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Amol Ghemud Published: August 14, 2018
Summary
Check out the essential tools for effective social media management, including Google Alerts, Hootsuite, SocialOomph, Buffer, Social Pilot, Likeable Hub, Sprout Social, Flipagram, and BulkBuffer. These tools assist in various aspects of social media marketing, from content scheduling and monitoring to analytics, aiming to enhance efficiency and reach for businesses.
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This is the era of social media marketing. Breakfast isn’t complete without them. Neither is night so good. Smart devices without social media apps are not considered cool.
“If content is fire, Social Media Marketing is fuel”
If you are a business, a social media presence can become your most effective path to reach the masses. There are many benefits like having a large segment of people concentrated at one place, various media tools available to track them and a variety of new experiments with the successful use of technology.
Social Media Marketing has created a roar in the digital world. You might be working on a technical project or scheduling a creative drive, for anything to reach the public (your potential buyers), it has to reach the digital social platforms, first.
It begins with creating a post/an article of importance, putting it on social media platforms, making sure it reaches the targeted audience and finally tracking the growth of your efforts. We have found these tools to be real effective while marketing for social media.
It sends alerts to you via email, based on your search terms. Google alerts goes by your preferences history and does the magic. It is linked to your Google search and remembers what you searched and shows related searches, too.
This is a single dashboard to handle multiple social media operations. From protecting your social profile to helping you spot the trends, there are multiple things that Hootsuite can do for you.
It integrates so many social networks together that you can rest assured.
This one saves your time and resources by helping you create engaging content, manage your reputation and measure your growth. It also comes with analytics and reporting.
Sprout Social’s Social Media Marketing section handles your publishing, monitoring & analytics well. Reaching your audience, monitoring the activity and measuring & optimizing the efforts put in it are the areas they take care of.
Facebook’s creator puts it really well that video is the next megatrend. It is gaining pace really fast now.
How can we stay behind and not equip ourselves with the latest trend for social media? So here comes this tool for free.
They provide you with the trending hashtag to make it easier. So start making your own video, today!
We have already mentioned Buffer, the useful tool. Now, this one is an extension of Buffer in the sense that you can upload your updates to your Buffer account.
Though they do not have a direct business connection to Buffer, they connect you well to it.
These tools will be your friends for Social Media Marketing. Social media posts are a combination of amazing design, content, tags, headlines and so on.
Ace all the areas, one by one, to reach people and to grow your business effectively.
Watch Nine Free Tools Elevate Social Media Marketing
For Curious Minds
A defined social media marketing strategy is essential for converting online presence into tangible business results, as it provides a structured path to engage a concentrated mass audience. Using integrated tools moves your efforts beyond simple posting and into the realm of strategic, data-driven communication. For example, platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite offer a centralized dashboard to manage multiple facets of this strategy:
Targeted Outreach: They enable precise audience targeting to ensure your content, whether it's an article or a video, reaches potential buyers.
Performance Tracking: These tools provide analytics to monitor the growth of your campaigns, helping you understand what resonates with your audience.
Operational Efficiency: They consolidate publishing, monitoring, and reporting, saving significant time and resources.
This integrated approach ensures that every piece of content serves a specific purpose and its impact is fully measurable. Understanding how these tools fit into a broader strategy is the first step toward mastering your digital presence.
Social media marketing tools create a command center that transforms a brand's digital presence from a series of disjointed actions into a cohesive and responsive system. This integration allows you to manage the entire engagement lifecycle proactively rather than reactively. This unified workflow delivers several key advantages:
Consistent Publishing: Tools like Buffer allow you to schedule posts in advance, maintaining a consistent brand voice across all channels.
Proactive Monitoring: Using a service like Google Alerts, you can track brand mentions and industry keywords, allowing you to join conversations as they happen.
Informed Analytics: Platforms consolidate performance data, showing you which content drives engagement and traffic, which helps refine future campaigns.
This shift turns your social media from a simple broadcast channel into a dynamic tool for listening, learning, and engaging with your community. Discover how specific platforms excel at these different functions by exploring the full analysis.
