50 Essential Social Media Tools For the Modern Marketer

Just like Batman's tool belt, a social media marketer's toolbox is equally important. Neither fight crime nor publish tweets without it.
Since social media barged its way into our lives there have been thousands of social media tools released into the wild.
While you may have started with simple social media tools, like Hootsuite, to manage your social media accounts, there is now an overwhelming number of choices. A quick search tells me there are hundreds of apps on the Google Play Store alone to help you repost photos on Instagram. With so many options, how can you determine what social media tools are the absolute best?
Thankfully we've experienced the same problem. Over time and through plenty of trial and error, we've figured out what social media tools actually make an impact. We use these tools for our own social media marketing, and recommend them to others who need help. Here is our list of the 50 best social media tools for social media marketing.
Social Media Management
1.
Price Plans:
- Free
- Essentials $6/mo per social channel
Buffer is our social media management tool of choice here at Wishpond. In addition to its clean interface and unparalleled user-friendliness, Buffer provides great insights to help any marketer make the most of their social media marketing efforts. When used in conjunction with , Buffer could be all you really need to run a smooth campaign.
2.
Pricing Plans:
- Professional $49/mo
- Team $129/mo
- Business $599/mo
- Enterprise: Custom amount
Still surprisingly the gold standard for social media management tools. Hootsuite allows you to schedule, track, and collaborate on your social media accounts. It’s particularly good for large organizations or agencies that manage multiple accounts and pages. Hootsuite offers a variety of plans to suit the needs of different businesses.
This is one of the best social media tools because of all the functions it allows you to do. You schedule content for all your social media accounts, access excellent analytics and insights, manage brand mentions and comments, engage with your community, and more.
3.
Pricing Plans:
- Custom quotes available
Used by brands like Uber, Costco, Krispy Kreme, and more, Nuvi is a social media marketing suite that is unique in its stunning social media data visualizations. Nuvi simplifies social media data reporting and monitoring, so marketers can focus on shaping their social media strategy.
Nuvi is an all-in-one tool that allows you to manage all of your social media accounts from one place, access plenty of helpful data, and access resources to vastly improve the customer experience.
4.
Pricing Plans
- Edgar Lite $19/mo
- Edgar $49/mo
MeetEdgar is one of the leading social media tools for small businesses and entrepreneurs. MeetEdgar provides an effective way to schedule and organize social media content and automate publishing your social media posts. With automation features, MeetEdgar automatically generates social media updates for your content and posts them even when you get to the end of your content queue.
5.
Pricing Plans:
- Starter $5/mo
- Solo $19/mo
- Business $29/mo
Post Planner claims to apply science to social media and content to identify the best content for your audience. Users can browse Post Planner’s recommended feeds to discover new content, and its algorithms measure data from previous posts to predict future engagement and help shape social strategy.
If you’re looking for one of the best social media tools to help you develop and enhance your strategy, then Post Planner is a great option.
6.
Although CoSchedule is actually a full-fledged marketing calendar, it’s still one of the best social media tools as well. By linking all of your platforms and social media marketing accounts, and managing them from CoSchedule, you’re able to plan, promote, and execute your entire strategy from a single tool.
CoSchedule saves a lot of time and helps to make a whole lot easier.
7.
Pricing Plans:
- Standard $89/mo
- Professional $149/mo
- Advanced $249/mo
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that features a Unified Smart Inbox to streamline social engagement. It also offers customer support features like tasks and Helpdesk, and team collaboration tools like live activity updates.
Sprout is certainly one of the most popular and best social media tools available thanks to its wide array of features. You can access great analytics, publish across various social media platforms, and use this social media tool to improve your engagement.
8.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $79/mo
- Premium $159/mo
- Custom
Agorapulse is a social media management tool that offers loads of functions through a single dashboard. You can use Agorapulse to schedule and publish content, manage all of your social media messages, and find influencers that match your brand. The platform also provides excellent reports and monitoring capabilities to keep an eye on your social media performance.
9.
Pricing Plans:
- Essential $30/mo
- Advanced $96/mo
- Expert: Custom Price
ContentCal is one of the most useful social media tools for planning your content creation and publishing. This tool allows you to easily plan, develop, and deliver your content strategy from a single place. You can create posts on the platform, and schedule out your entire social calendar. This is an easy way to stay organized and keep on top of your social media marketing.
10.
Pricing Plans:
- Creator $29/mo
- Traction $89/mo
- Scale $199/mo
- Expansion $399/mo
Sendible is a time-saving social media management tool that is specifically geared towards brands and agencies to manage clients at scale. The platform allows you to customize, schedule, and publish posts across channels from one location. You can also use this tool to engage with social media users, track comments, collaborate on content calendars, and more.
