Facebook is a powerful platform with an immense following. By 2017, a quarter of the world’s population was using Facebook monthly. Big is an understatement. Facebook is better described as “colossal.”
As a social seller, to ignore Facebook is to limit your potential severely. While LinkedIn might be the home of B2B decision-makers, most of the private discussions on social media platforms are taking place within Facebook Messenger and Facebook Groups.
Facebook Messenger is the top mobile app based on the number of downloads. For some, the app has replaced text messaging, instant messaging, and personal email altogether. It’s become an integral piece in the way the world communicates with one another.
But Messenger is often also the place where conversations go after relationships are taking shape. Initially, your interactions with prospects on Facebook are likely to take place in your timeline, on pages, and in Facebook Groups - but after that, Messenger shows its true potential.
Mastering social selling on Facebook requires dedication but represents the nearly unlimited potential in your ability to connect with your ideal prospects. With that said, Facebook is a big platform. Focus your efforts on the proverbial ‘meat and potatoes’ of your social selling operation. Use Facebook to identify, meet, and speak with your ideal prospects. Don’t focus on tasks that would be better automated.
If you’ve ever tried to keep your profile up to date with valuable content for your prospects daily, you know that it is a task easier said than done. You might plan out a few days, but most find that they quickly fall behind if they are relying on their ability to physically handle those tasks while creating conversations with ideal prospects at the same time. There are only so many hours in a day.
In this article, we’ll cover the top ten tools that you can use to bolster your social selling on Facebook. These tools cover a wide range of tasks, including update scheduling and automation, analytics, content development, and other tool categories to help you effectively leverage the platform.
Read more: 2023 Social Media Cheat Sheet for Realtors
#1) Buffer
Buffer is one of the most popular scheduling tools for Facebook (and other platforms). Why do we like this tool? A few reasons. First and most importantly, It’s incredibly simple to understand, set up, and use. While Buffer doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that other platforms do, it is, without a doubt, the easiest to use. Buffer also pioneered quality, industry-specific content recommendations for sharing built directly into their app. In just a few clicks, you can schedule posts sharing high-quality industry resources.
Another reason why we like Buffer is that they are dedicated practitioners of social selling, both as a brand and as individuals. In their early years, Buffer was built on the back of a strong social media presence and quality content that answered the most critical questions of their customers and prospects.
Through the development of valuable content with the high usability of their scheduling tool, they made themselves a useful resource for their target audience. It didn’t stop at their brand either, many senior Buffer employees maintained an active social media presence, growing the reach of the company organically. They’ve been very open about sharing their journey and offering a high level of transparency on their Buffer Open blog.
#2) Post Planner
Post Planner is Buffer on steroids. Their platform takes an excellent content recommendation system and makes it the centerpiece of their platform. Post Planner allows you to use their analytics system to identify the content that has the highest probability of performing with your audience based on how it has performed when shared by similar profiles. Then, you can quickly create post copy and content around what you are sharing and get it on your schedule.
The app also allows you to recycle previously posted content that performed well for your business. Over time, Post Planner’s analytics engine builds a profile that helps you determine the best times to share content with your audience.
With Post Planner, the proof is in the pudding. According to a recent study from Buffer, Post Planner drives much more engagement than other popular platforms:
Source: Post Planner
The one feature that we think makes Post Planner stand out is in its Facebook Group automation. Their basic plan allows you to schedule posts on Facebook Groups up to ten times per day. While this feature is compelling, it is also crucial that you use it sparingly.
If you have your groups that you administrate, you can use Post Planner to disseminate information. But if you are going to use it to publish content on public and private groups, make sure that you are following the rules of each group and sharing something that their audience will find genuinely valuable. Otherwise, you may drive people away from your group instead of attracting them. Or, if you do this excessively in someone else’s group, you may be pushed out.
Best of all — Post Planner is cheap. Seriously cheap. For just $3 per month, you can manage up to three social accounts on their platform.
#3) CoSchedule
CoSchedule is one of the most popular marketing process management systems. While the company initially started as a content marketing management system, it has grown to include tools for project management, task management, social media management, content management, and asset management. They provide a complete suite that any social seller (or team of social sellers) would find extremely useful.
CoSchedule allows you to build complete workflows within your content sharing operations. Their system not only helps you to automate tasks but provides real-time recommendations for improving your efforts on social platforms. For instance, when you create a new post within their system, they automatically offer suggestions for the best time to post (or recycle) the content that you share on social media.
#4) Sprout Social
Sprout Social is the swiss army knife in the social seller’s toolbox. The tagline of their homepage is “Real People, Real Brands, Real Connection.” If that doesn’t accurately convey that they are a solution that will help social sellers, we aren’t sure what will.
