5 Best Tools for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing campaigns are essential for any content marketing strategy. Social media management software can help schedule content and automate posting, saving time and improving the effectiveness of social campaigns. Social media management software helps by allowing users to schedule content and automate posting. Social media marketing is key, but posting constantly takes time. Smart managers use social media management software to schedule posts across platforms from one dashboard, saving time and boosting campaign effectiveness.

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Forbes Advisor's guide reviews top options based on value, features, and customer ratings, helping you choose the best software for your needs. As of 2023, 93% of marketers worldwide utilize social media for business, making it a global hub connecting over 4.9 billion individuals worldwide.

Table of contents:

Buffer
Lumen5
SocialPilot
Hootsuite
Canva

Buffer

In 2022, a strong online presence requires an active social media presence, with over 4 billion monthly users. Buffer, a social media management tool with 75,000 customers, introduced the time slots feature for scheduling content, saving time, and allowing users to use it simultaneously with Hootsuite. Since then, Buffer has expanded scheduling to multiple social networks and added features like detailed analytics.

Useful Features:

1. Schedule Social Posts: Buffer allows users to schedule posts to various social networks, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Users can schedule posts directly from their desktop, set reminders, and receive mobile notifications when it's time to share. However, Facebook has changed its restrictions.
2. Create Slots and Add Content: Buffer introduced the slot feature, allowing users to set pre-set time slots for curating posts. Content can be added to these slots through the dashboard or using an extension. Buffer previously connected RSS feeds, but removed this feature.
3. Calendar View: The calendar view displays published and scheduled posts, allowing easy filling of social media calendars, adding posts, and dragging and dropping posts to copy to other spots.
4. Pablo For Image Creation: The calendar view displays published and scheduled posts, allowing easy filling of social media calendars. It allows adding, dragging, and dropping posts, copying them to other spots.
5. Instagram-Specific Features: Instagram's Buffer feature adds comments to posts, reducing spam and distraction. Adding hashtags in comments increases engagement. A shop grid on Instagram helps drive traffic and sales by creating a bio URL for images and links to products.
6. Team Management: Buffer offers team management features for social media managers and marketers, enabling collaboration on content planning, scheduling, and post drafts, with members providing feedback or approval before scheduling.
7. In-Depth Analytics and Reports: The Analyze plan provides advanced social analytics, analyzing audience demographics, comparing post types, suggesting optimal posting times and frequencies, and generating reports for sharing with teams, managers, or clients.
8. Clean Interface: Buffer's clean interface, despite its numerous features, provides a pleasant experience and simplifies navigation, making it a preferred choice for users.
9. Integration: Buffer has established numerous integrations such as Bulk.ly, IFTTT, Instagram, Mention, Pocket, Qu, Sharp Spring, and WordPress.

Lumen5

Lumen5 is an AI-driven video creation platform that simplifies text conversion into engaging visual content. It offers a user-friendly interface, automatic text transformation, and a vast library of music, images, and themes. Lumen5 supports various video formats and offers a branding kit feature for easy incorporation of logos, colours, and fonts. Its instant video creation feature ensures clear communication and high viewer engagement.

Useful Features:

1. Video Creation From Text: Lumen5 is an AI-powered platform that enables video creation from text. It analyzes content, identifies key points, and creates a storyboard for the video. This innovative feature allows brands and businesses to repurpose existing content and reach wider audiences with compelling video formats. Lumen5's dynamic online video creation is efficient and convenient, making it a standout in the industry.
2. AI-based Workflow: Lumen5 is an AI-based content conversion tool that simplifies video creation by automatically transforming written content into dynamic videos. It uses intelligent algorithms to match key points with visuals from an extensive library, allowing users to turn blog posts into engaging clips within minutes, saving time and maintaining quality output.
3. Large Collection Of Images, Music, And Themes: Lumen5 is a comprehensive library of audio, visuals, and design elements that helps create engaging videos that resonate with target audiences. It offers a wide range of soundtracks, visuals, and artistic designs, making it ideal for businesses looking to save on production costs without sacrificing quality. The library allows users to craft unique videos in 10-15 minutes, with customizable templates to ensure consistency. Lumen5's vast selection of resources is suitable for various projects and aesthetics.
4. Multiple Video Formats: Lumen5 offers versatile video formats for various platforms, allowing users to create square, landscape, or vertical videos for social media, YouTube, Instagram stories, Facebook ads, and YouTube tutorials, ensuring effective engagement with their target audience.
5. Branding Kit: Lumen5's branding kit offers customizable designs for businesses to maintain brand consistency in their videos. Users can add logos, colours, and fonts, ensuring videos reflect their unique style and personality, making them valuable for marketing.
6. Instant Video Creation: Lumen5's AI-powered platform enables users to quickly create engaging videos from written content, saving time and effort compared to traditional methods. It analyzes text, identifies key points, and generates professional-looking videos, effectively communicating your message.

SocialPilot

SocialPilot, a newcomer focused on outperforming Hootsuite, has been praised for its user-friendly interface and pricing. Launched in May 2022, it has continued to add features and maintain the same price points for professional and small team plans. Despite Hootsuite's doubled Professional and Team plans price, SocialPilot remains a cost-effective alternative.

