2018 Social Media Marketing Tools

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With another year well underway, it’s time to take stock of where we are and to prepare for the months to come. With the social media industry constantly evolving at such a rapid pace, it can be difficult to keep up with what’s hot and what’s not.  At the same time, social networking sites are constantly reinventing themselves and deploying new features. They’ve also been known to change their APIs and to discontinue support for the services that rely on them. Some tools are just no longer relevant as needs change and new social networking sites rise and fall. That’s why we’ve pulled together this list of the best social media marketing tools in 2018 that are as relevant and as powerful as ever. Let’s go.

Top 8 Social Media Marketing Tools in 2018

1. Hootsuite

Are you looking for a simple, friendly to use platform to share and schedule social media posts across a range of different social networks? Hootsuite is the best tool for you. It’s so quick and convenient that it’ll quickly become your most used tool. Their reasonably priced pro plan grants access to a whole host of extra tools including real-time analytics features and auto scheduling content.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content discovery tool. It allows you to enter a set of keywords of your choice and to search for relevant content from across the web. What makes it different to a search engine, though?  It ranks its results based upon the number of social shares and interactions. That’s why it’s one of the best tools to use to find out what’s got people talking. You can use the content you find as fodder for social networking updates or you can use it to inform the content that you yourself create.

3. IFTTT

IFTTT stands for “if this then that”. And it basically acts as a connecting tool between different services. It allows you to create your own set of automatic rules. At its most basic level, you can create a rule that knows if you post a Facebook update and that will automatically share it on Twitter and LinkedIn. At a more advanced level, it can be put to all sorts of creative uses such as forming the framework of a customer service Twitter bot.

4. Buffer

Buffer is a little like Hootsuite in that it allows you to schedule posts to go out on different social networks. It’s been around since 2010. It started out as a simple scheduling tool for Twitter, but it now offers support for the vast majority of social media platforms. Buffer can even help to suggest the best time for you to share your content so that you make the most of it.

5. Canva

Canva is one of the favourite tools of social media thought leader Guy Kawasaki, and it’s easy to see why. It makes it super easy for people to create professional quality imagery for social networking sites without any graphic design experience or fancy software. It’s easy to dip in and out of and to use on the fly if you’re out of the office, and while it’s true that a professional designer could do a better job, they’d struggle to get it done that quickly.

6. DisplayPurposes

No list of the top 2018 social media marketing tools would be complete without a mention for DisplayPurposes. It allows people to enter their choice of keywords and to get a list of suggested hashtags for their Twitter and Instagram posts. Tools like these help you to select the perfect hashtags – those with the most traffic and the most engagement.

Post on Instagram

7. Later

Scheduling content can be super useful when it comes to social media marketing. It’s always difficult to find a decent solution for Instagram, which specifically prohibits third-party applications from publishing updates directly to the network. Luckily, the team at Later have figured out a pretty good workaround.  You schedule your posts in advance and then receive a push notification when it’s time so you can manually post the update yourself.

8. TweetDeck

If you’re spending a significant amount of time on Twitter then you’ll need to use a Twitter dashboard. This way you can monitor what’s happening and react to things in real time. TweetDeck has been around for a while now, but it’s a perennial favourite. Now it comes with some great features for marketing departments including the ability to use a single login for multiple accounts and to synchronise dashboards and other data between accounts.

Conclusion

The tools that will be relevant in 2018 and beyond will be those that continue to offer value to marketers.  Those which are able to make ongoing changes to the services they provide to match what their users are asking for. That was the key we used to select best social media marketing tools for our 2018 list. They’ve been around for a while because they’re good at what they do.Remember that these tools are designed to be a help and not a hindrance. If you find yourself spending too much time on a single tool or if you’re not seeing a worthwhile return from it, you should drop it. Social media tools should make you a better worker in 2018.Pick and choose from them to build your own personal toolkit. Then go ahead and put those tools to work and try to get to the list of best social media campaigns in 2018!

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