10 Helpful Social Media Tools for Better Performance

Social media platforms are many and boast of their own qualities. Each platform has a unique user base. But deciding which platform is most suitable for your business goals and which of your follower base will return high converting customers is tricky.

Allocating budgets for social spending campaigns depends on which platform offers the most ROI.

When it comes to Social Media Marketing, tools provide insight to improve your strategy and scale-up in your performance.

These tools give you concrete data in the form of performance reports which you can seamlessly share among your team members.

Depending on the popularity and features offered, you can choose between free versions of paid tools as long as they take you closer to your goals.

Here are 10 helpful social media tools for better performance in 2021.

1. Hootsuite:

Hootsuite is a popular social media tool and one that’s widely used for social media marketing and management. In 2021, Hootsuite’s popularity is still going strong and it is still one of the most sought-after choices available for digital marketers. Here’s all you need to know about Hootsuite:

• Hootsuite is a social media management tool where you can connect multiple social accounts on its interface and manage them all from a single place.
• It’s used to schedule posts for each social media and publish them all from one place.
• Review content on each platform to get a side-by-side performance analysis.
• Hootsuite connects more social media platforms than other similar social management tools and this happens to be its USP.
• Hootsuite generates insightful analytics to help you make the best decisions pertaining to campaign budgets, etc.
• Hootsuite offers specific tools like Hootsuite Analytics, Hootsuite Insights, and Hootsuite Impact, all paid tools for in-depth analysis for social media performance.

2. Google Analytics:

Anyone with a career in digital marketing knows that Google Analytics is not the right tool for social media management. But it may surprise you, that Google Analytics does have social media management. Here’s how Google Analytics can help with tracking your social performance:

• Social analytics is free to use on Google Analytics.
• Monitor traffic and leads flow on Google Analytics coming in from each social platform.
• With Google Analytics, you can set up reports for your social campaigns and share it with your team for in-depth insights into key metrics.
• Obtain demographic data and see platform-specific conversion data.

3. BuzzSumo:

Another popular name among social media monitoring tools, BuzzSumo has been around for a while. Popular for content marketing and content analytics, BuzzSumo is a well-known social media management tool used by businesses and is highly recommended for marketers in 2020-21. Here’s everything you can do with BuzzSumo:

• BuzzSumo is a favourite among content marketers because of its ability to throw light on the performance of different pieces of content from various perspectives.
• It gives a bird’s-eye view of an article’s performance on the internet including its share-journey.
• BuzzSumo is used as a research tool by marketers to improve their content performance. It offers unlimited searching for keyword-based content.
• It works not just for social media platforms but also for QA sites like Reddit and Quora.

4. Platform-specific Analytics Tools:

All the social platforms nowadays have their very own analytics tools to monitor outreach. Most are free to use and are built-in to help you understand user behaviour and put it to your advantage. You can benefit from the free features or upgrade to a paid version if the need arises. However, the reason why everyone doesn’t just use the built-in tools for social media is that they don’t match up in capabilities to dedicated social media tools. Here are some popular social analytics tools to get you started:

Facebook Insights – Primarily useful for Ad spend analysis on Facebook. It’s best used as an analytics comparison tool to check how your audience engages with your content.

Pinterest Analytics – Pinterest Analytics is quite popular with those who understand the power of Pinterest to grow an audience. To access Pinterest Analytics, you need to convert your account from personal to ‘business’. You can see impressions on your pins, engagement insights, top-performing pins as well as the traffic coming in from various sources.

Just like Facebook and Pinterest, every platform including Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. also has its own dedicated analytics tool.

5. Tailwind:

Tailwind has made a name for itself especially around Pinterest. A tailwind is a social tool focused on two social platforms namely, Instagram and Pinterest. So, it’s specifically an analytics tool for visual social platforms. Visual social creators are using Tailwind to schedule their feed and pins. Tailwind automates manual posting, improves your reach and subsequently your follower base.

