45 Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools for 2021

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PixoLabo
  • Date Published
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Are you spending too much time and effort on your social media marketing? Find out how these essential tools can simplify your life and provide better results!

Work Smarter, Not Harder, With These Social Media Marketing Tools

If you run any business, online store, or product brand, you probably don’t have a lot of time. You don’t want to spend a tremendous amount of time learning how to find and learn how to use the best tools to achieve your goals. Our team has helped many clients with their social media marketing over the years, and we always enjoy researching new social media marketing tools.

In this post, we run down the must-have social media marketing tools for 2021. Since this list grew to be fairly extensive, we grouped them by category. Of course, every situation is unique, so we recommend tailoring a system that works for you.

But First, a Question:

What are you trying to achieve with your social media marketing? You need to ask yourself that question before you start looking for social media marketing tools that will best meet your needs.

There is no point in having a presence on all the social networks if you don’t know what goals or which audience you want to reach. So you must answer this question before you get started with your social media marketing.

What This Post Doesn’t Cover:

This post does not cover how to build a social media plan. We will assume that you already have a presence on your choice’s social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, or YouTube. We are also going to take it that you have a mobile-first website, including an active blog. One of the significant advantages of posting to social networks is driving traffic back to your website and showing that you are a trusted expert in your industry.

We are not covering the various pricing options for these social media marketing tools. You are all big girls and boys here and should figure out which options and costs work best for you. You can also check my recommendations for essential social media management tools for specifics. Of course, if you have any questions, we are here to help.

There are hundreds of apps and tools that deserve some consideration as viable solutions to enhance your social media marketing. These 45 social media marketing tools offer a range of capabilities and costs to appeal to everyone, from a growing startup to a fully established company.

45 Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools

Social Media Marketing Tools – Content Creation

1. Canva

With the need to include more visual content as part of your social media posts, you can turn to Canva for high-quality images that fit your budget. They offer numerous templates that help you look like a great designer, even if you don’t always know what you are doing.

2. Spark Post

Spark Post, formerly Adobe Spark, is a relatively new addition to my favorite small business social media marketing tools and has become one of my personal favorites. I use it to create visual content for our blog and social media presence. You simply choose from millions of photos, and it’ll put together what looks like the best presentation in the world.

3. Feedly

Feedly offers content curation and content sharing that integrates with Buffer to gauge what others are saying in terms of content and identify the key industry trends in relevant information that should shape your social-media posts.

4. Ripl

This tool is another addition to my favorite social media marketing tools. Ripl is the first app that enables social media influencers to personalize and share trending stories quickly. It allows you to create eye-catching original content and monetize their following across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Ripl scans millions of public social media posts searching for trending content. The tool then automatically curates posts for more than 460 topic feeds ranging from yoga and healthy eating to sports and technology. As a result, social media influencers can quickly discover and share relevant news and trends.

5. Design Wizard

Design Wizard is a useful tool for making visual content, with a reasonably simple and intuitive interface. Like Biteable, it has a host of features available with the free plan and some good premium content if you can spare a couple of dollars to upgrade.

With over 10,000 free design templates pre-optimized for platforms like Instagram and Facebook, and over 1.2 million stock images, Design Wizard is great for lazy marketers without a lot of time to spend.

6. MeetEdgar

It’s okay to re-use old content on social media as long as it is relevant. Still, it is often hard to find great content among daily social-media posts. MeetEdgar solves that by locating some of that incredible content that many followers may have missed because of the constant flow of information.

But they might catch your great information this time around. This social-media tool provides a way to categorize your posts to more easily track down the content you want to re-post shortly.

7.  VEED

Video Editor is the easiest and most versatile marketing video maker on the web. VEED helps to create stunning videos to market products, services, and promote your brand. 90% of customers say that video helps them make a purchasing decision, and are more likely to buy a product after watching a video.

Marketing videos are a great way of increasing your reach. Get new followers, subscribers, and boost like! With the full VEED range of editing tools, you can make your marketing video dazzle and impress. Veed helps you give your videos that professional edge. Veed is also more than just a marketing video maker.

With Veed, you can crop, rotate, resize, apply filters, add subtitles, translate subtitles (!), add sound effects, draw on your videos, and more! VEED has every video editing tool you can think of. We’ve got you covered, no matter what kind of video you want to make.

8. Biteable

Creating content for social media is an essential part of the game. Visual content gets three times more engagement on Twitter than plain text, so good visual content can help you take it to the next level. With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share.

