Top 30 Social Media Marketing Tools: Free and Paid
Social media marketing has become a crucial aspect of digital marketing. It allows businesses to reach a diverse audience while building brand awareness and engaging with customers. People are more active on social media than ever. Hence, the need for social media marketing is on the rise.
There are a variety of social media marketing tools available that help businesses streamline their social media marketing efforts, improve engagement, and drive organic website traffic. In this blog, we will learn about social media marketing tools in detail.
Why Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is one of the types of digital marketing which offers powerful tools for businesses to connect with the audience, build awareness, and drive results.
Following are some of the reasons why social media marketing is preferred in the online age.
- Large Audience: Social media platforms have a large and diverse user base. It provides businesses with a great opportunity to reach this wider audience.
- Brand Awareness: Social media marketing helps businesses build brand awareness by increasing online visibility and engaging with the target audience.
- Cost-Effective: Traditional advertising methods are costly as compared to social media marketing. They can be tailored to fit the budget of any business and industry.
- Customer Engagement: Social media platforms allow businesses to engage with their customers in real-time. This provides valuable feedback and creates strong relationships.
- Increased Website Traffic: Social media marketing can drive organic traffic to a business’s website, which results in increased leads and sales.
- Measurable Results: Social media tools provide businesses with detailed analytics and insights. It allows them to track the effectiveness of their campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
There are majorly 7 types of social media marketing tools that are extensively used in social media marketing. Let’s understand each one of them one by one.
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Social Media Marketing Tools
The following is a list of common social media marketing tools.
1. Talkwalker Analytics
Talkwalker Analytics is a tool for social listening and reputation management apart from analytics. It searches the web for conversations about your brand and reports issues for you to tackle. It also offers media monitoring, social benchmarking, audience insights, and trend identification services. It further gives you detailed reports about your brand that you can use to draw comparisons with your competitors.
Key Features:
- It answers strategic questions in real time.
- It gets faster insights through AI automation.
- It provides influencer identification for social media marketing campaigns.
- It provides visual analytics and smart alerts.
Channels: It supports all major social media channels.
Pricing: It has various plans, such as Starter, Business, Premium, and Strategic. The prices are available on request.
2. Brand24
Brand24 is an AI-powered tool that helps you analyze your brand’s reputation. It is used for gathering insights, analyzing competition and audience sentiment, and tracking brand mentions across the web.
Key Features:
- It provides hashtag tracking. You can measure hashtag reach and volume.
- It provides advanced sentiment analysis to know positive and negative brand mentions.
- It supports 108 languages and can track mentions.
- It provides reports on your PR coverage.
- It allows the sharing of insights and statistics with the team through automated reporting.
Channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, X, LinkedIn, etc.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. Other plans are:
- Individual plan: $79/month
- Team plan: $149/month
- Pro plan: $199/month
- Enterprise plan: $399/month
Note that all of the plans mentioned above are billed annually.
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3. Brandwatch Social Media Management
Brandwatch is a tool for brands and companies that want to manage multiple social media campaigns and platforms. It provides businesses with a single inbox to manage all their conversations across social media platforms. It also allows customization of workflows and even advises on how to formulate social media strategies.
Key Features:
- It provides AI-based trend detection.
- It provides a collaborative content calendar to manage channels, teams, campaigns, etc.
- It monitors threats over millions of sources and offers real-time alerts.
- It provides one social inbox for all networks for better community management and customer support.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, X, YouTube, Tumbler, etc.
Pricing: Details for various plans are available on request.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that tracks social media traffic. It provides insights into how visitors interact with the content and uses modern analytics tools to measure web performance.
Key Features:
- With its built-in automation, it provides proactive insights, privacy-safe modeling, and predictions related to the future actions of customers.
- It does real-time reporting and provides reports for acquisition, monetization, and engagement.
- It provides an advertising workspace to get insights on campaign performances and cross-platform attribution reporting to analyze your marketing channels.
- It allows free-form exploration where you can drag and drop multiple variables to see the visualization of data.
