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Social Media Marketing isn’t a one size fits all strategy. 

Social media is a powerful tool and is just a tap away.  It enables you to connect with your target audience and even expand your reach, but that is only half of the picture. It is not an easy job; extracting as much value as possible from social media can take time. Building a loyal fanbase, and cultivating long-term relationships with your customers will take time, which means you will need to use tools other than social media platforms.

Let’s look at some of the essential social media marketing tools you need to help your brand succeed.

1. Content Planning

Every great social media account is supported by a strong strategy. The visibility of your brand on social media platforms can make or break your strategy. So, deciding on what and when to post can be complicated, especially for accounts with a global audience.

Use the Hopper HQ analytics tools to determine the best time to post on Instagram. This tool allows you to analyse your follower's activity and engagement to align your posting schedule with their activity. 

2. Content Scheduling

Once you've created content that you're ready to share, it's important to publish it regularly. Luckily enough, social media marketing tools allow you to plan out and schedule your content in advance - how neat!

Content calendar tools and schedulers are life savers - they help you to save time by allowing for weekly, monthly, or even quarterly content planning for your team. This allows your social media to run autonomously while you're away from your desk!

Check out Sendible!

3. Social Media Analytics

When moving forward with your social media marketing strategy, you want to ensure that your content is doing the job. 

An analytics tool can assist you in understanding your content data and identifying trends and performance. This allows you to be able to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and help increase brand awareness

Using post and account analytics, you can determine what is the best time to post, track your follower's growth and determine what content works best. You'll be able to learn about your follower's locations and other demographics. Another thing to keep in mind is that analytic tools can assist you in determining where your competitors outrank you in search engine rankings. 

4. Monitor your @’s

As we are all familiar with, if you are tagged in a social post, you will receive a notification. However, not everyone who mentions you or your products will include an @mention. They will also not tag you if they are talking about your competitors. This is where social media monitoring tools that allow you to keep an eye on variations of your brand name, as well as variations of your competitor's brand names, come in handy. 

Tracking your mentions can help your company in connecting with potential users and respond to customer service opportunities. By having wider visibility of your mentions, you will be able to have a better idea of the perception the public has of your brand. 

5. Automate your work

Social media automation tools are programs that help busy social media managers save time by automating simple or repetitive tasks. Which in turn frees up your time and energy for higher-level tasks like brainstorming new content ideas or fine-tuning your social strategy. 

Social automation tools can also improve your follower's experience by providing them with faster responses and more personalised information. You can reach potential clients and convert them into paying customers by promoting your content to those who are not already following you. 

6. Advertising

Social media advertising can is a handy tool to assist you in expanding your brand reach. You can reach potential clients and convert them into paying customers by promoting content to those who aren’t already following you. 

Tools such as Mailchimp or Hubspot allow you to create, purchase, and analyse the performance of your ads all in one place. 

7. Engagement

It can be difficult to keep up with incoming messages from customers in general, let alone if you have a large following. But, with social media engagement tools, you can manage comments and messages from your social media profiles in one inbox. 

They also allow you to delegate messages and comments to other team members, to make your life a little easier. 

8. Customer Service

Many users prefer using social media platforms for their customer service enquiries, and often enough have high expectations for response times. By linking your social media customer service to your CRM, you can receive a complete picture of each customer interaction, both on and off social media. Rather than having to start from scratch each time, each customer interaction builds on the previous one. 

9. Chatbots

Social media chatbots are essentially virtual robots that provide automated messaging between your brand and your followers. They have significantly improved in recent years due to the incorporation of artificial intelligence.

And, not to mention, if a conversation becomes too complicated, chatbots can transfer the conversation to a human, allowing your team to focus on the most difficult cases - while the chatbot handles the simpler requests.

MobileMonkey allows you to create intelligent messenger chatbots that will assist you in acquiring, qualifying and nurturing Facebook leads. 

Conclusion

Social Media is a powerful resource for businesses of all sizes. The right tool will help you better communicate with your audience and improve the effectiveness of your social media marketing. It can take you from an amateur to a pro in just one click.

Want to take your social media to unparalleled heights? Talk to Team Elephant! We have a team of content ninjas that have just what it takes to take your brand to extra heights, through a carefully curated content strategy.