77% of marketers vouch for social media marketing for business growth. But managing multiple social media accounts is extremely time-consuming. You wear multiple hats for content creation, editing, data analysis, graphic design, and video creation — overwhelming, isn’t it? 

Even though you have your team by your side, sometimes you need an extra hand to handle tedious tasks. That’s where social media marketing tools come in. They take care of all mundane tasks and speed up your social media management process.

This blog lists 14 social media marketing tools for small businesses and startups. Choose the ones that work for you. 

Why do you need social media marketing tools?

Different steps are involved in social media marketing. Each stage has a procedure you repeat each month to fill your content calendar with relevant content. 

Here are the steps involved in social media marketing:

1. Competitor Analysis 
2. Ideation 
3. Content Creation 
4. Scheduling 
5. Social Listening 

Social media marketing tools assist you in each step of the process. They help you: 

• Analyze your social presence – Tools make tracking your followers across multiple channels easy and analyze your visibility. 
• Generate new content ideas – Social media marketing tools for small businesses analyze data from multiple e-commerce platforms and Google. They find what customers are searching for. Use this data to generate targeted posts that directly speak to the customer. 
• Keep up with social engagement across all platforms – Reply to comments, mentions and tags across multiple social media platforms and always be present for your customers. 
• Manage customer relationships – Social media management tools let you divert customer queries to various departments, such as sales or PR, so they quickly provide solutions. 
• Streamline team collaboration – The best social media management tools let you collaborate with your team easily. Give safe access to relevant media while protecting your passwords.
• Handle competitor research – Tools analyze large volumes of data to find what, when, and how your competitors post on social media. They provide charts, graphs, and a dashboard so you drive conclusions quickly. 

Now that you know the importance of social media marketing tools for small businesses, let’s dive into the list. Read the list below to understand how each tool makes social media management easy for you. 

Best social media marketing tools for small businesses 

The best social media management tools are the ones that fit into your workflow and speed up your social media management process. Below are the best social media marketing tools. We’ve categorized them into the steps they’ll be used in. 

Competitor Analysis Tools

• Brandwatch

Image source: Brandwatch

Brandwatch lets you benchmark your performance against competitors in your industry so you know where you stand in the market. 

Features:

• Brandwatch provides data on your brand’s social presence compared to your competitors during any timeframe. It’s essential as your position changes over time. With Brandwatch, you consistently measure your growth or fall against your competitors. 
• Brandwatch analyzes customer conversations throughout the globe and finds out how people compare your brand with your competitors. 

Price: Contact the sales team 

• Mentionlytics 

Image source: Mentionlytics 

Mentionlytics is a comprehensive competitor analysis tool that monitors trends, hashtags, saves, and reshares to measure your brand performance against your competitors.

Features:

• Mentionlytics provides critical insights from your social mentions. It also identifies trolls and discovers negative remarks, and suggests ideas to resolve issues. 
• It finds sites that link to your competitors and influencers who collaborate with them. Use this data to approach sites and influencers who work well for your industry. 

Price: 

• Basic: $49
• Essential: $99
• Advanced: $199
• Pro: $299

Ideation Tools

• Google Trends

Image source: Google Trends

Google Trends provides access to unfiltered search terms across the globe. It presents search data in a graphical format to compare various keywords and show their search volume over time. 

Features: 

• Google Trends shows relative visualization of keywords over the years. It shows when interest peaks around a keyword so you can plan your content strategy accordingly. For instance, the keyword “Christmas lights” peaks around December. Create content around that topic. 
• Trends provides a graphical comparison, which makes it easy to choose the best keyword among similar ones. For instance, “wordpress”, “WordPress”, and “wordpress.com” have different search volumes and interests over time. Find the best fit for yourself, depending on the time you publish your content. 
• Related keywords in Google Trends automatically show other keywords related to your base keyword. It contains multiple long-tail keywords which you can use to improve your SEO game. 

Price: Free

• Answer the Public

Image source: Answer the Public

Answer the Public lets you discover what people are searching for. It uses autocomplete data to pull phrases or questions people ask around your keyword. 