- For better analysis, it allows you to import interaction data from any internet-connected third-party system.
Channels: YouTube, X, Instagram, etc.
Pricing: Google Analytics is a free tool. Large enterprises can use Google Analytics 360, a premium paid plan.
5. Mention
It is a social media listening tool that monitors brand mentions, tracks sentiment, and identifies key influencers. It also allows one to schedule social media posts in advance.
Key Features:
- It provides a multi-channel editorial calendar to preview and organize content.
- It offers alerts powered by boolean operators for more flexibility and precision.
- It offers comprehensive analytics.
- It provides a common tool to plan and manage social media posting.
- Its free tools include an email signature, QR code, and invoice generator.
- Its free social media tools include bio, caption, and username generators.
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, and X.
Pricing: There is a free plan available. The paid plans are as follows:
- Solo plan: $49/month
- Pro plan: $99/month
- ProPlus plan: $179/month
- For details on the Enterprise plan, contact the Mention team.
6. Keyhole
Keyhole is a tool that provides customizable, shareable, and downloadable reports that can monitor brand mentions. The monitoring can be done directly, indirectly, or by using brand keywords. It also provides detailed analytics on people’s reactions and engagement.
Key Features:
- It analyzes campaigns in real time.
- It allows hashtag tracking and analytics.
- It helps in finding relevant influencers in your niche with simple filters, such as keywords, geographic location, and hashtags.
- It provides a free Instagram engagement rate calculator.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. The paid plans include the following:
- SMB and Freelancers plan: $79/month
- Corporate plan: $239/month
- Agency plan: $479/month
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is used for generating new content ideas for your social media pages. It has a Content Ideas Generator that helps with SEO insights and trending content ideas. One can analyze the social engagement data with the help of the Content Research feature of BuzzSumo. The monitoring feature allows tracking brand mentions, monitoring competitors, and uncovering audience sentiment.
It is useful for content and influencer marketing as it discovers trending content and searches for relevant influencers in your niche.
Key Features:
- It provides a content ideas generator.
- It provides competitive benchmarking or searching competitors’ top content by domain.
- It identifies the top influencers in your niche.
- It is a comprehensive keyword tool providing alerts on topics, brands, and keywords that have an impact on your business.
- It provides a browser extension to search key success metrics of a competitor quickly, record any new ideas online, and add to your content strategy on the go.
- It provides powerful APIs for integration, development, and automation.
Channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, X, etc.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. Other plans are as follows:
- Content Creation plan: $199/month (one user)
- PR and Communications plan: $299/month (five users)
- Suite plan: $499/month (ten users)
- Enterprise plan: $999/month (thirty users)
8. Hashtagify
Hashtagify is a tool to search relevant hashtags for your business. You can find hashtags for X and Instagram and even find top influencers who use those hashtags.
Key Features:
- It provides real-time data and insights about any hashtag.
- It does in-depth analysis and finds relevant influencers based on hashtags.
- It has easy-to-use dashboards for analysis and building custom reports.
Channels: Instagram and X
Pricing: Hashtagify provides basic features for free. The paid plans are as follows:
- Personal plan: $29/month
- Business plan: $86/month
- Enterprise plan: $311/month
Note that Hashtagify has provisions for customizing selected plans with add-ons.
9. Tailwind
Tailwind is a useful tool that allows you to create and schedule posts on Pinterest and Instagram. This tool is used to bulk upload posts, pin multiple boards at once, and schedule through a simple drag-and-drop calendar.
Key Features:
- Create Features: It transforms photos into high-quality posts, automates design for several social media platforms, and provides intelligently generated templates.
- Scheduling Features: It provides automated posting and email follow-ups, one calendar for all networks, and one platform for creating, scheduling, and marketing.
- Optimize Features: It provides a powerful hashtag finder and allows you to engage with customers and convert them via email.
Channels: Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook.