Here’s a quick overview of Tailwind for Pinterest and Instagram:

• Pin and Post on auto, schedule your content even when you are not using the app. Engage with followers and target different time zones.
• Tailwind is best used for Pinterest marketing, to grow the outreach of your blog and to view which content is working best for your blog.
• Get insights, analytics and tweak your strategy accordingly.
• Review all the stats about your Pinterest account on a single dashboard including the number of followers, pins and repins gained.
• Evaluate your engagement with stats like ‘Virality Score’, ‘Engagement Rate’, etc.
• Benefit from other features like ‘Pin Inspector’ to check the health of a particular pin.
• Tailwind can also be used to view website insights.

6. Sprout Social:

Sprout Social is a one-stop solution for managing multiple social profiles on a single dashboard. You can fine-tune and manage the nitty-gritty of everyday social media exchanges from Sprout Social.

SproutSocial has the below interesting features to note:

• SproutSocial’s ‘Smart Inbox’ collects messages received from all connected social platforms and shows them on one inbox interface where you can attend to them without logging into each social individually or leaving SproutSocial’s dashboard.
• SproutSocial has social automation tools to create pre-built audience responses to messages, as well as for post scheduling and performance measurement.
• SproutSocial also has Team Collaboration, Publishing, Reporting and Analytics tools.

7. Unbox Social:

Unbox Social is an analytics platform for social media which is also dedicated to ‘Influencer Marketing’.

• It’s backed by AI technology and has a whole suite of tools for social marketing.
• Unbox Social is used by social media managers worldwide to achieve improved performance in their social campaigns.
• Unbox Social also has a special capability which allows you to gauge your social performance alongside that of your competitors.

8. Keyhole:

Keyhole is another name that pops up everywhere when we speak about social media tools for performance.

• Keyhole is primarily aimed at setting up and managing social media campaigns.
• With keyholes, you can not only run targeted campaigns, but you can also perform market research on any social site.
• Keyhole offers a unique analytics approach called the ‘real-time hashtag tracker’ tool for different social media platforms.
• Keyhole has a far-reaching hand when it comes to deriving metrics of posts from any date and time.

9. Social Pilot:

SocialPilot has made a name for itself as one of the most convenient social performance tools out there. It connects many social platforms at the same time and is yet unmatched in this capability.

• You can connect socials of more than one website on Social Pilot and individually track performance for each of them.
• Apart from the usual audience engagement and demographics, Social Pilot improves your brand awareness and opens the doors to massive inflows of traffic.
• For a nominal fee, Social Pilot gives you access for managing up to 50 social accounts on its interface.

10. Awario:

A less known name but nonetheless powerful in the social media scenario. Awario is a social listening tool you can use for in-depth research purposes on social platforms.

• Awario produces powerful insights instantly.
• It lets you keep track of your competitors presence and progress on the social media scene.
• With Awario, you have complete awareness about your brand health, competition, audience, and industry insights.
• Awario is aimed at making you instantly aware and notified when your brand is mentioned in some corner of the web. Mentions of your social pages instantly show up on the Awario dashboard for review.

Conclusion:

Social media platforms realize the need for analytics as more businesses jump in to use their platform for customer outreach. Pre-built native tools are already available which get the job done well. So, the question is, why should you go for a paid, dedicated social media tool for better performance? The answer is simple. Paid, dedicated tools are built to challenge the limits posed by platform-specific tools.

Another obvious need fulfilled by social media tools is that digital marketers are free to monitor many social platforms on a single interface instead of going unnecessarily back-and-forth on multiple socials, making things much more manageable.

Social media is a goldmine for digital marketing since the opportunities to tune in to your audience preferences are immense. With an immense potential, choosing the right social media tool and investing in it while upgrading to a paid version is a critical task. The objective is to obtain maximum ROI from social campaigns while optimizing budget. Keep this goal in mind while choosing a social media tool to improve your brand/website/business performance.