With a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes, Biteable is a godsend for anyone who wants to create studio quality quickly. You do not need expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment.

9. Buzzsumo

Research is a crucial part of marketing. If you want to do well and leave your competitors in the dust, you need to understand what they’re doing and whether what you’re doing is working. Buzzsumo is a research tool that tells you how your content is doing and spreading the word.

Sometimes when you sit down to create content, you’re on fire. Other times it’s like pulling teeth, and you’re just grateful to have met a deadline. It’s impossible to guarantee success, but a tool like Buzzsumo can help you increase the odds.

10. POSTOPLAN

POSTOPLAN is a smart automated social media and messengers marketing platform, that allows you to create, schedule and promote content.

Create content easily, quickly, and conveniently. POSTOPLAN provides post ideas for every day. There’s also an excellent graphic editor with manual and automatic modes. Content creation has never been faster!

11. ContentCal

ContentCal is a great team collaboration social media marketing tool that can help you and your team with content creation and publishing. Using it, you can create a visual content calendar and set up approval flows with ease.

Social Media Marketing Tools – Content Sharing

12. AddThis

AddThis is the world’s largest content sharing platform. It provides tools that make it easier to share content across the social web and provides publishers with increased traffic and in-depth analytics. AddThis provides sharing, following, and recommended content tools, social analytics, tools to measure audience engagement, as well as audience Targeting conversion tools.

13. ShareThis

Do you want to get your content in front of a larger audience? Make it easy for your readers to share it on their favorite social media sites with ShareThis. Social media buttons are easy to install in just minutes. It takes just a single click for visitors to share your content with all popular social media networks when installed.

Choose the type of buttons you want to use, easily customize the design, to complement your site, and then add the code to your website. It’s that simple! Prefer to design your own? You can even create your own fully customized buttons from scratch.

14. Buffer

Buffer allows you to quickly post to Twitter, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn profiles and company pages, and Google+ brand pages. Whenever you add a post to Buffer, you choose which network or networks you want to post. For example, you might want to post to your Facebook Page, your LinkedIn profile, and a LinkedIn company page. It gets added to each network’s queue. If you’re going to post something straight away, you can do that by using a button in your browser.

15. Missinglttr

Social media promotion is vital to success in the online world. Still, the act of scheduling posts may not be the reason you bounce out of bed every morning. Even if you use a tool to help you speed up blasting all your channels at once, you still need to input the text and images for each post manually. Rinse and repeat to re-promote the posts.

Missinglettr helps you automate creating social content by scraping your blog post content and creating a year’s worth of social content for you: nine individual posts dripped out to your social channels over a year.

16. MailChimp

MailChimp is an email marketing and newsletter service with a long and proven track record. Each month, MailChimp sends out around 4 billion emails and takes care of all the issues that can arise from sending out emails to your customers.

MailChimp makes email marketing easy, and over time you can add more information such as demographics (age, gender, location, etc.). MailChimp also has detailed analytics to track when your recipients open the email or click-through to your website.

17. Post Planner

Post Planner makes it easy for businesses to find and share content consistently to get predictable, considerable, and remarkable results on social media. It’s a social media marketing tool that will be very helpful to your content and social media teams.

18. SlideShare

SlideShare is a slide-hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote, or OpenDocument presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on your website, hand-held devices, or embedded on other sites.

Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos, and webinars. SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content.

19. edocr

If you need to showcase an e-book, you will need to use a document-sharing service. You may have already heard of the likes of SlideShare. But there is another document-sharing service called edocr. When you upload your e-book to edocr, you will then appear in the edocr directory and be searchable for any edocr user and on the web. When an edocr user reads your e-book, you get notified by email, and you’re then able to follow up on that lead.

20. bit.ly

bit.ly is a URL shortener. That means it takes a long web address such as

https://pixolabo.com/my-ridiculously-long-and-confusing-and-convoluted-blog-post-title-that-is-so-long-you-already-forgot-the-beginning-of-it/ and turns it into something much shorter like https://bit.ly/134sfXy

The beauty of bit.ly is that it is very widely used and has fantastic analytics. You can easily see how many times visitors click on a link in a tweet and what network they were using. If you want to be posh, you can even customize the look of your short URL by adding a custom URL shortener with bit.ly, like https://bit.ly-pixolabo-post

21. Rebrandly

Similar to Bit.ly, Rebrandly is another 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 can put your brand on your links.