Features:

• Answer the Public is easy-to-use. Enter your keyword or phrase, and it presents several related questions in a circular format. It shows questions of all kinds. Some begin with ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘when’, and some are yes-no questions related to your keyword. 
• It provides prepositions that people search with your keyword. For instance, if you enter ‘chocolate’ for the keyword, it will create sentences like ‘chocolate to order, ‘chocolate with nuts,’ and ‘chocolate near me. 
• Answer the Public offers an alphabetical comparison of search results. It’s easy to analyze, which speeds up your ideation process. 

Price: 

• Basic: Free
• Pro: $75/month

• BuzzSumo

Image source: Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo provides content insights that help you generate multiple ideas each month and find the best influencers to collaborate with. 

Features:

• BuzzSumo analyzes five years of data and provides evergreen content ideas that work best for your industry keywords. Sort results by trending scores and spot emerging ideas before they become viral. 
• It lets you analyze the top-ranking sites’ subheadings, structure, and content, so you adopt the strategies from the best. 
• BuzzSumo searches genuine customer questions from Amazon, Reddit, and Quora. Analyze these questions to find gaps in the industry. Then create content to fill that gap and answer your target audience’s questions. 

Price: 

• Basic: Free
• Pro: $99/month
• Plus: $179/month
• Large: $299/month

Content Creation Tools 

• Canva

Image source: Canva

Canva is every designer’s dream tool. It has several templates for Instagram posts, infographics, logos, banners, YouTube thumbnails, presentations and website designs, so you can create them with minimal effort. 

Features: 

• Canva has pre-designed templates with customizable graphics, colors, and fonts. Add text, photos, or logos to create a new post through the template. 
• Canva’s color palettes help you find your brand colors. It suggests groups of colors that go well with each other, along with fonts for headings and paragraphs, so your posts always look appealing. 
• Invite your teammates to edit the graphics. Give access to one project so the rest of your library stays secure. 
• Download the graphics as PDFs, PNGs, GIFs, or MP4 videos. 
• Share posts directly to your Instagram personal or business account or schedule posts right from Canva. 

Price: 

• Basic: Free
• Pro: $12.99/per month

• Grammarly

Image source: Grammarly

Grammarly helps you communicate with your target audience with grammatically correct sentences. It takes the guesswork out of writing and suggests the best words, punctuations, and verbs that make your writing stand out. 

Features: 

• Grammarly provides comprehensive feedback in real-time. It points out grammatical mistakes and suggests ideas to improve clarity. Blue lines appear under hard-to-read sentences, along with improvised suggestions. 
• It provides readability, engagement, and tonality scores to keep your messaging in check. Grammarly also rates your content against 100 and gives an overall content score that you can use as a benchmark for your content writers. 
• Adjust the editor as per region – US or UK – to make sure your messaging caters to your target audience. 
• Check plagiarism right inside Grammarly to ensure your text is original and doesn’t fall against Google’s copyright policies. 

Price:

• Basic: Free
• Professional: $12/month 
• Business: $15/user/month 

• Anchor

Image source: Anchor

Anchor is a free podcasting tool by Spotify to help you easily create, distribute and monetize your podcasts. 

Features: 

• Anchor allows you to unlock sponsorship opportunities and add subscriptions to your podcasts, so you make money directly from it. 
• Advanced IOB 2.0-certified analytics in Anchor analyzes your target audience behavior and provides actionable insights in a single dashboard to improve your content. 
• With Anchor, you own the right to your content. It lets you create and distribute unlimited free content, making it one of the best social media marketing tools for audio content. 

Price: Free

Scheduling Tools 

• Social Pilot

Image source: Social pilot

Social Pilot is an easy-to-use and affordable tool for scheduling customized posts. It’s compatible with Facebook groups, Pinterest boards, Google Business pages, Instagram and Tiktok. 

Features:

• Social calendars offer two views – in-depth and overview – where you decide whether you want a glance at your account or to dive deep into analytics. 
• Social Pilot lets you share stories, reels, and shorts on top of posts. 
• Tag your friends or collaborators from the social pilot to avoid extra work after scheduling the posts.
• Bulk schedule up to 500 posts and add alt text to images. 
• Manage multiple client accounts from a single platform. 