11.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Starter $15/mo
- Growth $25/mo
- Advanced $40/mo
Later is the quintessential Instagram post scheduling app, used by brands like GQ, Yelp, and The Huffington Post. Later features an intuitive calendar view, bulk uploading, and a search function that makes it easy for Instagram marketers to find and repost engaging content.
This social media tool is also great for its Instagram analytics, as well as its Pinterest and TikTok scheduling. Brands can also use Later to improve their user-generated content.
12.
Pricing Plans:
- *Free *
Tweetdeck, now owned by Twitter, is a simple and fully-featured dashboard for Twitter. It organizes feeds, notifications, messages, and more using an easy-to-follow column view, and supports the management of multiple accounts, making it perfect for the social media marketing enthusiast. This is an essential social media tool for busy Twitter users.
13.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Starter $29/mo
- Pro $89/mo
- Premium $499/mo
- Enterprise: Custom price
Rebrandly is the most advanced link shortener for creating branded links and custom short URLs. Behind every piece of valuable information you share online, there’s a link. Every one of those links is an asset to your company. With Rebrandly you are able to put your brand on your links.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Rebrandly: Branded links can drive a higher click-through rate, enhanced brand awareness, and visibility, as well as increased link trust. This social media tool offers over 100 integrations and is trusted by some of the world’s smartest brands.
14.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $9.99/mo
- Advanced $19.99/mo
- Max $39.99/mo
Tailwind is an awesome scheduling app for Pinterest and Instagram. This app helps you choose the best times to post for maximum engagement, and it uses pixel-matching technology to help your pins go viral. If you’re focused on , then Tailwind will help you get your content in front of a much larger interested audience.
Graphics and Design
15.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $199.99/year
- Enterprise: Custom price
Canva makes it easy for anyone to create gorgeous images. It features multiple fully editable templates and a drag and drop editor that gives even the most visually illiterate marketers the ability to design great visual content for sharing on social.
Canva is one of the best social media tools for its ease of use and many features. You can access various templates that are already formatted for different social media channels. This social media tool is a must-have for any brand that wants to enhance its visual appeal.
16.
Pricing Plans:
- Starts at $9.99/mo
Lightroom by Adobe is one of the best tools for editing photos. This platform is simple to use, and doesn’t require any previous editing experience. If you want to start creating jaw-dropping Instagram posts that look professional and are always on-brand, then you’ll want to touch up each image with Lightroom. This tool is suitable for desktop and mobile use.
17.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Pablo is another visual media tool for social media, created by Buffer. With over 50,000 images and a simple drag and drop editor with over 25 fonts, Pablo is one of the easiest ways to create engaging images in different sizes for every social network. Pablo even features several filters to make your images stand out.
18.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
When you’re looking to create visual media to share on your social platforms, Pexels is the perfect place to find free, beautiful stock images. The site searches a multitude of stock image sites so you’re always sure to find the images you’re looking for. Anyone that needs to find the right images for their social media campaign can easily find them on Pexels.
19.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Just like Pexels, Unsplash is another amazing database of beautiful free images. We love Unsplash because the images are all incredibly high-quality, and they cover a wide range of themes. If you need to quickly gather some amazing visual content to post on social media, then Unsplash is definitely a site to check out.
20.
Pricing Plans:
- Student $2
- Individual $4
- Business $5
Easelly is a tool that simplifies making infographics, which is important when you consider the impact of visual media on engagement. With its large library of templates, marketers are sure to find an infographic outline that suits their needs.
This is certainly one of the top social media tools for visual content. Easelly is cheap, simple to use, and can help to enhance your social media posts in a big way.
21.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $19/mo
- Business $67/mo
- Team $149/mo
- Enterprise: Custom price
Infogram is an infographic creation tool that helps marketers share and visualize data through over 35 charts and 200 maps. It features ready-made designs, GIF charts, and the ability to import data from Excel, Google Drive and Analytics, Dropbox, and more.
Whether you’re creating YouTube thumbnails, social media posts, reports, charts, and more, Infogram is one of the top marketing tools to do it.
22.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $14/mo
- Enterprise: Custom price
Piktochart is a visual media tool that simplifies the creation processes for infographics, reports, posters, and presentations. It features over 500 templates, tons of industry-specific icons, and integrations to make importing data a cinch. This is a top social media tool that lets you enhance your content creation and marketing strategy in a big way.
You can also check out , a good alternative to Pikochart.
23.
