Analytics is the foundation of your planning efforts, and with more brands relying on consumer data provided by them, it’s critical to have accurate social media marketing software you can trust. However, there are many types of players in this social media analytics game, so how do you know which ones are the best for your team? That’s where we come in.
We’ve compiled a list of the top 15 social media software tools for your 2022 (and beyond) marketing endeavors. And we’ve highlighted their best qualities to help you maximize your marketing spend and efforts.
And while we explore these top tools, keep these statistics in mind:
- There are more than 307 million users on Facebook.
- YouTube and Reddit were the only two platforms measured that saw statistically significant growth since 2019.
Now for those tools!
NetBase Quid
When it comes to consumers, social media is a part of their everyday life – and they consume it in mass quantities. They crave it right when they wake up, just like a cup of coffee. And with social media being just as common as that cup of coffee, it’s important to note that consumers talk in more than one place: 7 out of ten Americans are on Facebook and there are 210 million on YouTube exploring videos. Oh, and Tik Tok, the rising star is expected to have 1.5 billion users by the end of 2022. Social media isn’t going anywhere and you can’t afford to have a social media marketing software tool that doesn’t cover consumers daily activities on all of these platforms. Fortunately, NetBase Quid covers a vast number of sources and domains such as Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, blogs, news sources, even review sites (where they dish about companies) – like Glassdoor.
NetBase Quid is like the quarterback, directing the social capture team and driving results. With options for both consumer intelligence and market research, this social media software tool can be applied to a variety of use cases. These include, but are not limited to, monitoring brand health, boosting campaign performance, crisis management and competitive analysis.
And it does this all with the help of next generation AI and natural language processing (NLP). Together, they spot consumer trends over time offering your brand the chance to be a leader in the conversation. All the while offering accurate language analysis with deep insights into what’s driving consumer emotions and behavior. Additionally, it offers deep dives into demographics gathering up not just common geography or genders, but professions, interests and more.
It does this rapidly, with reports that can be easily shared between team members and with stakeholders.
Rival IQ
Enhancing your own business strategy should be ever evolving, and one of the top ways to do this is to benchmark your brand against others out there. You can be sure that your competition is doing the same, as consumers are changing brands daily, you can’t afford to remain ignorant of how your competition is perceived. During the past year, 39% of consumers have either changed brands or retailers, and there is evidence to suggest that this may be the new norm. This is all the more reason to measure yourself against the other companies vying for your consumers’ attention.
Rival IQ does a deep dive into your competition, locating which brands are succeeding. This way you can copy their moves for your own success – or do better. It starts with audience growth metrics, pinpointing which social channels are seeing the most follower growth. From there, you can view average activity of a brand or brands. How many times a day do they post? What emojis do they use in their bios? Are there any hashtags that are seeing high traffic? These questions (and more) can be answered using Rival IQ’s social media marketing software.
And of course, it’s rounded out with brand positioning metrics, where you see your efforts and that of your competition side by side. Additionally, you can schedule reports to be delivered straight to your inbox, keeping you constantly updated on the competitive landscape.
Buffer
This tool is for anyone who wants to build a social media presence and needs minimal analytics. Buffer allows scheduling posts for a up to 25 social accounts (that number depends on the tier you choose), along with permission for six users, and scheduling for up to 2,000 posts. Free analytics come with this and cover social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.
The analytics are fairly basic, but valuable nonetheless. It will analyze metrics such as audience demographics and it can compare various post types such as videos, images, text, and links to see which one performs best. It has a handy suggestion tool which gives you your brand direction on best times and frequencies to post. They do have a new tool called Start Page, which allows brands to build a customized landing page. This makes this social media software a true all-in-one tool. Host your domain and run analytics to see where you stand!
And like any good social media marketing software, you can create reports that contain this data and share it with your team and clients.
Sendible
This tool offers social media management, and is a lot like Buffer. It allows you to create and publish content across multiple channels and interact with users from within the software. It also offers white label reports, client management, team collaboration and consumer analytics.
As a social media marketing software, using it to monitor for relevant conversations to be a part of is really simple. Just set up a Twitter search to look for trending keywords or hashtags that aree resonating with your followers. And although they don’t offer sentiment or behavioral driver intel, you can monitor content and attached sentiment for keywords and topics. You just can’t dig in to see what’s “driving” it, basically. All of this comes together in a visual analytics interface to measure how effective your marketing effort has been, or how your campaign is faring.