Price: 

• Agency: $106/ per user/ per month
• Studio: $85/ per user/ per month
• Small Team: $42/ per user/ per month
• Professional: $25/ per user/ per month

• CoSchedule 

Image source: Coschedule

CoSchedule comes with an agile marketing calendar to schedule posts. The Kanban project dashboard allows all your team members – even the CEO – to keep an eye on the campaign and monitor progress at each stage. 

Features 

• In case you miss posting on schedule, CoSchedule reposts your top-performing posts to maintain consistency. 
• CoSchedule also integrates with blogging tools like WordPress and Hubspot, so you publish blogs right from your CoSchedule account. 
• CoSchedule’s drag-and-drop feature lets you easily attach projects to your calendar. 

Price: 

• Basic: Free
• Pro: $29/user/month

• Planable

Image source: Planable

Plannable is intelligent scheduling with multiple publishing and viewing options. Organize posts in different views – list view, grid view, calendar view and feed view – for better analysis. 

Features:

• Plannable’s feed view shows post previews with all details – exactly like they would look on the respective social media platform – so you can edit or tweak it to perfection. Add gifs, emojis or hashtags on preview mode without more clicks. 
• Get separate workspaces for each brand or client—no more missing drafts or sending posts to the wrong client. 
• Store all media in a centralized location and share access with whomever you want – even if they’re not on Plannable. 
• Give or receive feedback on posts with comments. Tag teammates, leave reactions or attach files. 

Price: 

• 50 posts free
• Basic: $11/user
• Pro: $22/user
• Enterprise: Custom 

Social Listening Tools 

• Sprout Social 

Image source: Sprout social 

Sprout Social offers powerful social listening to improve your marketing efforts, customer support, ROI and user adoption. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and YouTube. 

Features: 

• Sprout Social lets you track relevant conversations to pick trends and create a content strategy accordingly. It converts popular conversations and includes easy-to-read analytics, which helps you make better decisions. 
• It identifies top influencers and thought leaders for each trend, so you become the first brand to engage with them and unlock opportunities for collaboration. 
• Competitors analysis lets you discover how your target audience feels about your competitors. Track their performance, analyze gaps and improvise your strategies. 

Price: 

• Standard: $89/per user/per month 
• Professional: $149/per user/per month 
• Advanced: $249/per user/per month 

• Hootsuite

Image source: Hootsuite

Hootsuite lets you manage your social media presence from one platform. View and respond to comments and mentions across multiple social media channels to save time. 

Features: 

• Hootsuite uses social analysis to suggest the best times to post without any extensive data crunching, so you attract maximum traffic each day. 
• Hootsuite allows you to direct duplicate messages to the right person in your team. For instance, direct PR-related questions to the press department, sales-related questions to the sales department etc. 
• Hootsuite has custom workflows that mirror your company hierarchy. When a draft goes through individual permission levels, it reduces the chance of human error. 

Price: 

• Professional: $49/ month
• Business: $739/ month

• Buffer 

Image source: Buffer

Buffer helps you find conversations that truly matter for your brand. Find relevant posts, comments and mentions, and dive into the conversation right from Buffer. 

Features: 

• The intuitive analytics dashboard in Buffer lets you create extensive reports for all your social media accounts from one platform. Graphs and charts make it easy to analyze data and make better decisions. 
• Buffer analyzes followers’ activity on your previous to predict the best time to post and what to post on Instagram. 
• The story monitoring feature lets you record and analyze story performance on Instagram and Facebook. It compares how your engagement has changed over time.

Price:

• Basic: Free
• Essentials: $5/ per month/ per channel 
• Team: $10/ per month/ per channel
• Agency: $100/ per month/ per channel

Increase ROI with the best social media marketing tools 

Social media management tools help you manage multiple social media accounts across different platforms. With a bunch of tools, you can save time and increase the ROI of your social media efforts. 

Invest in the tools that fit your budget and workflow to trim the never-ending list of social media management tasks. To understand more about social media management and content marketing, contact us at Contensify.