The ideal choice between a comprehensive platform and a specialized tool depends entirely on your team's scale, workflow complexity, and strategic goals. An all-in-one platform like Hootsuite is built for teams that need a single dashboard to manage multiple networks, monitor trends, and protect their brand profile. In contrast, a tool like Buffer excels at streamlined post scheduling and performance analysis, built on a strong value-driven system perfect for those who prioritize simplicity and effectiveness. When deciding, you should weigh the following factors:
Number of Social Profiles: A higher number of accounts often justifies a more comprehensive solution.
Depth of Analytics: Determine if you need deep, granular reporting or straightforward performance metrics.
Team Collaboration: Consider if multiple users need access for approvals and campaign management.
Selecting the right platform is about aligning the tool's core strengths with your most critical marketing objectives. The complete guide explores other alternatives, like Social Pilot, that offer a balance between these two approaches.
The primary distinction between SocialOomph and Social Pilot lies in their strategic focus: specialization versus breadth. SocialOomph offers deep productivity features heavily centered on Twitter, making it a powerful choice for brands where that platform is the main channel for thought leadership and customer interaction. In contrast, Social Pilot is engineered for versatility, allowing you to connect multiple accounts, share numerous posts via bulk scheduling, and drive traffic across a wide array of social networks. Your decision should be guided by where your target audience is most active. A B2B technology firm might gain more from SocialOomph's specialized features, while a consumer brand would likely benefit from the broad-spectrum capabilities of Social Pilot to maintain a presence on Facebook, Instagram, and more. A deeper look into each tool's features can help clarify which best fits your marketing mix.
Buffer’s success powerfully illustrates that a transparent, value-driven company culture is a formidable competitive advantage in the software market. By building its product and support system around a remote team of dedicated global experts, the company fosters a deep sense of trust and reliability with its users. This model proves that customer-centricity is not just a buzzword but a core business strategy that drives loyalty and retention. Businesses that invest in their internal culture and prioritize clear communication, like Buffer, often find that their product's reputation for quality and support becomes its most effective marketing tool. This principle of building a trustworthy brand from the inside out is a recurring theme among the most respected and effective tools available today.
The emergence of accessible tools like Flipagram confirms that video is no longer an optional extra but a central component of a successful social media strategy. This free tool validates the 'megatrend' identified by Facebook's leadership by empowering any business to create engaging video content without specialized skills or a large budget. The tangible benefits are significant: video captures audience attention far more effectively than static content, communicates complex messages quickly, and consistently generates higher engagement rates. By incorporating a tool like Flipagram, brands can leverage trending hashtags and dynamic visuals to tell compelling stories, showcase products, and build a more personal connection with their audience. To remain relevant, understanding how to integrate video into your content calendar is no longer a choice but a necessity.
A startup can establish a robust reputation management system without a large budget by combining free, automated tools for monitoring and management. This approach allows you to stay informed and responsive while focusing your limited resources on core business activities. Here is a simple, effective process:
Automate Brand Monitoring: Set up Google Alerts for your company name, key products, and top executives. This ensures you receive immediate email notifications whenever you are mentioned online.
Centralize Social Engagement: Use a platform like Likeable Hub to manage your social media accounts from a single dashboard. This helps you create engaging content and respond to customer comments and concerns promptly.
Measure and Report on Growth: Leverage the built-in analytics within Likeable Hub to track key performance indicators like follower growth and engagement rates, providing data to demonstrate progress.
By creating a system that combines automated alerts with a unified management hub, you can efficiently maintain a professional and proactive brand presence. Discover more tool combinations in the full guide to build a complete marketing stack on a budget.
A growing business can leverage a tool like Social Pilot to systematically scale its social media operations and achieve measurable marketing goals. This structured approach transforms content distribution from a manual chore into a powerful engine for growth. You can follow this four-step implementation plan:
Curate Your Content Calendar: First, assemble a diverse mix of content for the upcoming month, including product features, blog posts, and user-generated stories.