Social Media Marketing Tools – Management

22. Hootsuite

HootSuite is a social media management tool that allows users to schedule and post updates to any pages or profiles. You can access Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WordPress, and others from the HootSuite dashboard. When you sign up, you have access to a panel with tabs organizing all the social profiles you connect to HootSuite.

Although HootSuite is known mainly as a business tool, many small businesses use it as well. If you spend a lot of time on social media and have many profiles, streamlining all of those profiles into a straightforward system can help save you a lot of time.

23. AgoraPulse

If you primarily use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or other social networks for business AgoraPulse is an excellent solution.  This tool offers customer relationship management software, applications, analytics reports, contests, and more.

24. Sprout Social

The days of scheduling a social media campaign across each platform are over. All-in-one social media management tool Sprout Social provides engagement, publishing, analytics, and team collaboration tools.

You can improve engagement by making it easier to start, join, and monitor social conversations. You can improve client relationships with speedy response times and you‘ll stick to your social marketing plans by using a range of optimization tools.

You can connect and engage with customers and fans quickly and easily, staying on top of trends and keeping an eye on competitors. You can track internal data, including reply time, the total number of replies, and sentiment.

And if you want to grow your knowledge, Sprout offers additional resources and support through conferences and webinars.

25. Social Pilot

SocialPilot is another well-known management service with a rich feature set. It is praised for its easy-to-use interface and affordable pricing while offering all the necessary post-management and monitoring tools and in-depth analytics for small businesses.

26. Planable

Planable features all the niceties of a social media management solution while emphasizing collaboration and teamwork. It provides an advanced commenting and post-approval system that allows posts to be pre-approved before scheduling and release.

27. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a simple yet feature-filled social media management tool that offers fairly basic yet standard capabilities at a reasonable price. Among others, Zoho provides a Live Stream of social mentions for targeted keywords and a host of collaboration features.

Zoho also provides exceptional ‘bang for your buck’ according to users, along with its extended tracking capabilities both for your business and for competitors’ brand sentiments.

28. Sendible

Sendible is a powerful small business social media marketing tool that brings together your social-media management responsibilities. This tool pulls all posts and comments into one dashboard for analysis, measurement, and engagement. Other features include publishing, collaboration, customer relationship management, and mobile devices.

29. Sumo

Sumo has a whole suite of useful traffic and social media tools to improve your marketing strategy. The most relevant for social media is the social shares feature, which makes it easy for visitors to your site to share your content on social media. It keeps track of the number of shares.

30. Oktopost

Oktopost is the only social media management tool dedicated to B2B marketing. Oktopost’s social media management tool is an all-in-one solution designed to manage, monitor, and measure your social media activities towards achieving your marketing goals. Oktopost excels at uncovering the value social media presents for B2B companies by demonstrating the impact (organic) social has on the sales funnel.

31. IFTTT

IFTTT: If this, then that. This tool lets you set up rules that make running your social media marketing empire much more straightforward. Create events that trigger specific actions when something happens. For example, you can create a rule that means every time you get a Google notification for a specific alert. It gets added into a Google doc to check it all at the end of the day. These rules can eliminate some of the manual back-and-forths, and help you streamline your process to emphasize and enhance individual productivity.

32. Zapier

Zapier is another tool that encourages automation and does share some similarities with IFTTT. IFTTT is easier to learn and great for light automation. At the same time, Zapier is an excellent tool for businesses that want to take their automation to new heights. A lot of marketers use both for different tasks. As a bonus, Zapier plays nicely with most of the tools on this list.

Are you looking for some neat automation ideas to get you started? The Zapier team has a list of suggestions about how you can use Zapier to manage your social media accounts better.

33. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a full-service platform to manage all aspects of social media marketing, from publishing to tracking conversations and analyzing the performance of your social media efforts. It allows you to drive pre-sales conversations, answer typical inquiries automatically, and reduce response time on social media.

By automating your campaigns, NapoleonCat allows you to increase efficiency and cost savings by up to 70%. Being an official Facebook Marketing Partner, NapoleonCat can be trusted to offer reliable marketing solutions.

Social Media Marketing Tools – Analytics + Monitoring

34. Google Analytics

If you have a website or a blog, it’s highly likely that you already have Google Analytics installed, and if not – you should! It is one of the essential social media marketing tools; you just may not know that yet!

Google Analytics is an entirely free web analytics product. That means it doesn’t just tell you how many hits you have on your website. It shows you how many actual visitors you have, where they’re from, how long they stay on the site, where they come from, and much more!