Pricing: A free plan is available. The paid plans are as follows:
- Pro plan: $19.99/month
- Advanced plan: $39.99/month
- Max plan: $79.99/month
- The Enterprise plan is customizable
10. Analisa
Analisa is an AI-based tool that gives insights about Instagram, X, and TikTok profiles. It provides information on audience demographics, competitors’ strategies, and historical data on posts.
Key Features:
- It provides profile and competitor analysis.
- It provides follower demographics and authenticity audits.
- It provides campaign reports from your social media to PDF or CSV files.
- It provides real-time analytics of posts, captions, hashtags, and posting time.
Channels: Facebook, TikTok, and X.
Pricing: The basic plan is free. The paid plans are as follows:
- Premium plan: $69/month
- Plus plan: $149/month
- Pro plan: $239/month
11. Bitly
Bitly is a tool for creating short and memorable URLs. It helps you share a branded link and also get insights on engagement by tracking every digital initiative.
Key Features:
- It allows the creation, sharing, and monitoring of branded links. They can be customized according to one’s brand.
- It provides real-time analytics of campaigns with data available on metrics, such as clicks, geographic data, and top referring channels.
- It comes with open and flexible APIs for the creation of links at scale.
- The links created using Bitly are secured with HTTPS.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, etc.
Pricing: There is a free plan available. The paid plans are as follows:
- Starter plan: $8/month
- Basic plan: $35/month
- Premium plan: $300/month
Details for the Enterprise plan are available on request.
12. Oktopost
Oktopost is a tool specially designed for B2B businesses to manage and monitor all their social media activities.
Key Features:
- It provides a social media calendar tool to publish content across multiple networks.
- It provides UTM tagging, i.e., UTM parameters are dynamically added to any shared link.
- It has a mobile app for publishing content on the go.
- It is equipped with crisis mode that allows you to pause or purge all social media activities and even notify users.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, LinkedIn, and WeChat.
Pricing: The pricing details are available on request on the official website.
13. Loomly
Loomly is a social media calendar that provides services such as content discovery, organization, and management of social media posts. Integration with Buffer has allowed the publishing and scheduling of posts easier. Additionally, it provides post ideas based on the latest trends and events.
Key Features:
- It has a social media calendar to receive notifications about any update or comment on your content.
- It gives ideas for posts based on trending topics, RSS feeds, and date-related events.
- It helps you store all your photos, videos, slideshows, etc. in one library.
Channels: Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. The paid plans include the following:
- Base plan: $26/month
- Standard plan: $59/month
- Advanced plan: $129/month
- Premium plan: $269/month
The details for the Enterprise plan are available on request.
14. Quuu
Quuu is a tool for businesses to boost their social media activity. It gives curated content suggestions related to one’s brand. Content that can be shared ranges from articles and news to industry-specific questions and tips.
Key Features:
- It comes with a curated content library with over 500 topics.
- It provides profile customization.
- It can be connected with several scheduling tools, such as Buffer, HubSpot, or SocialBee.
- It saves a lot of time with automation. You can set a posting schedule and the category for the content and the tool will maintain your social media presence accordingly.
Channels: Facebook, X, and Linkedin. The content can be shared across multiple platforms.
Pricing:
- Pro plan: $5/month
- Business plan: $15.83/month
For the Agency plan, contact Quuu for custom pricing.
15. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a professional social media management platform for businesses and agencies. It helps with the scheduling of posts, social listening, and delegating tasks to the team.
Key Features:
- ViralPost is a patent technology of Sprout Social. It analyzes the audience’s behavior and provides an optimal time to post.
- It integrates with several analytical and e-commerce tools to provide the best experience to the users.
- It provides access to quantitative and contextual data.
- It allows the user to create unlimited posts.
- It provides a smart inbox for the user to manage social media engagements.
Channels: Instagram, TikTok, Shopify, Google Business Profile, WhatsApp, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. The paid plans are as follows:
- Standard plan: $249/month
- Professional plan: $399/month
- Advanced plan: $499/month
The details for the Enterprise plan can be requested from Sprout Social.
