It’s not easy to stand out among the hundreds of social media tools out there. But a handful of companies do manage to beat the crowd, because their products are unique, hassle-free and great value for money. I spend a lot of time figuring out who’s worth a closer look, so I put together this list of my current favourites. Let me know what you think in the comments!
1. Social media scheduling: Kuku.io
Do you ever wish you could manage all your social media accounts from one place? Kuku.io offers a clean and efficient way to upload all your social posts — and you can even use it as a team, streamlining the editing and approval process. This means you can easily create a schedule of content to be posted to different social media outlets, ensuring that you keep a steady flow of content coming and speak with a consistent voice — all without having to log into several different social media accounts. Lots of companies offer scheduling tools, but this one is particularly easy to use.
2. Employee advocacy on social media: Smarp
Getting your colleagues to like your posts shortly after you publish them can do wonders for reach and engagement, especially following algorithm updates that have reduced the organic reach of many social posts. But the good news is more than ever, people are used to sharing and retweeting content (half of all tweets today are retweets). Enlisting your colleagues to help spread your message on social media can give you some initial momentum, helping increase the chance your tweet or post will start appearing in search results or on featured pages. To make the hard work of mobilising your colleagues easier, Smarp gamifies the whole experience to help the team spirit get off the ground.
3. Trending hashtag search: Hashtagify
Including trending hashtags significantly increases the reach of your Twitter posts, driving traffic to your website. If you want to take the guesswork out of picking the right ones, Hashtagify is a good place to start. Plus, it also tells you the top influencers for any topic. Lots of companies will charge you for information on trending hashtags, while Hashtagify provides a lot of what you need to know for free, making it a great addition to your arsenal of social media tools.
4. AI-driven social media automation: Echobox
Amongst this list of my favourite social media tools for publishers, there’s Echobox, a platform that does it all for you: scheduling, analytics, social listening, hashtag searching, resharing, optimisation and AB testing. Powered by artificial intelligence, Echobox can even write optimal headlines for your social media posts. Publishers like Newsweek, The Guardian, The Times and many more already use Echobox to save time and drive more revenue from their social media audiences. It’s the ultimate social media tool for publishers of all sizes.
5. Resharing social posts: RecurPost
With organic reach declining as Facebook and Twitter show your posts to an ever smaller share of your followers, it’s more important than ever that you repost your best content to get the most traffic out of it. RecurPost lets you upload and categorise content, and starts resharing once everything has been posted. Added bonus: reposting keeps up a steady stream of social content when you’re hitting a bad case of writers’ block.
6. Social advertising: Boosterberg
Feeling like you spend too much time with tedious clicking to boost your Facebook posts? We’ve all been there. Boosterberg lets you promote your posts from a clean and user-friendly interface, and gives you useful analytics and scheduling options for your paid ads.
Has this list of my favourite tools given you some new ideas for making your social media management more efficient? Do you have any others to suggest? Leave a comment below!
And to learn more about Echobox, the world’s most powerful social media publishing platform for publishers, download our Factsheet now:
This article was originally posted on 15 February 2017 and has been updated for accuracy and freshness.