Sprout Social’s platform caters to enterprise, corporate, and small business applications alike. Their features include the ability to cover your entire publishing process, from drafting content to actively publishing on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Their system provides a complete social content calendar and helps you to analyze your data by providing actionable recommendations to improve your social media efforts.
#5) Likealyzer
Likealyzer is the tool that you invest in if you want to truly understand your audience and optimize your social selling and marketing operations on Facebook. Their platform is built with one thing in mind — being actionable. They don’t just want to tell you how you can improve your social media efforts; they want to deliver the tools that you need to do it.
First, they grade your performance on the platform. The grading is done by analyzing several different aspects of your social presence, such as your profile, pages, and social shares for engagement from your audience. Then, they allow you to benchmark your effectiveness against other industry averages. They make it easy to learn from what is helping others to succeed on the platform.
Likealyzer uses the data that they collect to provide actionable recommendations. A lot of tools say they do that, but these guys genuinely mean it. They recommend specific tactics that you can use to bolster your efforts on Facebook, using the millions of data points that the company collects to make those recommendations.
Likealyzer also offers in-depth reporting features that allow you to deep-dive into your social selling efforts and identify areas for improvement on your own.
#6) Social Bakers
Social Bakers is a social media management and analytics tool that places a lot of focus on research and understanding. With their system, you can learn what your audiences genuinely want to see. You can see what kind of content people are engaging with across your industry and directly join in conversations from their platform.
Their system is comprehensive. You can identify social media influencers, optimize your budget, and benchmark your results for optimization and improvement. For social sellers, Social Bakers offers unparalleled insight into your industry on all major social media platforms, including Facebook.
Another great feature is that Social Bakers allows you to sift through millions of conversations across social media platforms better to understand the sentiment within your audience around specific topics. This is incredibly important for social sellers because it allows you to craft content that speaks to more significant ideas and trends that are being discussed in your industry, which helps you position yourself as a true thought leader within your market.
#7) Animoto
Do you know what kind of content drives the most engagement on Facebook? Video. 45% of people watch more than an hour of Facebook and Youtube Videos per day. But creating video content can be challenging. You don’t want to have to jump in front of a webcam every time that you want to post new video content.
Animoto takes the complexity out of video creation and editing. Using their system gives you access to high-quality stock video footage so that you can create impactful but straightforward Facebook videos in just minutes. Using Animoto, you can quickly divulge facts and short copy content in a format that drives engagement. With Animoto in your toolbox, you can craft a more well-rounded Facebook social selling strategy that helps you to stand out from the competition.
#8) Shortstack
Shortstack is a game-changing tool for social sellers that rely heavily on surveys, contests, giveaways, or quizzes on social media. Shortstack is an excellent tool for quickly deploying ads that feature these tactics on Facebook. Their system handles everything, from creating the content and deploying it through Facebook’s advertising system.
Their system places a strong focus on not just generating leads, but helping companies to create accurate user-generated content that they can leverage in a variety of ways. For social sellers, it’s easy to realize how these types of strategies can be deployed in a personalized manner to help you collect information and deepen relationships with prospects. It’s the ultimate tool for quickly growing a list of engaged and excited followers.
#9) Grytics
For social sellers, few strategies can have more impact on Facebook than creating your group. Doing so allows you to connect more profoundly with your ideal audience while establishing yourself as a leader in your industry.
But there aren’t a whole lot of tools out there for managing and understanding engagement within your group. Luckily, Grytics’ platform comes to the rescue and does the heavy lifting for you here. Their system allows you to publish automatic updates, analyze engagement based on a variety of filters, and better understand how you can foster growth within your group.
Grytics’ in-depth reporting suite takes the guesswork out of running your own Facebook Group, allowing you to hone in on strategies that provide measurable results. That way, you can put more focus on building relationships and less on-page administration.
#10) Agora Pulse
Agora Pulse prides themselves on their ability to offer a simple solution while covering all of the major bases when it comes to social media marketing. For social sellers, their tool is incredibly valuable. Not only does it provide all of the necessary social media scheduling and management features that one would need and expect, but their platform offers in-depth monitoring features as well.
Using their social listening feature, you can monitor millions of conversations happening at any given time. Their “Listen” tool makes it easy to identify opportunities for growing relationships based on search parameters that you set within their system. Additionally, their tagging system allows you to designate brand ambassadors, engaged prospects, or create custom tags that help you to filter profiles within the system.
Tools Expedite Growth
Facebook social selling tools allow you to take the guesswork out of your strategies, automate essential aspects of your social publishing campaigns, and put yourself in a position to leverage more of the platform. At the same time, you focus on building and growing relationships that result in business. The tools outlined in this article will put you in a position to increase your reach on the platform successfully.
Let us know with any of your favorite tools we may have missed and that we should include.
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