16. Canva
Canva is an image creation and editing tool used widely for creating social media posts. The free plan provides the user with several templates to choose from for their posts across social media platforms. The Pro account is for small businesses and enterprises. It allows them to create a brand kit and maintain a consistent tone for their content and posts.
Key Features:
- It provides video background remover.
- It allows you to schedule posts on multiple social media platforms.
- It provides animation features to animate your graphics.
- It provides team collaboration features for shared design projects.
- You can resize designs according to various social media platforms.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc.
Pricing: There is a free version available. The paid plans are as follows:
- Canva Pro: 3,999/year (one person)
- Canva for Teams: ₹9,980/year (five people)
17. Social Metrics Pro
Social Metrics Pro is a social media marketing tool for WordPress. One can track likes and pins, and see how many times their content was shared through this tool.
Key Features:
- It automatically tracks social signals relevant to your brand.
- It allows the users to sort, search, and filter social signals.
- It simplifies analytics with conditional color formatting to indicate relative popularity.
Channels: Facebook, Pinterest, Digg, and LinkedIn.
Pricing: The paid plans are as follows:
- Single-site plan: $27
- Unlimited plan: $47
18. Animoto
Animoto is used to create professional-looking videos with ease. One can create videos with the help of storyboard templates and a drag-and-drop story builder.
Key Features:
- It supports three different video formats and resolutions.
- It provides access to the music library and Getty Images stock library.
- It provides trimming and cropping features for photos and videos along with a voice-over feature.
- For branding purposes, it allows logo watermark and custom font upload.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Pricing: There is a free plan available. The three paid plans are as follows:
- Basic plan: $16/month
- Professional plan: $29/month
- Professional Plus plan: $79/month
19. Upfluence
Upfluence is a tool to help with influencer marketing. Through this tool, one can find influencers according to their niche, track influencer campaigns, and measure their success rate.
Key Features:
- It has smart filters for influencer search, such as the influencer’s location, language, and activities on social media.
- It provides campaign management features, such as budget management, contacting the influencer, and transferring of payments.
Channels: YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, etc.Pricing: For details on the pricing plan, you can contact Upfluence.
20. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is an AI-based tool that provides a unified customer experience management platform. It is used for social media marketing, advertising, research, customer engagement, and customer care.
Key Features:
- It allows the creation of optimized campaigns at scale.
- It provides an omnichannel inbox and AI chatbots. One can also monitor omnichannel keywords through this tool.
- It has powerful compliance and possesses strong social media listening capabilities.
Channels: YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
Pricing: The paid plans are as follows:
- Sprinklr Service: $249/month
- Sprinklr Social: $299/month
Both of the plans are billed annually.
21. AdEsspresso
AdEsspresso is a tool to boost your social media marketing campaigns. Small and large enterprises can use it for advertising purposes.
Key Features:
- Though it provides automatic optimization, users can create their own optimization rules.
- It provides a data sync tool for creating retargeting lists and a grid composer tool.
- It also provides the creation of dynamic ads and asset manager functionality.
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. The paid plans include the following:
- Starter plan: $49/month
- Plus plan: $99/month
- Enterprise plan: $259/month
22. Post Planner
Post Planner is a useful tool for content planning and scheduling. One can schedule in advance and auto-publish content through this tool to improve engagement. Additionally, it provides its users access to curated content from popular sources.
Key Features:
- It has a discovery engine to find, curate, and share content.
- It allows bulk post creation.
- It publishes posts directly after scheduling without requiring mobile approval.
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, Google Business Profile, etc.
Pricing: There is a free trial available. The paid plans are as follows:
- Single plan: $3/month
- Starter plan: $7/month
- Growth plan: $27/month
- Business plan: $47/month
- Enterprise plan: $197/month
23. Placeit
Placeit is an online design tool used for creating branding images. The users are provided with templates and mockups by professionals that can be customized and used as per the requirements.
Key Features:
- It provides the creation of logos for a wide variety of categories.
- It also allows one to create gaming designs.
- It has a large mockup library for the users to choose from.
Channels: X, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Pricing: The plans begin from $14.95.
