Social media marketing tools play a critical role in social selling. They give social sellers the ability to analyze the effectiveness of their efforts, schedule and automate portions of their social presence, and discover new and interesting content to share with their followers. But social sellers often have limited budgets and it is so important that you invest in the right tools to put yourself in the best position for social media management success.
As the prominence of social selling has grown, more competition has entered the ring. To get ahead, you need an edge. In this article, we’ll cover four of the best social media marketing tools that will help you to discover new prospects, schedule your social posts, find new and interesting content sources, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. It’s a crowded arena. There are hundreds of different tools to choose from, each offering its own unique features. However, we feel that these
#1: Top Social Media Prospecting Tool — LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Every social seller knows how powerful social media can be - especially for B2B sales prospecting. It’s perhaps the best source for not only identifying prospects but learning more about your buyers so you can position yourself appropriately and speak to subjects that they care the most about. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is the key to unlocking the full potential of LinkedIn, giving you more information to work with as you begin to develop relationships with your prospects.
Sales Navigator seamlessly integrates with most CRM solutions, allowing you to find prospects that match your ideal client profile. It also features detailed messaging and analytics features that make it easy to evaluate how your efforts are going on the platform. While prospecting can still be performed on LinkedIn without Sales Navigator, it certainly will make your efforts easier and more effective.
#2: Social Media Scheduling Tool — Buffer
There are tons of social media scheduling tools to choose from. Buffer is the most popular among them, and the tool that we feel most comfortable recommending due to its ease of use. While many scheduling tools are built into larger software suites, Buffer focuses on doing one thing and doing it very well.
Buffer makes it easy to schedule social updates across multiple accounts. They also have a built-in recommendation feature that hones its recommendations over time as Buffer learns about the types of content that you like to share with your audience. When it comes to automating a continued presence on social platforms, there are no tools that do it as efficiently (and cheaply) as Buffer.
#3: Content Research & Curation Tool — BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a very useful social media analytics tool that differs from the competition in several ways. Instead of analyzing your own brand’s social media performance, Buzzsumo looks at social media as a whole, giving you access to the most-shared content across the different social platforms.
This makes BuzzSumo the perfect tool for two tasks in particular (a reason why the tool has become an industry standard) — content research and curation. It’s perfect for seeing what your audience has shared and finding content sources to share with your own audience.
#4: Social Media Analytics Tool — Sprout Social
SproutSocial is the perfect social media analytics tool for social sellers. Sprout allows you to measure the performance of your campaigns across all relevant social networks from a single platform, making it easy to monitor engagement and communication from prospects from a central hub. It provides a beautiful, informative dashboard that quickly allows you to compare the performance of different campaigns across your chosen platforms, with customization features that ensure you always have the most useful view for your needs. It’s simple to set up, easy to use, and in-depth enough to make it hard to choose another solution in this category.