Pricing Plan:
- Starter Plan: Free
- Individual $9.99/mo
- Team $19.99/mo
Spark is a web-based tool from Adobe that turns ideas into graphics, web stories, and animated videos. It simplifies these processes making it simple for creatives and non-creatives alike to create beautiful, engaging media in minutes for sharing on social media platforms. Spark also features three iOS apps so you can create on the go.
This is definitely one of the top social media tools for creating fast Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok content.
24.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Professional $15/mo
- Business $39/mo
From Instagram Reels to TikTok, is the most engaging and exciting form of content on social media. Animoto is an easy solution that lets you create and share videos with the simple drag and drop video editor. No experience in video making is necessary, allowing anyone to transform their social media with high-quality video content.
25.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
GIFs have become an integral part of the social media experience - they’re everywhere. GIPHY is the web’s largest GIF database, containing all of the moving images you’ll ever need for sharing with your social media following.
This is one of the most popular social media tools for gathering fun content to share across your social media platforms. All of the GIFs are free and posting them can make a big difference to your social networks.
Curation
26.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $6/mo
- Pro+ $8.25/mo
- Enterprise: Custom price
Feedly is a news aggregator app that creates a daily feed based on your interests. This results in a feed with topics closely related to your niche and allows you to find prime content to share on social media.
Feedly updates your feed each day with fresh content and top news stories. This is one of the easiest ways to keep ahead with content creation and marketing ideas.
27.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $99/mo
- Plus $179/mo
- Large $299/mo
BuzzSumo is one of the best tools to determine what’s trending for certain topics or keywords. It provides data on the highest-ranking content, and allows you to look at people who have shared this content; this helps you identify and connect with top social media influencers.
28.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Pro $5/mo
- Business $15.83/mo
Content curation is one of the most difficult parts of social media marketing - it can be tough to know what your audiences will like. Quuu takes the work out of curation by hand-curating content for you based on your audience’s interests that gets sent to your Buffer account immediately. This makes it easy to keep your social networks up to date with the best content.
Analytics and Insights
29.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Twitter Marketing $79/mo
- Audience Insights $696/mo
Audiense (formerly SocialBro) is a tool that provides a wealth of social media insights. It helps marketers create segments, understand audience behavior, optimize engagement, and track and report both organic and paid campaigns in detail.
30.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Solo $29/mo
- Pro $99/mo
- ProPlus $199/mo
- Company: Custom Price
Mention is one of the best ways to monitor your brand across the web and social media. It monitors a multitude of channels in real time to provide users with live updates about their brands, and features competitive analysis, influencer finding, and automated reports.
31.
Pricing Plans:
- Professional $119/mo
- Premium $279/mo
- Growth $699/mo
Whatagraph is one platform that syncs up with your favorite digital marketing channels and presents your data in one place. Integrate your social media and PPC ad platforms, use pre-made widgets to display marketing data automatically. Instantly see which campaigns, posts, or keywords perform the best. Make data-driven adjustments and watch their impact in real time. This is certainly one of the top social media tools to understand your multi-channel marketing data.
32.
Pricing Plans:
- Custom pricing plans
Keyhole is a hashtag tracking tool that measures the performance of certain keywords on both Twitter and Instagram. It provides real-time analytics, influencer metrics, and suggests related hashtags to help drive discovery and engagement.
Keyhole is a tool that lets you improve your social listening and brand monitoring, influencer marketing and analytics, competitor analysis, and campaign tracking.
33.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Plus $7.48/mo
- Premium $37.48/mo
- VIP $74.98/mo
Crowdfire is a social media management tool that allows you to manage followers on Twitter and Instagram. It provides insight into people who follow you, people who don’t, and finding inactive or influential users. It’s the ideal tool for maximizing the relevance and engagement of your followers on social media.
The Crowdfire features include content, publishing, analytics, and mentions.
34.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Instagram for Business is a feature within Instagram that allows brands to turn their accounts into Business accounts. This unlocks a “contact” button, business insights, and the ability to create ads and promote posts directly within the Instagram app. You can also use your business account to set up Instagram Shopping, which is a great solution for any brand that wants to sell physical products on social media.
35.
Pricing Plans:
- Pro $49/mo
- Advanced $79/mo
- Enterprise $139/mo
Iconosquare is an analytics and marketing suite for Instagram, and is used by brands including H&M, National Geographic, MTV, and more. It provides insights like follower analytics and engagement, Instagram post scheduling for multiple accounts, and photo and video contests. If you’re looking for Instagram scheduling tools that also offer great insights, then Iconosquare is a top choice.
36.
Pricing Plans:
- Basic: Free
- Premium $49/mo
- Market Intel: Custom Price
SocialRank is a tool that assists users in identifying, organizing, and managing followers on Twitter and Instagram. It features follower sorting and filtering to help brands identify their most influential and most engaged followers.
