Guest post by: Jigar Agrawal
Social media is one of the fastest-growing industries today. It has taken the world by storm, and almost 4.48 billion people use it regularly. This vast audience base makes it the perfect platform for brands, companies, and individual creators to do marketing. It is one of the most sought-after channels for keeping in touch with customers.
Marketing on social media is no mean feat; you need to have the right tools to succeed. Numerous companies have mastered the art of social media marketing, and now they’ve created tools that can help everyone succeed.
In this post, you’ll get a brief about social media and why to use it as a marketing channel. Moreover, we’ll also explore some of the best social media marketing software that the top custom software development agencies use to generate a loyal audience for their products.
What is Social Media Marketing?
There are tons of social media platforms, starting from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Reddit, and more. When companies use these media platforms for marketing their products or getting in touch with customers, it is called social media marketing.
Today, social media lies at the core of human lives, and it has become an inseparable part of it. Globally, users spend 2 hours and 25 minutes every day on their social media and networking sites.
This is almost 10% of the day, so it is excellent for brands that want to rise up and grow their business using social media. It is a great marketing channel where you can connect with your customers in real-time and build meaningful relationships.
If the above statistic was not enough, here are some reasons to do social media marketing.
Why do Social Media Marketing?
Build trust
Every business needs trust to grow. Without trust, you cannot procure new customers, and even the existing ones will start fleeing away. So it is better to build confidence in the community so that you can grow your business.
One of the easiest ways to build trust is creating a social media profile for the business and posting regularly. Moreover, try to help as many visitors on your profile as you can, and engage in talks with the customers.
This will spread the word about your business, and more people will get to know you, which will increase your trust factor.
Grow audience
Growing an audience is crucial to expanding any business, and you can do it effortlessly with the help of social media marketing. Today’s social media algorithms reward the pages that participate and post often.
You can grow the audience by posting more relevant content and driving traffic to social media from other marketing channels. Once you start growing your social media following, it will become an autonomous process, and your business will grow together.
Generate leads
Social media marketing has grown many brands into huge businesses, and you too can do that. An excellent social media marketing policy focusing on every aspect can help you generate new leads and nurture existing ones in a better manner.
Almost all companies are struggling to generate leads through the conventional marketing channels, and if you move first, you can benefit largely.
Generating leads using social media is effortless, just engage with the community, provide relevant information, post often, and you’ll see an inflow of leads in your business.
Cost-effective
Social media marketing is basically about using free tools to start marketing your brand online. Many other marketing channels require some sort of investment before beginning the campaign.
But social media marketing is not like that; here, you just need to have a good understanding of the target audience and social skills to start out. An extensive experience in marketing products in other channels is a plus for social media marketing.
Starting out a social media marketing plan does not require anything special; just internet connectivity and a zeal to grow your brand online are enough.
Increased traffic on websites
Using redirections from social media, you can organically grow your website traffic. With a good presence on social media platforms, people will search for you online, and once they find it, they’ll visit your website.
An increase in search queries and website traffic for your brand will force search engine algorithms to rank you higher on the results page. Moreover, with the help of increased traffic, you can see an increase in domain authority for your website too.
There are many other reasons to answer why you need to do social media marketing. But for today, it is better to stop here. Now it is time to explore the tools that help you do social media marketing excellently.
Best Social Media Marketing software for 2022
HootSuite
Hootsuite is one of the best social media marketing software. The plans are reasonably priced, and the features are adequate for every plan. Anyone can manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard using Hootsuite.
Social media marketing gets easy with this software, as using this, you can track keywords, audience, and schedule marketing posts for a long time too. With advanced modules, the analytics can provide insight into marketing efforts and their returns.
Hootsuite’s paid plans start from $29 and go up to $599 per month. Moreover, there are free and customized pricing for enterprises.
Onlypult
Onlypult is one of the social media management tools to schedule your content on Instagram (including Stories), LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Twitter, other social networks, messengers and blogs.
The Publishing tool has a built-in editor, a set of hashtags selected from the recommended ones or created by a user. Another tool feature is cross-posting, designed to publish the same post to several social networks at the same time.
And although the Publishing tool is the main one, it’s worth paying attention to the Analytics for business accounts on Instagram.
It allows setting up the parameters for analysis the way you need, for example, the best time to post, engagement rates, most popular post types, and more. You can send automatic reports to colleagues or clients weekly or monthly.
Another feature worth mentioning is Team for a joint workflow on the platform. You can assign roles and open access to the necessary accounts in social networks without sharing passwords.
