20+ Must-Have Tools For Savvy Social Media Managers In 2023
Your social media is a weapon to elevate your brand and it should be used like one.
For the past years, I have been managing social media accounts for clients and have immersed myself in the social media world.
I have used variety of social media marketing tools and resources to help me save time (and money), create awesome content, track my performance and boost my business growth.
Without the proper tools, managing social media can be incredibly overwhelming, but with the right tools in place, it can be easy and effective.
Let’s jump into juicy tools to help you go from amateur and overwhelmed to a professional with clarity and confidence.
For Managing Social Media Posts: The Time Savers!
- Hootsuite: I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of this one! Why people love it (including me)? First, it saves me a lot of time. Second, it’s super affordable. They have a lot of cool time-saving features but they’re mostly known for their “auto-publish” feature where you manually schedule your social media content to publish at a later date & time, or let their “auto-schedule” to publish content for you. You can also target messages to specific audiences making you more effective and on-point. Also, you’ll get access to analytics and reports to measure how your audience is responding to the social media content you are publishing. Alternative: Buffer.
- TailWindApp: an analytics and scheduling app used for Pinterest. You can create a pin schedule to schedule multiple pins at once with their Google Chrome extension & mass uploading. Using their Pinterest Insights, you can use what is trending right now to curate incredible content for your audience. As well, you can monitor your brand and campaigns and how they are being responded to on Pinterest. You can also track growth in your Pinterest followers, boards, repins, and comments! Using Google Analytics, you can also see where you’re gaining revenue and traffic from the awesome platform of Pinterest. Alternative: ViralTag
- IFFFT: an app to connect your multiple apps to work for you. IFTTT gives you creative control over the products & apps getting them to work together to manage tasks and create results. You create recipes which are simple connections between products and apps.
- SocialOomph: a tool to create productivity with your social media. I use this app to schedule recurring posts. You can schedule updates, find quality people to follow, and monitor social media activity.
- Tags For Likes: You can use this tool to save tags that you consistently use on Instagram.
- Friend+Me – Google+: Draft and schedule posts to publish content to your Google+ account.
- Repost App for Instagram: Instead of taking screenshots and cropping, you can use this app to repost photos and videos from Instagram.
For Fan Building: Get Your People
- Tweepi: a tool to help you expand your Twitter reach. Using Tweepi, you can help discover and follow new Twitter users that are relevant to your niche. You can also cleanup the inactive profiles. AND oh, you can help to see which users do not follow back and take the action you want to, to respond to that.
- Circloscope – Google+: a way to manage your Google+ Circles. You can find your followers, people that don’t follow you back, find people followed in your circle, or relevant people in your circles.
- Unfollowers: This tool can be used to track who has unfollowed you via Twitter or Instagram. Connect with your people and automate tasks. Get an inside perspective with your audience and how your content is connecting.
For Spicing Up Your Social Media Posts
- Bit.ly: a resource will help you to get to know and understand your audience. This is an awesome tool for shortening your links to use in social media + for analyzing and understanding who in your audience is engaging and where they are coming from!
- Hashtagify.me: This is a powerful tool for searching for hashtags. Using hashtag marketing, you can help grow your business, build brand awareness and market effectively. It helps you find the best hashtags for your brand so you can go out and get noticed.
- Emoji App: Using emojis in your social media posts can create visual appeal and add a fun spin to the content that you are posting. They are free and easy to use.
For Finding Superb Content To Share
- Feedly: a tool to keep up with all the content you follow. Set up with Feedly so you don’t miss content with publications, blogs, YouTube channels that you absolutely love and connect with. Also, you can organize your content, read the content you’ve saved, search for content that interests you, and most importantly easily share via Hootsuite or Twitter to your social media channels.
- Buzzsumo: a tool for content strategy, creation and sharing. Find out what is being shared most often across all social networks. Find influencers in your niche, review that content and share it to extend your platform. Lastly, set up alerts to receive notice when content is published mentioning your keyword.
- Scoop.It: a tool for content marketing. Using content objectives, build a calendar of when content needs to be scheduled for your blog, social media and newsletters. The tool itself pulls content from millions of websites each day and will deliver content personalized to your niche that you can use. You can even analyze the performance of every content item you create to encourage your success. Alternatives: Bloglovin, Topsy, Tagboard.
For Creating Attractive Visuals: Get More Clicks!
- Canva: This is a tool for simple and fast graphic design. Though, if you’re a graphic designer, I recommend you learn Photoshop!
- Smartphone Visual Editors: Moldiv: create collages and borders, Word Swag: easily generate type designs, Snapseed: engineered by Google to make photos awesome, Overgram: add text to photos quickly.
- Stock Photos: Pixabay: quality stock photos for free use, Picjumbo: high-res photos for design work, Death to Stock: lifestyle images for creatives, Unsplash: 10 free hi-res photos each week.
- Color Palette: This acts as a tool for generating color schemes.
- Social Media Images Size Reference: This is a resource to any possible social media sizing you need! Go crazy.
- GoAnimate: a tool to create animated videos quickly. Use features such as adding characters, swapping backgrounds or creating scenes easily. Also, match your message to a style whether you want to create an infographic or whiteboard animation.
For Managing Clients: Look Like a PRO!
- LastPass: This tool helps you manage your passwords so you don’t forget them, ever again! You can also use Lastpass to access your clients’ social media accounts without actually sending their passwords to you.
- Google Drive : I don’t know if I can live without Google Drive! I’ve been using their apps like Google Docs + Google Sheets for like years. I can easily create report, pricing, editorial calendar, develop strategy and share with my clients. You can even access your files anywhere. For more details about their features, you can click here to learn more.
- DropBox: DropBox keeps your files synced, stored and easily shareable no matter where you are. I LOVE IT so much!
- GetBallPark: a tool for CRM management, invoicing and time tracking. Their web-based invoices and estimates are visually stunning and easy for both you and your clients. Monitor where your time is going and helping you to stay on time and on budget. Their reporting system helps to monitor payments, time tracked and the cash flow so you can have insight on your business development. One of my favorite features is you can set-up recurring invoices and actually send them! Alternative: PayDirtApp.
Which of these tools do you use? Which ones had you not heard about before? What tools do you recommend for owning your social media instead of it owning you?