From international corporations to small businesses alike, few companies have not found success marketing on social media platforms. Digital advertising by way of social media continues to hedge out television for the third year in a row. With over 3 billion active users between Facebook and Instagram alone, the market only continues to grow.
Brands are turning to social media to reach their audiences through both paid and organic means. However, they don’t do it alone. Here is a list of 10 tools, both popu
lar and obscure, that marketers should try before this year closes. There is just enough time remaining in the year to see what you like, what you don’t and what you want to make a part of your marketing plan for 2019!
Using machine-learning algorithms, SocialDrift sends automated likes, comments or follows that target a specific demographic. This outreach motivates Instagram users to check out your own account, which improves brand awareness and drives followers. Bloggers and influencers find this platform of high value as it increases their “follow-backs.”
Things can get a bit hairy when sending out multiple posts, tweets DMs and the like. Thankfully, Buffer has a well-integrated window that seamlessly organizes all these activities into a methodical panel. With Buffer, you can schedule social media posts, monitor conversations and analyze channel performance. Best of all, Buffer offers a variety of plans designed to fit the needs of any brand, from small businesses to large enterprise organizations.
Instagram’s analytics may very well be one of the more elusive to understand because it’s the newest to offer up its data for consumption. If you’re interested in surfacing helpful insights that can be used to grow an Instagram presence, you’ll want to check out Owlmetrics. The all-in-one Instagram analytics platform offers users access to rich analytics that can dramatically improve performance. Information about follower engagement and growth is accessible via a user-friendly dashboard.
An excellent choice for those in need of an enterprise-level social media solution, Sprout Social is used by Dropbox, Soulcycle, and Vice. The platform integrates with most of the major social media networks and empowers users to access analytics, schedule content and provide social media support, all from one place.
Facebook offers advertisers a variety of targeting options. One option is known as custom audiences. A custom audience is created when a marketer uploads a list of emails to Facebook. Facebook then matches the emails to those used by people on the platform.
This is a particularly powerful type of ad because it allows marketers to create highly personalized journeys that coordinate with things like an email drip campaign. But custom audiences usually require a marketer to upload a list of emails to Facebook manually. Thanks to AdEspresso, marketers can integrate Facebook with a marketing automation platform to ensure that an up-to-date list of contacts is being served ads.
Trusted by Microsoft and SAP, Sprinklr offers a suite of tools designed for a variety of modern teams. From support to marketing to business analytics, Sprinklr’s social media cloud is designed to help enterprise organizations get the most out of social media platforms.
Salesforce Social Studio is an alternative all-in-one social media management solution for enterprise businesses. Social Studio helps teams across your organization use social media in a way that protects your brand. Post permissions, smart routing options, and detailed analytics provide large organizations with the resources they need to enter the world of social media marketing safely.
Presentation is half the battle on social media platforms. Adobe Spark Post is designed to provide marketers of all types with the tools they need to produce high-quality social media images. The service allows marketers to easily retouch, annotate and enliven visual content to ensure that the audience engages with posts in a meaningful way.
Few tools bring together digital advertising information quite like Funnel. This tool aggregates advertising information in one clean and simple dashboard, making it easier for marketers to compare social media advertising performance across channels.
Furthermore, thanks to integration with tools like Google Analytics, marketers can better understand whether social media ads actually generated ROI.
A video-editing tool built by GoPro with social media in mind, Splice is an excellent solution for those who want to edit social media video content on the go. With Splice, iOS users can trim and crop footage, apply filters, add animations and customize video audio in one user-friendly app.
What’s on Trend for Next Year?
We have a good idea of what’s in store for next year by looking at what’s trending now: video content. Facebook’s algorithms are promoting more video than it has previously, and it’s speculated to consume 75% of feeds by 2020. In 2019, marketers will have the opportunity to reach millions of potential customers by embracing the power of software platforms like the ones listed here. By combining a compelling brand narrative with insightful analytics, stunning visuals and timely monitoring, brands of all sizes have a chance to compete for audience awareness and loyalty.