Social media enables brands to market their products and services to their target audiences, which is a cost-effective alternative to the traditional advertising methods. However, growing your social media account can take a lot of effort if you run several social media accounts. From determining what to post to responding to your audience and everything in between, it can be hard to manage all these tasks.

The good news is that you can leverage social media tools and resources to take your account to the next level. These tools can help you manage social media tasks more efficiently and save you a lot of time and effort. This article will guide you on everything you need to know about social media tools and resources.

What Are Social Media Tools?

Social media tools are resources for various tasks such as content creation, scheduling, publishing, analytics, and automation. They can help you track the performance of your tools across different channels. They can also help you analyze metrics such as engagement, audience demographics, and the success of your campaign. The exact features available will depend on individual tools. In all, they make it easier to track the performance of your social media account and even improve it.

Factors to Consider When Searching For a Social Media Tool

Searching for a good social media tool can be a daunting task. Here are a number of factors to consider to help you make the right choice.

Impact on ROI

A good social media tool should enable you to get a higher ROI on your social media advertisement. For instance, if it can help you create great content on a large scale, it can help you boost your ROI. Similarly, a good social media tool should enable you to increase your engagement and visibility.

One-stop Data Hub

Managing all your data in one place makes everything easier. It eliminates confusion and switching between multiple tools. When searching for a tool, you need to select one that supports everything from publishing to analytics and monitoring.

More Efficiency

A rather obvious reason people choose to use social media tools is to improve efficiency. Therefore, when searching for a tool, you need to ensure that it allows you to automate or make certain tasks easier.

Provide Great Performance Insights

One of the most important steps when running a social media campaign is tracking its performance. A top social media tool will help you track your campaign's performance by providing helpful insights. Therefore, you need to ensure that you select a tool with great social media reporting and analytics. These can help you determine how well your campaign is performing.

Benefits of Using Social Media Analytics

If you are wondering whether it is worth getting a social media analytics tool, here are a number of reasons to consider:

Data Collection and Analysis

A good social media analytics tool provides metrics that are more than just likes, shares, and comments. They provide additional data on your social media interactions, such as the engagement rate, reach of your posts, audience demographics, sentiment analysis, and more. These expanded metrics provide powerful insights into the performance of the content.

The more metrics are available, the better the insights on what drives engagement, conversion, and more. The metrics show marketers what resonates with their audience and where improvement is needed. This data depth is key for evaluating a brand's strategy and identifying optimization areas.

By leveraging various social media platforms, brands can examine the performance of specific campaigns in depth while uncovering patterns and trends. This can prove helpful in developing a more informed campaign strategy. If there are any changes to be made, social media managers can make them in real-time.

Simplified Social Media Reporting

Another benefit of social media reporting tools is that they enable users to generate reports. Social media managers and marketers don't have to pull data from multiple areas. Instead, the data is pulled from one location, ensuring consistent reports. On top of time-saving, the data is more accurate.

The tools also enable users to customize reports for a particular goal, such as engagement tracking or evaluating the brand's overall performance. Additionally, the software allows users to create reports for several platforms, providing them with holistic data. This data is key to helping social media managers oversee different channels and get a holistic view of their social media efforts. The tools make it easy for teams to share results with other stakeholders, ensuring better communication and decision-making.

Competitive Benchmarking

The top social media management tools make it easier for brands to compare their performance against that of their competitors. By tracking their key performance indicators, it's easy for businesses to see what their competitors are doing right or wrong and the areas they can improve on. This competitive analysis enables brands to improve their strategies and remain ahead of their competitors.

Brands can determine the type of topical posts and strategies that are performing well for their competitors. This enables them to adapt these to their content strategies. With good competitive benchmarking, you can understand the market and make some smart and data driven decisions for your brands.

Analyzing Industries and Trends

On top of helping compare your brand against competitors, social media tools provide important data and competitive insights. They can compare the performance of your brand against that of your direct competitors in the industry. This can help provide a better view of the market trends and industries.

When they have access to the industry data, brands can determine if there are shifts in audience preferences, arising trends, and growth opportunities. Since the tools often provide historical data, it is easier for brands to track their performance over time. The long-term insights are great for noticing trends, determining seasonality, and checking the performance of the social media strategy. When brands analyze past data, they can see what worked and what did not and, therefore, adjust their campaign to align with industry emerging trends.

Best Social Media Analysis Tools

To reap the most benefits from your social media tools, you need to select the right one for your campaign. Here are our top recommendations for the best social media tools.

Sprout Social

If you are searching for a social media analysis tool to enable you to perform a wide range of tasks from one area, you should consider Sprout Social. It has different features to enable you to perform a wide range of functions, from social media listening, managing campaigns, to performance analysis. These include:

• Visual calendar. This great feature enables you to plan your social media content and diversify your posts.
• Optimal send time. Another great feature that allows you to set up when your post goes live is to maximize the engagement of your audience. You can use it to determine the best time for publishing your posts by using audience data that spans 16 weeks.
• Inbox help. This feature enables you to manage your DMs and comments in one space. You can receive crisis notifications and determine the priority messages. The inbox help also comes with AI assistance to improve your response time.

With the above comprehensive features, Sprout Social is a great tool for businesses and agencies. The tool will simplify your social media workflows with message tagging and team approval workflows. In addition, you will receive reports that are ready for presentation.

Keyhole

If you need a tool to help you with your influencer marketing analysis, you should consider a keyhole. The tool offers social media data for various platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter. It allows users to track different metrics such as hashtag performance, follower growth, and engagement rate. You can read our guide on LinkedIn engagement tactics to grow your following.

