to know what content is more efficient for competitors or your own page.
Rival IQ
Purpose: social media performance evaluation.
Pricing: $199/mo for Drive, $299/mo for Engage, $499/mo for Engage Pro billed monthly. Making an annual payment will save you 15%. A 14-day free trial is available.
Key features:
- social media analytics for your brand, your competitors, and market on the whole;
- alerts when a competitor boosts a post on social media;
- custom reports;
- data export to PPT, PDF, PNG.
With Rival IQ, you create your own landscape by adding a benchmark for your company and your competitors. That gives you a reference point and a better understanding of the situation.
Agorapulse
Purpose: social media performance evaluation, audience analysis, posts scheduling, communicating with users.
Pricing: €99/mo for Medium, €199/mo for Large, €299/mo for X-Large, €499/mo for Enterprise billed monthly. With an annual payment, you can save up to 20%. A 28-day free trial is available.
Key features:
- one-click reports;
- recommendations on the best time and day to post based on your content’s past performance;
- automated inbox assistant;
- built-in CRM.
Below is the example of a report by Agorapulse:
So, here are some of the social media marketing tools that can boost your SMM performance. This has been only a brief survey, there are other tools that may better suit your goals and budget. Test, compare, and use. Good luck!