24. Lumen5
Lumen5 is a tool for creating short videos. It can also convert a video into a text video. It is useful for branding as it allows customization of color and font style according to one’s brand aesthetics.
Key Features:
- It has an extensive library of images, GIFs, short videos, and music.
- It provides a drag-and-drop feature to add multimedia.
- It lets the user add callouts and cutaways to enhance their videos.
- It provides auto-generated captions for all video clips.
- It provides transcript-based editing.
Channels: YouTube
Pricing: The plans for Lumen5 range from $19/month to $149/month.
25. SocialPilot
SocialPilot is a social media analytics tool that provides an overview of metrics, such as engagement, top fans, ideal time to post, trending hashtags, etc.
Key Features:
- It provides a unified social media scheduling tool to schedule a single post for multiple social media platforms.
- It provides one social inbox to reply to comments and messages on all social media platforms.
- It uses an AI-based tool to auto-generate captions and hashtags.
- It converts the analytics into PDF format or Excel reports.
Channels: Facebook, X, Instagram, Google Business, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
Pricing: There is a 14-day trial available. The paid plans range from $25.50/month to $170/month.
26. BeFunky
BeFunky is a graphic design and photo editing tool that allows its users to remove backgrounds, convert images into art, create collages, retouch portraits, etc.
Key Features:
- It provides the user with several one-click editing features.
- It has an extensive library of vector graphics and stock images.
Channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
Pricing: Plans begin from $9.99/month.
27. Snappa
Snappa is a graphic design tool used to create and edit images with a photo editor. It is good for businesses as it allows content, designs, assets, and folders to be shared within different teams in an organization.
Key Features:
- It has an asset library with more than 1,00,000 photos and graphics.
- It allows the user to import their brand’s fonts.
- It organizes designs into various folders for better management.
Channels: YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, X, etc.
Pricing: The plans are as follows:
- Starter plan: Free
- Pro plan: $10/month
- Team plan: $20/month
28. Feedly
Feedly is a tool that helps its users organize all the content they want in one place. You can save publications, track trending social media conversations, explore new videos and more.
Key Features:
- Feedly AI feeds provide users with information on malware, track detection rules across the web, track press releases of companies, and collect and share customer insights.
- It allows the user to track the events their competitors attend.
- It supports multi-language content.
- It also helps in discovering proof of exploits across cyber security websites and social media sites early.
Channels: Evernote, OneNote, Trello, and Slack.
Pricing: The plans begin from $12 for one user.
29. Curata
Curata is a content creation software that improves the user experience according to their content preferences. It allows the user to find and share relevant content on social media, use it in emails, and publish it on blogs or websites.
Key Features:
- It provides the users with SEO and image suggestions.
- It enables the user to change content before sharing or publishing it.
- It provides a browser plugin for the user to curate content while surfing the web.
Channels: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
Pricing: You can view a demo from the official website of Curata.
30. HypeAuditor
It is an influencer marketing platform that serves as a great tool for brands and agencies. It filters out fake followers and bots and retrieves actual influencers for its users.
Key Features:
- It provides the user with genuine influencer discovery. The influencers with fake followers and bots are filtered out. It uses over thirty-five in-depth metrics to analyze influencers from different social media platforms.
- It provides managing and monitoring of influencer marketing campaigns.
- It provides a list of competitors, trends, and ranking analytics.
Channels: X, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Pricing: The plan details are available on request for businesses and agencies. For influencers, there is a free trial available along with two paid plans, Starter and Pro, priced at $8.99/month and $24/month.
Conclusion
Social media marketing tools are essential for businesses that want to promote their brand, products, and services. These tools provide various functions, like management, creation, automation, and analytics. With such a wide variety of tools available in the market, it is important to select the right tools keeping your resources in mind.
Conclusion
Social media marketing tools are essential for businesses that want to promote their brand, products, and services. These tools provide various functions, like management, creation, automation, and analytics. However, it is important to select the right tools keeping the resources of the business in mind.