Execute Bulk Scheduling: Use Social Pilot's bulk scheduling feature to upload your entire content calendar from a single file, customizing captions for each unique platform.
Track Your Traffic: Implement URL shorteners with tracking parameters for all links pointing back to your website to measure which posts are driving the most traffic.
Analyze and Optimize: At the end of the period, review the platform's analytics to identify top-performing content and double down on what works.
A disciplined cycle of scheduling, tracking, and optimizing is the key to converting social media activity into real business impact. The full article provides more insights on refining this process for maximum efficiency.
The dominance of integrated platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social indicates that the role of a social media marketer is evolving from a content creator to a strategic analyst. These tools automate many of the manual tasks of the past, placing a greater emphasis on data interpretation and cross-channel strategy. To remain competitive, marketing professionals must cultivate a new set of skills:
Analytical Acumen: The ability to interpret complex analytics dashboards to make informed, data-backed decisions about budget and strategy.
Strategic Integration: A deep understanding of how to orchestrate a cohesive customer journey across multiple social platforms.
Technical Proficiency: Mastery of these sophisticated tools to manage publishing, monitoring, and reporting with maximum efficiency.
The future value of a social media marketer lies not in their ability to post, but in their capacity to manage a brand's entire digital ecosystem for measurable results. Continuous learning is essential to keep pace with this evolution, a topic explored further in our complete analysis.
The proliferation of sophisticated, free marketing tools is fundamentally democratizing the social media landscape, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for small businesses. This shift means that a large budget is no longer a prerequisite for a professional and effective online presence. The key competitive advantage is moving away from financial resources and toward strategic creativity and agility. This new environment creates several exciting opportunities:
High-Quality Niche Content: Tools like Flipagram allow small brands to produce compelling video content without expensive production teams.
Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Schedulers like BulkBuffer automate posting, freeing up entrepreneurs to focus on their core business.
Authentic Audience Connection: Small businesses can use these tools to create genuine, relatable content that builds stronger communities than polished corporate campaigns.
This trend empowers any business to build a powerful brand presence. Explore our full list to discover how you can assemble a professional-grade marketing toolkit for free.
Inconsistent posting and a lack of measurable ROI are critical challenges that undermine social media strategies and lead to wasted resources. Management platforms provide a direct solution by introducing structure, automation, and accountability into the workflow. Tools like Buffer and Sprout Social transform chaotic, ad-hoc posting into a systematic, data-driven operation. They address these two core problems head-on:
Solving Inconsistency: The advanced scheduling features in Buffer allow you to plan and automate content weeks or months in advance, guaranteeing a consistent brand voice and presence without daily manual intervention.
Solving ROI Blindness: The comprehensive analytics in Sprout Social track key metrics like clicks, conversions, and audience growth, connecting social activities directly to business outcomes like website traffic and leads.
By implementing these systems, you replace guesswork with a clear and repeatable process for achieving and measuring success. The full guide helps you select the right tool to overcome these specific hurdles.
When content and analytics teams operate in silos, strategy suffers because creative decisions are not informed by performance data, and data insights are not used to guide content. Integrated platforms like Likeable Hub and Hootsuite are specifically designed to dismantle these barriers by creating a single source of truth for the entire team. These tools serve as a central nexus where the full content lifecycle, from ideation to measurement, is transparent and collaborative. This unified environment solves the problem in three key ways:
A Shared Dashboard: Content calendars and performance reports exist side-by-side, making it easy to correlate specific posts with engagement spikes.
Collaborative Workflows: Teams can plan campaigns, leave feedback, and review results together in one place.
Rapid Feedback Loops: Near real-time analytics allow content creators to quickly pivot their strategy based on what is resonating with the audience.
By centralizing these functions, you ensure your strategy is cohesive, adaptive, and constantly improving. Find out which platform best supports your team’s workflow in our complete review.
Amol has helped catalyse business growth with his strategic & data-driven methodologies. With a decade of experience in the field of marketing, he has donned multiple hats, from channel optimization, data analytics and creative brand positioning to growth engineering and sales.
Growth Strategy and Planning
