Ready to scale your business by streamlining social media? Check out our 30 favorite tools to find the perfect social solution for your agency!
Managing social media can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re balancing your own business and your clients. With multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram to handle, you need tools that simplify your workflow and boost your efficiency.
To help, we’ve put together a list of 30 top social media tools designed to make your life easier. These tools can assist with content creation, follower growth, performance tracking, and more. By choosing the right ones, you can streamline your social media management, enhance your agency’s productivity, and keep your sanity intact.
Explore our list and find the tools that best fit your needs!
Image creation
A COLOR STORY
Nail the perfect filter and aesthetic vibe for your Instagram photos with a couple of swipes and edits in A Color Story, a beautiful creation from A Beautiful Mess. With 100+ filters, 40+ effects, 20+ tools, and the option to save your edits for later, you’re sure to create the perfect feed.
This app is super easy to use and helps speed up your workflow. Plus it’s free, but you can also buy packages to take your social media photos to the next level!
VSCO
VSCO is a snazzy app that allows you to shoot, edit, and share photography. Known for its film-inspired filters, this app will make your images look professional and well-executed. You can also contribute to the creative VSCO community by sharing your photos or browsing through others – hello, inspiration!
CANVA
If you don’t have the time, resources, or desire to craft custom Photoshop images for your personal or professional social media posts, Canva is a quick and simple way to create them instead. From Twitter to Tumblr, it offers pretty templates that make it a breeze to whip up graphics with text overlays, ebook covers, YouTube thumbnails, and more.
There’s a browser and app version, so you can access the tool whenever and wherever works for your creative style.
PABLO
Pablo is the brainchild of Buffer, which lets you create beautiful images for all of your social media channels easily and quickly. With pre-loaded image dimensions for all major mediums, you can create engaging images to complement all of your social media copy. Their database also contains hundreds of royalty-free stock images to use, and various fonts to choose from.
ADOBE SPARK
If you’re not a designer, don’t let the Adobe name scare you here. This tool is built for anyone with an eye for design, with no major expertise needed. Bonus: it’s free! You can create graphics, web stories, and animated videos with Adobe Spark.
Your projects also automatically sync between your computer and iOS device, so you can create and share whenever the inspirational light bulb goes off.
Management
FACEBOOK PAGES APP
Use the browser version or app to manage your or your client’s Facebook Pages, no matter where you’re at. Utilizing Pages is a must for anyone using social media for business.
Within the app, you can manage up to 50 Pages straight from your mobile device, check Page activity, see insights, post updates, respond to comments, view and reply to messages, manage settings, and adjust Page admins. This app allows you to do almost everything you can do on the browser version. Hooray!
FACEBOOK ADS MANAGER APP
Easily manage all of your Facebook and Instagram ads on the go with the Facebook Ads Manager app, available for all mobile devices. You can create ads, edit campaigns, view your performance, manage account settings and track spending, and easily switch between your Pages or ad accounts. This way, you’ll never have to fret that an ad is overspending, and always have knowledge about ad performance for your clients whenever they may randomly call you!
HOOTSUITE
Here’s a simple breakdown of Hootsuite for social media management:
- What It Does: Hootsuite helps manage multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ from one place.
- Interface: The dashboard is functional but can feel cluttered and gray.
- Key Features:
- Scheduling: Plan and schedule posts ahead of time.
- Analytics: Track performance and gather insights.
- Social Media Listening: Monitor mentions, industry news, and relevant keywords.
- Customization: You can create and refine streams to follow specific mentions, keywords (e.g., ‘design agency in [your location]’), and competitors.
Hootsuite is particularly useful if you want strong social media listening capabilities and are okay with its basic interface.
TWEETDECK
If you don’t want to opt for a full suite of social media management, TweetDeck is a solid option for scheduling and monitoring tweets. You can arrange Twitter accounts, filter the people you’re following on Twitter, and track mentions, keywords, and hashtags using this tool.
The best way to use TweetDeck (even if you’re using Hootsuite) is the same way you would use Twitter lists. You can filter and organize your followers, allowing you to prioritize certain streams and interact with the best people. We find it incredibly useful to create lists like “Influencers” (the users that matter most to your agency/client), “Bloggers/ Journalists,” “Industry News Sources,” “Staff,” and “Competitors.” You can create an unlimited number of columns and filters, so you can be as organized as you want to be. It’s also completely free, which tends to be a pretty compelling argument for trying something out.
Scheduling
ONLYPULT
The hidden gem of Instagram scheduling tools, this app will post directly to Instagram for you when you draft from the web or their mobile app. Say adios to the days of having Instagram tools ping you when you need to launch a post!