35. Follower Wonk

An app for Twitter analytics, Follower Wonk, helps you find, analyze, and optimize your social media efforts on this platform. You can get more in-depth information about your followers, their location, and when they tweet plus the ability to locate new influencers and optimize your tweets.

36. Tweepi

Tweepi is an AI-powered social media marketing tool that helps you grow your brand’s presence on Twitter. You can use this tool to increase your Twitter following by as much as 100 new followers a day.

If you’re looking for a tool to make it easy for you to manage Twitter for your business, Tweepi is one of the best tools out there.

37. Cyfe

It’s important to add many analytics tools to your social media toolbox to understand what is working and not working. Cyfe delivers detailed reports related to SEO, Google Analytics, AdWords, and brand mentions that even a small-business owner can afford to use. It also gives you customizable dashboards to store and review this data.

Beyond just its social-media application, Cyfe also helps with industry and competitor research as a business intelligence tool that helps turn data and trends into actionable insights.

38. Nuvi

As an analytics tool, Nuvi can see what others cannot see in terms of Facebook conversations, including private and public posts. You can get insights into what people are saying behind the scenes that can help you to shape your social media messages further.

39. Mention

Mention is an extremely comprehensive social listening tool. Monitor mentions of your brand, your products, or your competitors in real-time. Staying on top of the conversation is easy: you can respond to social media comments and mentions from inside the platform. You can use Mention to find relevant influencers for influencer marketing campaigns and analyze your competitors.

40. AdEspresso

Social media advertising is complicated and can feel like you’re taking a shot in the dark. That’s where AdEspresso, the master of the A/B test, comes in. This tool allows real-time analysis of Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads. AdEspresso takes the guesswork out of how your ads resonate with your audiences under your campaign name and targeting details.

You can create and manage ads for all three platforms and then see what’s working (and what’s not) while your campaign is live. You systematically test different images, headlines, ad copy, and so on, until you find the perfect combination.

41. Brand24

Are you searching around for what people are saying about your brand? Brand24 delivers real-time information on your brand mentions and what is going on with your competition. This continual insight can help you effectively respond to positive and negative comments across your social media platforms, so you can stay engaged with your audience and effectively gauge any potential sales opportunities.

42. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a social media tracker that allows you to monitor and engage in online conversations in real-time. The tool works great for managing your brand reputation, spying on your competitors, content marketing, etc.

BrandMentions sends you real-time notifications when a new post appears anywhere on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, or any other place worldwide. BrandMentions is the tool to have if you want to measure the buzz around your brand, product, or keyword.

Social Media Marketing Tools – Security

43. LastPass

It’s quite normal for a social media marketer to take charge of numerous social accounts on different sites and platforms. Some can use the same password for everything. However, it can bring back many potential hazards of security and data loss.

LastPass allows you to have top security across all your social networking sites. The benefit of using LastPass is that you only have to keep up with one password, the LastPass one. Users never have to worry about remembering more than one password.

44. SecureMySocial

Tracking what people say on social media goes beyond just looking after your audience. You need to consider what your employees are saying and doing that might reflect on the company. SecureMySocial provides a way to get an alert if any social-media posts violate company policy or the law.

It is also possible for you to have the person posting information get a notification that they are in violation. This info could help maintain the company’s reputation when you don’t necessarily have time to track every post.

45. Secure Password Generator

Use this free Password Generator to create highly secure passwords that are difficult to crack or guess. Just select the criteria for the passwords you need and click “Generate Password(s).” Remember, the more options you choose, the more secure the passwords will be.

Using Social Media Marketing Tools

There you have them, 45 must-have social media marketing tools for 2021 that all businesses and product brands should be using. No, not all of them! Take a look at our favorites and see which of these must-have social media marketing tools best fit your needs.

Then start with the ones that work for your business. As always, we recommend that you try these small business social media marketing tools one by one. Evaluate if they meet your needs and provide the results you require. Feel free to switch to a different tool if you are not getting the benefits you expect.

Keep in mind that if you are not comfortable doing social media marketing, you should leave this in the hand of a professional social media marketer or agency. Like power tools, incorrectly using any of these social media marketing tools can hurt you and your business!

Are You Using Social Media Marketing Tools?

Of course, you may disagree, and you may think there are some glaring omissions.  If you have any thoughts regarding our small business social media marketing tools, please leave them in the comments below.

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By PixoLabo
A Next-Generation Web Design Agency
@PixoLabo