They do offer decent team features, such as filtering for a specific team member’s post or sending posts for approval. And as far as reports go, you have the choice of using their built-in reports or building your own with their report builder tool.
IFTTT
IFTTT stands for If This, Then That. This social media software app is all about creating connections. Think in terms of keeping your content in the view of many consumers, spread out over the many social platforms – this is what IFTTT facilitates. You won’t need to log into each account, rather all of your apps are connected in IFTTT. It’s a bit different from places like Hootsuite or Buffer where you choose which apps to share with. With IFTTT, you create actions which trigger responses.
If you write a blog for example, it can create a link that is automatically shared on Pinterest. It works like this:
- Figure out your trigger (i.e., posting a company blog on change of services, or research relevant to what you offer)
- Figure out what you want done from that trigger (email sent out to clients and employees to keep them in the know)
This social media marketing software can also help your brand create a file of Tweets to have on hand to reuse. This can save time searching for content to share with the masses. And there are so many uses for this social media software tool besides. It’s about saving time, and time is money.
Feedly
If you like very neatly organized social media information in one spot, then Feedly is for you. This social media marketing software uses Leo to help keep all your ducks in a row.
As a company you likely follow many news sources and outlets to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in your industry, and with consumers. However, many of those articles won’t apply to your category specifically. This where Feedly’s bot Leo, comes in. It reads all the articles for you and prioritizes them by insights based on what you set as important. They can be prioritized by keywords, trends, topics, and articles similar to your own board. And Leo learns from your feedback, getting smarter as it goes.
And like any great market analytics, it allows you to share all of your insights between team members, so everyone has the same intel to work from.
Post Planner
Social media marketing software is the bread and butter of advertising efforts. With it, 73% of marketers believe that their efforts have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their brands. Consumer engagement is the name of the game, and Post Planner helps you stay connected. It gives you the power to create and post to multiple social media platforms and then manage those sites. And you can schedule posts for publishing ahead of time. This is critical as posting consistently is key to keeping your consumers engaged.
To help you with content, this site has a content search engine and library enabling you to create your own firehouse of content resonating with your consumers. You can post this content immediately or save it for later. It also has a nifty recycling tool, allowing you to find top performing past posts to reuse. Another fun aspect is the ability to search for quotes. Scrolling Instagram will reveal that quotes are popular. And why is that? Well, though longer posts may be better for SEO purposes, quotes are quickly and easily consumed by your viewers, who may not want to read a lengthy dissertation. And quotes illicit an emotional response, and since product purchases are often made emotionally, finding the right quote may push those fence sitters over the purchasing edge.
Their analytics are basic but offer sorting by likes, comments and shares. Sadly, there’s nothing indicating what they liked about the post or why they are sharing it. Having that intel would help better guide a brand in creating future content. However, for the basics and for individuals or small businesses, this tool could be just right.
It’s imperative that brands stay on top of all the information out there. 44% of consumers say that ads are irrelevant to their needs and 74% say that they see too many ads on social media – so, connecting in a more intimate way with consumers has to become mission number one for brands. Pocket is a social media marketing software tool that helps you keep track of articles, videos and apps so that you can find relevant and meaningful content to either repost, or use to start a conversation with your consumers on your page.. And with the rise of users on sites like Reddit which has a community feel and has experienced significant growth since 2019, you can’t afford to miss out on valuable intel.
Pocket is not your traditional bookmarking system. Instead, it’s more like a reading list. Once you’ve finished an article or video, you have the option to archive it or delete it. And it gives you viewing options, such as grid vs list with everything categorized by type of content. It also allows you to highlight passages or sentences you read as a note taking system. And lastly it gives you offline access to articles, videos and other items you’ve saved.
As a social media marketing software tool, it helps you stay in the know and up to date with world trends and news – all of which can be applied to your next business venture.
Tweetdeck
Twitter users, this one is for you! If you have a Twitter, then you know it’s algorithm and even the way consumers respond on this platform are totally different from many of the other options out there. And so, it’s no wonder that there are social media marketing softwares that act as a management app for this little blue bird of social interactions.
Tweetdeck is a social media marketing software analytics tool, offering real time tracking, organizing and engagement. It features an all-in-one interface where users can tweet, reply, retweet, favorite and even send direct messages. You can monitor multiple accounts and streams, following, muting or blocking them straight from this app. And of course, you can create and schedule your tweets for future postings.
