Social Media Marketing Tools Every Beginner Must Learn to Use

A great deal of forethought, skill, and talent goes into orchestrating a memorable social media campaign. Yet, not even seasoned marketing vets could do it without the right tools for each aspect of the job. Are you new to a social marketing role and unsure which tools you’ll need to prosper? Read our guide and wonder no more!

Scheduling Tools

Developing content for and posting on a single social media platform is challenging enough for newbies, yet your company likely isn’t present on just one. Mastering scheduling tools lets you create and schedule content in advance, allowing the whole team to make coherent and meaningful contributions when it’s most convenient.

More importantly, you don’t need to switch between tabs and different platforms to post since everything is unified. Many other core tool categories use this same feature to great effect.

Engagement & Customer Service Tools

A viral social media campaign will galvanize existing fans of your brand, attract new ones, and likely bring out some nay-sayers. They’ll all want to share their opinions while expecting prompt and professional responses. Engagement tools capture activity on all channels and sort posts for more streamlined response handling.

Support tools help turn disgruntled customers into brand evangelists by timely connecting them with the staff members most competent to handle their complaints. You can also streamline part of the process via chatbots that offer solutions to the most frequent problems or can put customers in touch with qualified humans.

Social Mentions & Listening Tools

Interacting with followers is essential, but it’s not the only online source of attention for your brand. A social mentions tool can monitor variations of keywords and hashtags to pick up whenever someone is talking about you or the competition.

Social mentioning is adequate for smaller companies that need general confirmation of whether their marketing activities are creating a buzz. Social listening tools provide deeper insights. Specifically, they can create a sentiment analysis of the conversations surrounding you, your products, or your competitors.

The insights such analyses provide are invaluable. You can gain a deeper understanding of people’s attitudes and their posting intent. Collecting enough data also lets you identify common complaints and can even provide ideas on how to innovate, paving the way toward a larger market share.

Analytics & Reporting Tools

Every post, response, or like is a meaningful data point you need to harness. Analytics tools collect, process, and contextualize such data to paint a bigger picture of your marketing efficiency. Unlike limited platform-specific metrics, advanced analytics tools use a holistic approach that highlights performance across channels. This is essential for making timely adjustments to ongoing campaigns and setting yourself up for even better results in the future.

The amount and complexity of data on display can be overwhelming. Reporting tools simplify analytics insights, making them more approachable for higher-ups and other stakeholders without a marketing background. They save time doing report generation and also help highlight the tangible impact your efforts have on the profit margin.

Cybersecurity Tools

Part of doing a social media marketing job efficiently is ensuring all your social channel accounts have the best possible protection from cyber threats. Strong, one-of-a-kind passwords for each social media site and tool you use should be a top priority since compromising one can put all others with shared or even similar credentials at risk. That’s where downloading a password management tool might come in handy.

Password managers are specialized tools that streamline this aspect of your job. They can generate superior passwords for as many accounts as you and your teammates need. You may autofill or even securely share credentials with others as well. Most social media sites offer account protection through individual 2FA. Password managers provide a central hub that makes storing 2FA codes and recovering devices easier.

Miscellaneous Tools

The tools in our final category don’t have an underlying theme. However, they can all be useful in certain situations. Mastering them will make you a more rounded professional and increase your chances of advancement.

For example, many smaller companies look for social media managers with graphic design or video editing skills to augment or even step in for a content creation role. Familiarizing yourself with such tools may give you an edge when looking for work.

No one is creative 24/7, so there’s no shame in using idea generation and brainstorming tools to get the ball rolling. You’ll want as many interested people as possible to easily find your content, which is where search engine optimization tools come in.

There’s also the matter of staying productive in different situations. You might need to maintain interactions and postings while on the go or abroad. Exposing your accounts on public Wi-Fi is a big no-no. However, you can utilize eSIM tools to find the best rates wherever you are and do your work securely through a local cellular plan.

In a nutshell

As you can see, even a beginner’s digital plate is quite full! So, roll up your sleeves, learn more about each tool through research and practice, as well as hone your social media marketing skills to perfection.

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