With Keyhole’s influencer benchmarking, you can compare different influencers, making it easier to find one that delivers great value for your brand. The feature is important for a well-optimized social media strategy that delivers results. The tools, therefore, are a great choice for brands that use influencers and marketing as it offers detailed insights into the activities of the influencer, enabling you to determine if they are best suited for your business.

The tool also has a channel analysis that enables brands to track their performance on different platforms. They can tell the channel providing them with the highest engagement. When combined with cross-platform analytics, it becomes easier to collaborate and track the performance across different channels. Whether you are a social media manager or marketer, you can use Keyhole’s data to enhance relationships and improve influencer relationships.

Therefore, if your brand is serious about influencer marketing, you can use Keyhole to enable you to analyze and optimize the relationships. With its metrics for influencer growth and engagement, you can maximize your partnership with influencers on different platforms. It's a great tool for influencer marketing on TikTok and other social media sites.

Social Insider

If you want a tool that focuses more on competitor analysis, Social Insider will help you do that. It is, therefore, a great choice for tracking the performance of your competitors. It will also show you various benchmark metrics, such as engagement rates, while helping you identify their top-performing content.

If you would like to categorize your posts according to their performance or topic, the AI content pillar enables you to do that. This means you can easily get insights into the performance of your audience. Another key feature of the tool is the social media benchmarks that will help your brand to position itself in its industry by showing their stand.

You can use Social Insider to analyze the social media strategy of your competitors. By doing that, you can notice trends on TikTok and other social media sites, refine your content strategy, and improve the overall performance of your social media strategy. You can use the content tagging and benchmarking features to analyze what works and what doesn't. This makes optimizing your social media approach and improving your campaigns possible.

Therefore, Social Insider is a great tool for social media users who want to deeply analyze their content strategy, see if there are content gaps, and enhance their social media content strategy.

SocialPilot

If you want to track the performance of your social media posts across different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you should consider SocialPilot. The tool features an automatic report generation feature that enables the generation of daily, weekly, or monthly reports. This not only saves time but also ensures tracking consistency.

With its robust social media KPI dashboards, SocialPilot offers great insights into audience demographics, content success, and engagement levels. You can count on the tool to make better and more informed decisions driven by data. You can also use it for white-label reporting so that you can present better and more customized reporting for better client communication.

If you are a marketing team, agency, or small to medium-sized enterprise searching for a tool with a better reporting capability, SocialPilot will serve you well. The tool will also work great for teams managing several social media accounts, offering them a more simplified reporting option that removes the need for manual task handling. If you are an agency managing several clients, you can use white-label reporting to enable you to present data professionally. The growth tracker is a great tool for tracking your growth opportunity.

SocialBee

One key feature that puts Social Bee ahead of other social media analytics tools is its   AI-powered analytics feature, which enables businesses of all sizes to manage their social media accounts. The tool has a wide range of valuable features, such as the audience demographic analysis, which provides helpful insights into an audience's age, gender, and location. With its post-performance tracking feature, you can track how well individual posts perform and highlight the top-performing ones.

The tool also has a content analysis feature, which provides users with real-time content monitoring and customizable heat maps that help optimize posting times. This great tool can enable you to make granular data analyses into metrics like video completion rate on TikTok. Therefore, if you are looking to streamline your social media efforts using automation, Social Bee is a great tool to enable you to do that.

RivalIQ

If you want a tool to benchmark your profile and performance, RivalIQ will enable you to do that. The tool will provide important insights into your competitors and the strategies working for them. It will show the key areas where your competitors are focusing and even help you compare profile attributions such as the about statement and their bio.

The tool is excellent for tracking social media trends. It provides necessary analytics and competitor intelligence, enabling you to make better and well-informed decisions. It also provides insights into your competition to help you improve your results. By using its comparative analysis and competitive benchmarks, social media managers can find new opportunities, stay abreast of trends, and track results across different social media channels and the internet, too.

Canva

While most of the tools we have discussed above focus on social media account posting, scheduling and analysis, Canva helps to make it easier to create social media content. With thousands of predesigned templates, you can create your social media visuals in a few simple steps. In fact, the templates already come while optimized for different social media platforms. Therefore, you don't need to worry about cropping and resizing graphics after you have created them.

Another great thing about this tool is that it comes with template collections in line with different social media trends. For instance, there are trends for #WithMe or camera roll dump. These features are great for co-creating relevant and trendy content for engaging with your audience.

Co-schedule

If you need a tool to help you plan your social media publishing strategy, Co-schedule is an excellent choice. The tool enables you to create a social sharing plan. You can save these as templates to re-use and, therefore, make your publishing efforts easier. The ReQueue enables you to regularly publish content to fill out your calendar. 

With Co-schedule, you can easily publish across different social media platforms.  Additionally, it comes with a Best Time Scheduler to enable you to optimize the send times to reach your audiences during their most active hours. You can schedule the same messaging to be posted on different platforms. 

The social helpers and template can help you save a lot of time by auto-populating social media channels. The tool also has a bulk upload option to upload content from a spreadsheet.

Conclusion

If you want to take your social media account to the next level, you need to take advantage of the best social media tools and resources. Not only will these tools simplify your work, but they can enable you to stay ahead of your competition. With features such as competitor analysis and engagement rate, you can find out the kind of content that resonates with your audience. If you are getting started with social media tools, you can consider one of the above options. We recommend you also read our guide on using the Twitter analytics tool to grow your following.