Social media has become one of the leading advertising platforms in recent years, and the growth in use as a promotional platform has lead to a spike in tools to help manage it all. Every other week, a new tool seems to be released to help improve your social media management team's productivity or to help curate the best content, etc.
Instead of making you do the research work on these options, we've put together this listing to highlight a few of our favorite tools which our social media team utilizes weekly.
These are some of the best social media tools and extensions available to help you optimize your time, complete tasks, curate and schedule content, display your analytics, communicate with your team, and monitor your social media channels.
Social Media Management, Monitoring and Dashboards
Buzzlogix
We're obviously biased, but Buzzlogix has our vote for best social media and monitoring tool. Our social media software beta improves each week, with feature updates and improvements based on user feedback.
Buzzlogix's powerful social listening tool includes topic streams (feeds of posts from across the web), post scheduling, alerts and messaging. In short, Buzzlogix simplifies social media monitoring and engagement.
Additional features includes a global dashboard of your selected social media data and direct messaging and replies to your followers. Our tool enables you to listen in real time to the conversations around your brand, your market and your competition. Add relevant topic streams, identify online influencers and advocates and pull real-time data on demand. Our newest features give you the power to search your topic streams for an even more specific term. Buzzlogix's beta is available for all. Register today, for free.
Later
Later is the top marketing platform and scheduling tool for Instagram. Through Later, you're able to plan, publish and schedule your visual content campaigns. With several plans to choose from, Later provides flexibility for individuals, small businesses, agencies and large teams to use the tool.
We love social media management tools that help us focus on creating instead of deciding when to post. Our favorite part? Free Instagram scheduling WITH free Instagram analytics.
SumAll
Whether you're an independent social media marketer, or a large team, tracking and analyzing your analytics dat is key to understanding (and demonstrating) the value you're adding to a business. SumAll lets you connect an unlimited number of your social media accounts, for yourself and your clients. Collecting analytics and displaying them in an organized fashion can be tricky. SumAll does a great job of putting all of the data in one, easy-to-read report.
Our favorite part? SumAll let's you take all the credit by enabling you to brand the reports as your own.
Project Management and Collaboration
Teamwork
This tool has been a lifesaver to many startups and marketing teams (including Paypal, Forbes, and Spotify).
Teamwork's free version gives you access to many of its project management tools and collaboration features. Visualize project completion status, set milestones and evaluate risks, bill clients, all while keeping organized along the way.
Teamwork has options that keep cost low, but you need to upgrade to the paid versions for high quantities of ongoing projects.
Our favorite feature? Assigning tasks and deadlines to team members in a few clicks.
Content Curation and Time-Savers
Our second favorite Chrome extension.
Pocket is your bookmark bar alternative - add the Pocket extension to Chrome and easily save must-read articles, videos, and images. Tag items in your pocket so you can quickly reference them in the future.
We like to use Pocket when we are on-the-go - save an article to your Pocket to get back to when you have an extra minute.
Like the next extension, Pocket let's you compile content to brainstorm with or to brush up on daily news.
Zest
Zest reminds us a lot of Pocket, but content is pulled for you automatically based on your interests.
Their site states that Zest is "is a new-tab feed of content suggested by marketers, for marketers. All manually moderated."
We don't always have time to hunt down the best content related to social media monitoring (we're busy building our tool) but Zest does the work for us. We like to recommend articles relating to social listening software, influencer marketing and social media automation. Add the Zest extension to get started.
Visually
Visually is a collected network of freelancers used to create stunning visual content - you can see a few examples of their colorful portfolio above. It's a known fact that visual brand assets are the highest performing on social media. Visual.ly isn't cheap, but it offers a robust platform of options for teams that are ready to take their content marketing to the next level.
Other services include social media marketing strategy, PR, video production, and interactive microsites. Save time by letting the pros do the work.
Canva
Designing your social media campaign visuals on a budget? Canva has been a favorite since its launch in 2012 - and the best part? You can use their beautifully designed templates for free.
The paid version provides extra features like resizing and collaboration tools.This is a great tool to use when you need visual material quickly or need the flexibility to make edits often.
Be careful - many teams utilize the brilliance that is Canva, so make sure to keep your designs fresh and unique. We love that Canva makes us feel like we can design anything without having to learn the language of other design software.
We hope you'll try some of our favorite time-saving tools.