Onlypult also allows you to change your Instagram bio link (#linkinbio), schedule a first comment of hashtags, queue posts to perfect your feed style, tag people and places, and so much more. The calendar and planner tabs are also super helpful when crafting Instagram posts. Onlypult is a paid app, but it’s super affordable and offers different tiered pricing.
BUFFER
Buffer is the ultimate social media scheduling tool for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and now, even Pinterest. It allows you to schedule your content days, weeks, and months in advance with an intuitive and feature-packed app. It will even auto-post content for you at optimum times during the day, saving you time and staggering updates so they don’t post all at once.
If you’re managing multiple social media accounts (and collaborating with others), you can sync all of the accounts and add team members, making it easy to consistently share content and keep everyone on the same page.
The best part? Buffer also offers a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Safari that lets you share content from any web page. Anytime you come across a relevant article, cool photo, or snazzy ebook, you can share it with just a click. And if you’re always on the go, no worries. The Buffer app for iOS has you covered.
TAILWIND
Buffer for Pinterest is a great tool, but if you want to get super serious about your Pinterest marketing, Tailwind is hands down the way to go. It’s the ultimate tool for agencies and offers scheduling, monitoring, and analytics.
For agencies, you can manage all of your clients (and your own Pinterest page) from a single dashboard. They also have a handy browser extension so you can pin from any page, or save pins to schedule for later!
Their agency plan offers multi-user access, custom reports, white labeling, super clean analytics… anything you can think of. If you’re a company that values this visual medium, Tailwind is certainly going to make your life easier.
SPROUTSOCIAL
Up there with the tools listed above, SproutSocial is another great option to invest in to handle all of your agency’s and client’s social media platforms. SproutSocial was built to streamline and enhance conversations with customers, prospects, and enthusiasts. The platform is packed with handy features to make engagement easier for brands.
Speaking of packed, SproutSocial is more than just a scheduling platform. It’s also brimming with all of the tools needed to conquer social media, including tracking social analytics, monitoring, listening, and scheduling.
COSCHEDULE
Here’s a quick overview of CoSchedule for managing your content calendar:
- Purpose: CoSchedule helps you organize and plan your content across various channels.
- Features:
- Team Collaboration: Easily assign tasks, add comments, and work together efficiently.
- Drag-and-Drop Calendar: Simplifies scheduling and organizing your posts.
- Cross-Functional Use: Manage social media, content, email, and events all in one place.
- Bulk Scheduling: Save time by scheduling multiple posts at once.
- Auto-Pilot Sharing: Automatically shares content at optimal times to maximize reach based on best practices.
CoSchedule is ideal for teams that need a collaborative, all-in-one calendar solution to streamline their content planning and scheduling.
LATER
Later allows you to plan, schedule, and publish Instagram posts all within a calendar-view, drag-and-drop editor. This helps streamline the organization and execution of your Instagram strategy.
Skip the headache of finding all of your media with their bulk photo and video upload tool and then stay super organized thanks to their ability to add groups and labels. You can also engage with your industry community with the search and repost tool. It’s a much easier way to create a curated feed!
Tracking
BIT.LY
This link shortener is an absolute must-have for any agency that considers branding to be important. You can brand your short domain, keeping your agency (or your client) top of mind during all of your social sharing efforts.
Bit.ly also provides you with valuable real-time insights for all of your links, so you know what’s performing well and why. Win-win!
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
We couldn’t go through tracking tools without mentioning this beast! While the number one use for this is to track website traffic, it’s also extremely helpful for tracking social media efforts. You can use it to dig into social marketing referral traffic by following:
ACQUISITION > SOCIAL > OVERVIEW
Here, you can see how much traffic your social posts have generated. To take it another step further, sprinkle your Google Analytics goals into the mix to see just how directly your social media is impacting overall marketing efforts. (Did you just think social media ROI reading that? We sure did!)
Another route you can go is by creating unique UTM tags for all your social media posts. We recommend doing it by campaign or organic posts. Then you can track each social campaign with an even bigger magnifying glass! To do this, you can use…
GOOGLE URL BUILDER
This builder makes the complicated UTM process so much sleeker! Break it down by source, medium, campaign, and content to nail down exactly what social post generated certain results. The Google URL Builder allows you to simply add the exact content where it’s supposed to go so you can skip hacking UTM links together by yourself!
FACEBOOK AUDIENCE INSIGHTS
If you aren’t looking to shell out a small fortune for a full management tool, most social media platforms provide their own set of analytics. Facebook Audience Insights gives you an overview of how well your page (or pages) is performing, so you can quickly and easily monitor its growth and impact. Just log in and visit this dashboard regularly to get a feel for which posts are the most effective and to gain insights into your audience demographics and behaviors.