Canva
This social media software is all about the looks! If you need a little pep in your step and maybe aren’t the best photographer, or just need extra ideas, Canva can do it. Graphic design impacts your consumers behavior, so you want to be sure you have just the right one.
With Canva, you’ll have over 420,000 templates and over 3,000 fonts. This includes the option to bring your own fonts, adding your own personal touch. But it goes a step beyond this, you can add animation, erase backgrounds, and effortlessly resize your images. You can invite members to your team to collaborate together and from there share your creation with up to 7 social media sites.
You’ll need to pair this social media marketing software with another analytics tool which can perform a detailed audience segmentation to be sure your graphics hit the customer’s happy button. But from there it’s all gravy!
Unsplash
This is a stock images tool for social media software users. These images can be used on blogs, in your next Facebook story or anywhere online. The library of photos it offers is so large, you’ll likely never get through it all.
You simply search for what you’re looking for, download the photo (royalty free) and you’re good to go! It keeps your followers riveted to your page.
The benefits of their search model is how specific you can get with it. So, if you’re looking for swimwear from Louis Vuitton for example – Bam! There it is! And just like Canva, you’ll want to be sure you use social media marketing software analytics to help uncover images that will relate to your audience.
They also have an advertising service that creates individual ads just for your company. You can join their waitlist.
Monday
Monday is a social media marketing software that brings teams together in one place to get consistent updates.
If your team needs more togetherness on the most recent social media campaign, Monday can help facilitate this with its customizable dashboards of tasks. These individual tasks can be broken down into other tasks which offer ways to track team efforts. The boards are color-coded making it easier to find. And it provides updates on assigned tasks.
Monday offers templates which can be a timesaver. You can pick what works for you and apply it. It’s good for both beginners and advanced users. You can automate repetitive work too. For example, when you get a new email, you can have the system create a new lead in the pipeline.
Beyond this, Monday is a social media planner and helps keep your brand voice consistent. This aids consumers in identifying your brand no matter what, across all of your social channels. Because of how Monday is set up, all team members have access to the same tools with a solid approval workflow system in place.
This tool can be integrated with your existing tools such as Dropbox or Gmail.
Asana
This tool helps teams organize everything. Through this social media software, you can track long-term goals or day-to-day tasks. And the best part is every one of your team members can track it alongside of you and find their specific duties, priorities, and track their individual progress.
Each task assigned to your team members can further be divided into sub-tasks. Add descriptions, attach files or invite other project participants – this social media software tool manages it all for jobs that increase social media brand health. And since this tool has a goal-tracking tool, it’s easy to keep track of where your efforts are succeeding or failing – all in one place.
Wrike
This is a management tool for your teams, and since studies have shown that synergy in the workplace and amongst team members is crucial to brand success, it’s a tool not to be taken lightly. There’s not a lot that this social media software doesn’t do. So rather than list everything it can help with, we’ll highlight a few top points.
Wrike is the ultimate consolidator, from your projects to tasks outside of those. It has a drag and drop function that makes it easy to move a task from new to in progress to completed. You can then view your project schedule and assign tasks in real time using that same drag and drop function.
Wrike offers report building capabilities with their report wizard to analyze results and keep everyone on the right track. This social media tool can be integrated into existing social media software tools your brand uses.
Loomly
Loomly is a social media software that acts as a calendar app to help your brand compose and schedule posts. However, its strength lies in its team efforts as well as a couple of smaller tool highlights.
With the tools it supplies for teams, the app tracks all modifications and updates performed by members. It then alerts managers to these changes.
And teams also have access to social media analytics tools. These tools help post optimization, aiding in wider demographic reach of social media users. From there, you can analyze how posts, shares and statuses are being received.
A real plus is in their cross-platform previewing. This simple tool allows users to preview what their post will look like on various platforms. This is a critical element especially for any photo content. Think of Instagram with its square format. Something posted on Facebook will share the whole photo, while on Instagram, your photo will be cropped.
And then if you’re ever worried about what to post, they have you covered with post ideas and inspiration. Once you’ve found the perfect idea, take advantage of their url shortener to help aid your brand in driving maximum traffic to your website.
There are many amazing social media marketing software tools out there. No matter if you’re looking for team building tools, social media sharing tools or design applications – you’ll need social media analytics to help you decipher activity on your social media accounts. Reach out for a demo and get your insight organized as a great first step!