Useful Features:

1. You can schedule posts: Third-party scheduling apps like SocialPilot enable business accounts to schedule and publish posts in advance, ensuring consistent engagement with their audience and saving time.
2. Bio gets an upgrade: Business profiles enhance professionalism by providing contact details like email, phone number, and business address, enabling easy connection with customers.
3. Set up Shop: Instagram Shop is a storefront that enables users to shop directly on business profile pages, requiring a business account on Instagram.
4. Advertising Options: Instagram ads allow brands to reach a wider audience, but require an Instagram business account connected to Facebook's ad manager. Paid ads can help reach target audiences and grow followers.
5. Access to Insights: Instagram business accounts provide built-in insights into account performance, including account reach, impressions, and interactions, enabling analysis of content success and optimization of strategies.
6. Branded content tags: 130 million people tap to reveal product tags in shopping posts monthly. Businesses can turn feeds into online shops by adding tags, product descriptions, prices, and shopping options.
7. Quick reply: An Instagram business account allows setting quick replies for customer DMs, saving time by providing pre-written answers linked to a shortcut word. It also categorizes DMs for tracking important leads.
8. Add links to Instagram Stories: To activate this feature, you need over 10,000 followers to add a URL to your Instagram Story, enhancing user engagement by allowing them to open the link within the story.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a SaaS platform that connects multiple social media accounts to a centralized management console, allowing community managers to manage multiple networks from one central spot, plan, schedule, and gather data.

Useful Features:

1. Content Planning and Publishing: Hootsuite, a social media platform, connects multiple accounts and uses a content calendar for scheduling and publishing content. Its user-friendly post creator allows users to upload images, add stock library images, or design visuals with Canva. Users can publish posts immediately or choose a future date. Hootsuite also features an AI writing assistant and an inspiration section for crafting compelling social content and converting website content into social posts.
2. Social Media Engagement Tools: Hootsuite enhances content creation and audience engagement by providing a unified social inbox, listening streams, auto-responders, and assignment tags. It saves time, ensures no missed messages, and helps identify trending topics, answer questions, and route communications efficiently.
3. Analytics: Businesses can manage their paid and organic content on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by setting up "auto-boost" ad campaigns through Hootsuite. This feature optimizes campaigns based on objectives, timelines, criteria, and audiences. Ad creation, deployment, and monitoring are done directly through Hootsuite, providing valuable insights and allowing easy comparison of organic content performance to paid content.

Canva

Canva is a free graphic design platform that simplifies creating various designs, including invitations, business cards, flyers, and lesson plans, using professionally designed templates and a drag-and-drop interface.

Useful Features:

1. Make text more engaging using animations: Animate text for Instagram Stories to grab fast-scrolling audiences. Design content like usual, hit the "Animate" button, choose style, and time frame, and download an MP4 video instead of a still photo.
2. Generate AI images using text prompts: Canva is integrating Stable Diffusion, an open-source technology, into its platform, allowing users to generate up to 100 free images from random prompts. The feature requires good, direct, and descriptive prompts, accessible through the Apps > Text to Image feature.
3. Make entire websites in Canva: Canva offers a Websites section with templates for portfolio, business, and personal sites. It features dozens of templates, all automatically resized for mobile view and allows editing of text and links. Users can generate up to five free links or add their domain.
4. Easily switch between your computer and phone: Canva offers a feature for designing social media posts on smartphones, allowing users to send their designs directly to their phone using a QR code. This allows users to continue their workflow on their smartphones.
5. Add tables inside Canva documents: Canva documents now allow adding tables to presentations, allowing users to add desired tables, add more rows or columns, and add text to cells, although Google Sheets integration is not yet available.
6. Create a presentation using pre-built layouts: Canva offers numerous templates, but they can be easily recognizable. Instead, use the Layouts tab in the Templates section to create your designs without stylizing text, images, or other elements. Canva automatically applies the same text styling to all pages.
7. Create device frames: Canva offers a free tool for creating device mockups, allowing users to showcase screenshots in presentations or social media posts. Users can add a screenshot, edit it, and choose a mockup image from the Smartmockups section. Canva also offers a Frames section for adding iPhone or laptop frames, enhancing graphic design images.
8. Enhance images: Canva is a powerful image editor with features like Auto-Enhance, Face Retouch, and Auto Focus. These tools enhance images automatically, smooth skin, remove blemishes, and blur the background. Canva's Design with Canva channel provides regular updates on new features and how to use them, making it an excellent choice for regular users or those looking to improve their skills.

An effective social media marketing strategy demands efficient tools. Buffer stands out for its comprehensive scheduling and analytics, Lumen5 excels in AI-driven video creation, SocialPilot offers a cost-effective alternative with a user-friendly interface, Hootsuite provides centralized management and engagement tools, and Canva simplifies graphic design. Marketers can leverage these platforms to streamline their efforts, engage audiences, and stay ahead in the dynamic landscape of social media marketing.

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