TWITTER ANALYTICS
Track your perfectly crafted, witty tweets within Twitter with their built-in analytics tool. It’ll help you get a better understanding of your followers so you can make your content even more engaging and help with your client’s business goals.
The Tweet Activity Dashboard provides high-level stats broken down by individual months. Here, you can find what the best tweets, follows, and interactions were. The Audience Insight Dashboards allow you to skim valuable information about the accounts you follow and your follower’s demographics and interests.
ICONOSQUARE
Iconosquare is a great tool to evaluate your Instagram posts, and you can even benchmark your performance against direct competitors. This tool visually lets you measure follower growth, demographics, engagement, hashtag performance, and so much more!
Listening
HUNTGRAM
This content discovery tool for Instagram helps you find users based on location or image subject, so you can speed up your social media outreach and find meaningful connections for your agency or your clients. If you specialize in restaurant branding and websites, you could use Huntgram to find potential clients or find bloggers to help promote the restaurant itself. Whatever your niche, you’ll be sure to find a clever way to use this handy little Instagram tool.
GOOGLE ALERTS
Listening to social media is hard. There’s a lot of noise, and it can often be hard to sift through the sea of posts constantly flooding all of the platforms. Google Alerts is one great, free tool to help you put your ear on the pulse. You can set up alerts to send you daily emails on blogs, social posts, web pages, newspaper articles, and new results on a specified selected search term or phrase.
SOCIALMENTION
The Google search engine for social media, this platform pulls in user-generated content across the vast web into a single stream of information. With SocialMention, you can check in on what people are saying about your clients, industry products, or any other topic on all of the social media platforms in real time.
BUZZSUMO
Social media influencers. This is a hot buzzword that gets thrown around a lot in the social media world. As marketers and advertisers, we know this buzzword is super important, but can often be difficult to find. With BuzzSumo, you can easily find industry experts to interact with by searching for topics and keywords that your fans care about.
At its core, BuzzSumo allows you to research certain keywords to discover what content people are sharing around them. You can also view posts competitors are publishing on these keywords, and track how others are using social media centered on the keyword.
MENTION
Mention is somewhat of a take on Google Alerts, but provides real-time monitoring instead of daily emails. It lets you search the web, social media, and beyond for helpful insights to power your social media strategy. Similar to Google Alerts, you can also program it to receive daily emails of their findings.
With real-time monitoring, you can focus on what’s being said about you, or your competitors, join in on the discussion, find influencers, and tackle your brand’s social customer support.
The automated reports also make it a breeze to share with clients and management when they want an update on how your social media marketing is performing.
Miscellaneous
ZAPIER
Zapier connects the apps you use, giving you nearly endless ways to automate tasks and streamline your agency’s processes. You can use Zapier to automatically promote your content through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn via Buffer. You can use Zapier to autoshare Instagram posts to a Facebook page, save Twitter mentions to a Google Sheets spreadsheet, automate Twitter replies, add new Instagram followers to a spreadsheet…and the list goes on, and on, and on more.
GRAMMARLY
When you’re writing a ton of social media posts for your agency and your clients, it’s easy to make an embarrassing spelling or grammatical error. And we all know that social media loves to catch us on these mishaps! Save yourself and your client’s professional look, and get another set of copy editor eyes on your social copy with the Grammarly browser extension! We consider it a big life-saver.
TYPEFORM
Revamping social media strategy and finding the right content for followers is an ongoing challenge. One of the best strategies is to listen to your fans and tailor your content to what they find useful. Forms are a great way to learn that information. Typeform is a great, free tool to utilize the next time you want to send a survey out. From surveys, quizzes, landing pages, and conversational online forms, you can easily build beautiful and engaging surveys in a breeze!
WISHPOND
Contests are a great way to hack both engagement and followers at the same time, and Wishpond allows you to do it effortlessly! It’s a fantastic tool for social contests and promotions. With options for launching sweepstakes, photo contests, hashtag contests, vote contests, referral contests, and coupon promotions, the engaging opportunities are limitless!
Conclusion
Social media management is just one part of running a successful agency. To further boost your growth, consider adding recurring revenue streams to your business model. Here’s why:
- Stable Income: Recurring revenue provides a steady, predictable income.
- Healthy Cash Flow: Helps maintain financial stability and reduces stress.
- Client Retention: Long-term services keep clients engaged and loyal.
If you’re interested in exploring how to integrate recurring revenue into your agency’s offerings, let’s dive into some strategies!