37.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Though Insights is just a feature built into Facebook’s Pages, it’s a tool that provides a wealth of analytics that are valuable to any marketer. In addition to showcasing impressions and engagement, Insights can be exported for further analysis. Using Insights is important for enhancing your Facebook marketing strategy, and finding ways to improve engagement on Facebook.
Promotion
38.
Pricing Plans:
- Free to use (not considering ad spend)
Facebook’s native Ads platform is the ultimate advertising tool. It uses the data the social network has collected over its lifetime (and believe me, there’s a lot) to allow advertisers to target audiences by interests, demographics, and more. If you want to reach a larger relevant audience on this major social channel, then utilizing ads is the easiest way to do it.
39.
Pricing Plans:
- Standard $49/mo
- Premium $99/mo
- Boost Plan + Premium $218/mo
Want to ? Of course you do. Well, Kicksta makes this easy. This is a complete Instagram organic growth service to help you get more followers. No spam, fake followers, or bots are included in this. Using AI-powered technology, Kicksta offers a smart solution to organic Instagram growth.
Automation
40.
Pricing Plans:
- Standard: Free
- Pro $3.33/mo
IFTTT is an automation tool that supports a ton of different social media apps. It allows you to link multiple apps to automate tasks like saving Instagram posts to Google Drive, keeping profile pictures in sync across platforms, or saving Tweets to a Google Drive spreadsheet. The possibilities are limitless!
41.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Starter $19.99/mo
- Professional $49/mo
- Team $299/mo
- Company $599/mo
Similar to IFTTT, Zapier is an automation tool that acts as a bridge between web apps. It features a huge library of apps, and supports complex linking between multiple programs. By making intuitive workflows that simplify processes, Zapier can help any social media marketer work more efficiently.
Other
42.
Pricing Plans:
Aha! Wishpond is a great tool for social media marketers looking to increase engagement. Its social media contest tool is a foolproof way to reach more potential customers through social to skyrocket lead generation. If you want to get more engagement, more customers, and use a single platform for all of your digital marketing efforts, then Wishpond is the solution.
43.
Pricing Plans:
- Basic $25/mo
- Plus $50/mo
- Business $83/mo
Typeform is a free and easy-to-use tool that helps you create forms and quizzes. If you’re looking to create a simple and gorgeous form to get information from your social media followers, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better tool than Typeform.
44.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Premium $4.99/mo
Ever read something on mobile that you want to share, and then have trouble finding it later? Pocket is a tool with extensions for desktop and apps for mobile that allows users to save links for later. It’s a simple tool, but it’s incredibly convenient and ridiculously useful.
45.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Live video is an awesome marketing tactic for any brand, and Facebook is one of the best platforms to do it. New content forms are always a good thing in social media, and live video is no exception. Facebook Live allows individuals and brands alike to connect with their audiences on a much deeper level.
46.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Google URL builder is the simplest tool you can use to attach UTM tracking codes to the links you share on social media. This gives you the ability to track metrics like traffic and visitor behaviour based on the places they came from, so you’re able to see how engagement varies on each of your platforms.
Visual Media
47.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
Click to Tweet simplifies the task of promoting, sharing and tracking content on Twitter. Users write the message they want others to share and Click to Tweet generates a link that can be shared. This link automatically posts a Tweet and can be tracked.
48.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Performance $5/mo
- Enterprise $45+/mo
Have2HaveIt is another Instagram platform that lets brands make their feeds shoppable. Though the tool only allows users to link to one location per Instagram post, it provides analytics and customer data that makes it easier to shape marketing strategies.
49.
Pricing Plans:
- Free
- Growth $19/mo
- Prime $149/mo
- Premium: Contact for Price
- Enterprise: Contact for Price
Yotpo is a marketing tool that focuses on generating real reviews for brands, with the goal of increasing brand equity and collecting user-generated content. The product is constantly introducing new features, including one that turns user-generated content and reviews into Instagram ads. Their features include SMS marketing, visual UGC features, loyalty and referral features, and reviews and ratings.
50.
Pricing Plans:
- Standard $39/mo
- Professional $79/mo
PromoRepublic is a smart posting and monitoring tool. combines a library of 100,000+ visuals and hand-crafted templates for posts and a scheduling tool with a number of features which facilitates engagement on your social media.
Wrapping Up
And there you go, the best tools that you can use to improve your social media. These tools can be used for multiple platforms and purposes, allowing you to schedule and create amazing posts, track results with an analytics tool, improve your social conversations, and more. With the right tool, you’ll be able to boost your in a big way!