A few more words about other tools. Any Onlypult user gets free access to 3 more tools. Of course, we are talking about basic plans, but even though the features can be useful. For instance, with the help of Builder, it is quite easy to create a multilink for an Instagram bio. The Monitoring tool is designed to track comments on Twitter or Youtube.
Multistreaming can be useful for bloggers or gamers to stream on multiple platforms at the same time. Onlypult can be interesting both in terms of the intuitive interface and additional features that you won’t have to look for anywhere else. The free trial period with access to all tools is 7 days.
The paid plans start from $25 per month.
ContentCal
To reign the social media marketing landscape, you need to stay organized and post regularly. Posting daily manually is not the best way today. There are many automation tools that you can use instead.
ContentCal is one of them. It is a tool to schedule and organize an entire social media marketing plan. Using this software, you can schedule when to post, where to post, and even have basic analytics on your hand. It is focused on helping companies to run effective social media marketing campaigns on autopilot modes.
ContentCal wants to help a broad spectrum of marketing professionals, and hence it offers multiple plans. Its free plan is aimed at individuals who are starting out social media marketing with up to 10 posts every month. But for serious marketers, paid plans start from $17 to $47/month.
SproutSocial
SproutSocial is another one-stop shop for social media marketers. It provides CRM features that are very unique in this domain.
Moreover, SproutSocial is filled with features like competitor analysis, comparisons, groups, social listening tools, trends tracker, and other reporting and analytics that help run social media marketing campaigns.
Alike other tools in the list, SproutSocial also provides social media post scheduling and reporting for better campaigns.
Many people love SproutSocial just for its extensive reports. The reports are so clear and precise that you won’t need anything else to have a look at your performance.
SproutSocial is pretty costly for individuals starting out because the plans start from $99/month, but looking at the features justifies it. There are other higher plans that go up to $249/month too.
Vista Social
Vista Social is an all-in-one, modern social media management tool that’s perfect for marketing agencies.
Despite the platform’s affordability, it offers TRUCKLOADS of features that agencies can use to run successful social media marketing campaigns for their clients.
Below are some of Vista Social’s key features:
- Publishing
- Highly customizable reporting features
- Post Scheduling
- Analytics
- Inbox (Audience Engagement)
- Reviews
Vista Social runs on a freemium model and charges per social profile connected and not per seat.
Users can sign up for free and connect 3 social media profiles. Its Pro package is for $3 per social profile.
Sendible
Sendible is a social media marketing software that is aimed solely at agencies that handle multiple clients. Sendible is a fully customizable marketing platform that can be used to attract new clients.
To make things easy for the agency professionals, Sendible presents new features like image search and even video search from YouTube. Moreover, there are other automation tools in the platform that help schedule, post, and promote social media posts.
Sendible offers plans in the range of $29/month to $299/month, but the features and user count vary a lot on both ends.
AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a multi-platform social media marketing tool that can help you with marketing endeavors on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. AgoraPulse can track efforts across multiple social media accounts, and it has rich reporting features.
Like the other platforms, AgoraPulse also offers you to download and keep the reports in formats like CSV and PPT.
AgoraPulse also comes with collaboration and tracking tools so that you never miss a beat. Plans start from $79/month to $159/month, and there are even enterprise options for more prominent organizations.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is an easy-to-use social media marketing software. It helps marketers with scheduling, replying, and posting social media posts.
This software comes with channel management features that help you to manage multiple channels in a better way. It also offers URL shortening services for redirect links, and using the intelligence, it can even suggest you custom content suggestions.
One of the core features of this software is the easy-to-use and intuitive user interface that has helped thousands of marketers.
SocialPilot also comes with a browser extension that can help you with managing the accounts from browsers. It also has native mobile applications for managing campaigns on the go.
With all the features, SocialPilot plans start from $10/month and go up to $30/month for business plans.
Rounding off, tons of other social media marketing software can help you, but these are the very best. Almost all these tools can provide free and trial plans. So you can use any of these tools and see if they work for you before upgrading to the pro subscriptions.
Do you want to discover more awesome tools for small businesses? Click here!
Author Bio:
Jigar Agrawal is Digital Marketing Manager at eSparkBiz. He is Passionate about anything related to Digital Marketing. Wants to unlock the world of technology and Social Media where every day there is a chance of new possibility as well as innovation.
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jigar-agrawal-seo-expert
Twitter: https://twitter.com/agrawaljigar1
