So, you’re on social media! If you use social media for professional work or even for personal life, there is always room for getting more engagement and reach. Which company doesn’t like to be famous on social media, after all?

In this post, I’m going to share my favourite social media marketing tools that I regularly use for my personal accounts and our clients in Socinova.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is definitely one of most useful social media management tools for people who handle multiple social media accounts. Hootsuite provides a single dashboard where you can manage your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, etc. accounts with engagement monitoring and analytics. And yes, it’s not expensive also. There is a free version with basic features and a pro version for $9.99 per month which comes with 50 accounts, additional team member, analytics and more.

Pros of Hootsuite:

• Convenience of managing multiple social media accounts under one dashboard
• Unlimited (almost, I guess) scheduled messages to social accounts
• Facebook Ads management and social media campaigns
• Multiple team members, so you can get a helping hand
• Excellent app directory for adding even more tools to the dashboard like Mailchimp, Zendesk, etc.

Cons of Hootsuite:

• No Instagram, Flickr and Pinterest post scheduling
• For few pro users, even the pro plan is not sufficient. And next plan, Enterprise, costs like 900-1000$ a month
• Analytic reports are quite expensive

But honestly, the cons are nowhere compared to the pros. So if you’re serious about social media marketing, Hootsuite is where you should start.

2. SocialReport

Socialreport is truly an all in one social media dashboard for marketers. It has content publishing, analytics, contacts management, social media search, automation and more. The only reason I prefer Hootsuite instead of Socialreport for content scheduling is because Socialreport’s content scheduler is not that powerful. For only a few posts per week, it is good; but for hundreds of posts per week (which I normally do) Hootsuite is way better. But definitely, you can use Socialreport if you want to handle some advanced tasks like reporting, goal tracking, contacts management, etc. And the best part, it supports over 35+ social networks and tools which cover almost every network you’ll use professionally.

Pros of SocialReport:

• Supports over 35+ social networks and tools
• Reasonable pricing
• Reporting and goal tracking features are quite cool
• We can organise things with multiple projects and users
• Socialreport continuously improves their dashboard
• For light users, it has everything you need for social media

Cons of SocialReport:

• Content publishing dashboard is not that great
• Sometimes, reports are not generated correctly
• It can get too complicated to understand for average users

Overall, it is a nice tool to have for your social marketing.

3. Trello

Trello is not a tool directly related to social media marketing, but it is quite useful for organising your social media activities. Trello allows you to create different boards and cards for various social media tasks, so you and your team can be organised. Trello is most effective when you have multiple team members. And it’s free too.

Pros of Trello:

• It is great at its purpose: Organisation
• Multiple team members can be added easily with security features
• It can be used for organising your other tasks also
• Integration with Google Drive, Dropbox makes things even easier

Cons of Trello:

• Though it is quite feature-rich, the free version lacks some features we need like live chat, more integrations
• If you have a large amount of information and tasks in Trello, it can get overwhelming

There are tools like Slack and other organisers also available for you to consider. But I personally prefer Trello because of its simplicity.

4. Canva

Canva is your online photoshop for social media (almost). Canva allows creating stunning graphics for your social media accounts and other marketing needs with an easy to manage designer dashboard. Even a beginner in designing can design awesome graphics with Canva; it is just as simple as that. Canva has multiple pre-defined layouts which can be used to create graphics and it allows many more customising options like adding design elements, text, uploaded images, colour effects and premium graphics. It even has its own image library so you won’t have to search images elsewhere! Most of the designs are free and premium designs are only $1 for one time use.

Pros of Canva:

• Beautiful designing dashboard with multiple layouts
• Almost all required designing features included
• It’s free for most features
• No designing training needed, but you can learn with Canva Design School
• All designs are saved so you can edit/export them later
• You can share editable Canva files with anyone, so team collaboration becomes even easier

Cons of Canva:

• Limited library of fonts and you can’t upload your own
• Dashboard still has some bugs (I noticed while designing)
• Premium licences for images are for one time use only

But yes, there is simply no reason not to use Canva. You will need graphics for your social media marketing and Canva is the best tool to do-it-yourself, saving you time and money.

5. Grammarly

Social media is like having a conversation with your friend, a grammatically correct friend. And to ensure your writing is grammatically correct, you’ll need a tool like Grammarly. Grammarly gives you a proofreading tool and a browser extension which helps you make sure that your grammar is correct. Yes, Grammarly does not always shows 100% accurate results, but it is quite useful. Especially the browser extension will check your text everywhere in your browser including social sites, email and more. It’s free for basic proofreading but I recommend getting a pro subscription as it has advanced proofread checks, plagiarism check and document type specific checking.

Pros of Grammarly:

• Quite useful for ensuring grammar correctness
• The browser extension checks your text on all sites
• It has an online tool, so no software installation is needed

Pros of Grammarly:

• Not 100% accurate
• The extension does not work correctly on some sites like Hootsuite and Trello
• We have to manually paste the text into the editor for checking (can’t scan web page text automatically)

Though Grammarly won’t guarantee that the Grammarly-checked text is 100% correct, it is nice to have a layer of checking for basic and few advanced grammar errors.

These were the five tools that I think are useful for social media marketers. But these aren’t the only ones I use or recommend! I’ll soon write another blog for five more social media tools which will help you for your social media marketing. Till then, why not discuss about your favourite social media tools? I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments.

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