Use Social Media Marketing Tools to Save Time and Manage Social Channels Better

Written by Lisa Chapman | Edited by Rory Hart
Sections of this topic
    engaging into social media marketing through a phone

    Content Curation and Management Tools

    Content Curation Tools, Content Discovery Tools and Social Media Management Tools

    Guest Author: Jessica Davis

    When you sit down to find relevant content to put before your social media audience, do you wish there were more hours in a day?

    Do you still follow an archaic system of posting content that involves logging in to Facebook first, followed by Twitter and then Pinterest or any other social networking site?

    Is social media analytics still an elephant in the room?

    Here are some awesome social marketing tools that if you explore very soon, your answer to these three questions will be an emphatic ‘no, no and hell no’.

    Content Curation Tools

    ‘Curate’ means finding, organizing, annotating and sharing quality digital content. Curation allows you to feed your social media audience with relevant content in a timely manner, supplement referenced content with your personal insights, and separate great content from merely good content.

    • With Feedly, not only can you browse feeds, blogs and news sites by your interests, but also categorize feeds into separate folders to organize and control content easily.
    • DrumpUp is one of the easiest, free content curation and social media content management tools for businesses. It uses smart algorithms to suggest personalized content for you to share with your Facebook and Twitter audiences. It also schedules content for posting, and effectively, acts as your social media assistant.
    • Spundge enables you to discover and organize content into neat notebooks; collaborate with influencers in your topics; and filter highly-targeted content for social sharing.
    • Pinterest isn’t just a content sharing network, it is a platform for gathering ideas around different topics or projects and cataloging them into interactive boards.
    • With Storify, you can create stories or timelines by gathering and publishing content across social media channels.

    Content Discovery Tools

    Social media facilitates inbound marketing. For successful inbound marketing, you need engaging, valuable content, relevant to your customers. Visiting different blogs or scouring the news each day to locate shareable content eats into valuable time. Content discovery tools offer content on various topics of interest, trending news, most-shared content, and more – all on one platform. Most require you to sign up with your email, Facebook account or Twitter account.

    • Prismatic‘s excellent algorithms use your social media feeds to evaluate your interests; they monitor usage and feedback for further evaluation to bring you highly relevant content you would have otherwise missed.
    • Newsle finds news about trending brands or people; articles published by journalists you follow; and news about people or brands similar to the ones you follow.
    • BuzzSumo brings you the most widely-shared content on social media sites and allows you to filter content by articles, guest posts, infographics, videos and interviews; finds influential content aggregators within any niche; and collects statistics on industry influencers and the sites they’re associated with. Its brand alerts (much better than Google Alerts) allow you to specify the brand or keyword mentions in the title and topic, or the title, topic and article text.

    Social Media Management Tools

    If your online social presence extends to multiple sites, you need a reliable social media management tool. Most of the tools out there share similar features, such as scheduling posts, adding photos or videos and providing analytics about the reach and engagement of your posts.

    • Hootsuite is a popular tool that connects more social networks than any other of its kind (35 in all), from FB, Twitter and Instagram to WordPress, Foursquare and Japanese social networking site Mixi. Its AutoSchedule feature allows you to automatically queue messages on the projected best times and post directly from the dashboard.
    • With Buffer, you can stagger posting times throughout the day and maintain a consistent weekly social media schedule with the least effort.
    • SocialOomph is the only tool that allows you to set up auto-follows, auto-responders and auto-direct messages. You’re also notified when someone retweets one of your tweets or you receive a @mention.
    • SproutSocial offers a simple and intuitive dashboard (“Smart Inbox”) unifying your social media profiles into a single stream. You can carry out content discovery, check out activity, publish content and view analytics from the Smart Inbox.

    Automation has eliminated the need to micro-manage social media marketing tasks without compromising audience engagement or digital marketing campaigns. Explore different tools to determine which one is a right fit for your business.

    Author Bio:

    Jessica follows the social media and content marketing space closely, and writes about it extensively. She represents Godot Media, a leading SEO writing and content marketing firm.

    For more social media and marketing resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.

    Lisa Chapman