Top 20 Social-Media Tools to Add to Your Arsenal in 2016 From generating leads to protecting your reputation, these 20 social-media tools are just a few of hundreds now available to enhance your social-media presence and investment.
By Peter Daisyme Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Social media is here to stay in the marketing world and, by all accounts, it will only further penetrate all aspects of life and work. As we enter 2016, many social-media experts are already forecasting the direction of social media in the new year.
To be prepared, it's that time of year to organize our social-media tool boxes, adding some new tools that can be game-changers in terms of how effective this platform is for certain strategic objectives. Here are 20 recommended social-media tools to add to your game plan, if you don't have them already.
Related: Top 10 Social Media Management Tools You Should Try Now
1. Chatty People
Chattypeople is the best chatbot platform for creating an AI chatbot on Facebook with integrated Facebook commerce. With Chattypeople you can create a Facebook message both quickly and easily, no coding required. The platform's simplicity makes it ideal for entrepreneurs and marketers in smaller companies, while its technology makes it suitable for enterprise customers. You can make a simple bot answering customer service questions or integrate it with Shopify to monetize your Facebook fan pages. ChattyPeople is where f-commerce and ai-commerce come together. Chattypeople is 100 percent free to get started.
2. Buffer
Posting your social-media content across multiple social media accounts gets a whole lot easier with this tool. It allows you to create a posting schedule for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ pages all in one place, creating a queue and saving you considerable time.
3. Brand24
Rather than have to search around for what people are saying about your brand, Brand24 delivers real-time information on what's been said as well as 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 as well as effectively gauge any potential sales opportunities.
4. Edgar
It's okay to re-use old content on social media as long as its relevant, but it is often hard to find that great content among the daily social-media posts. Edgar can solve that by helping you to locate some of that incredible content that many followers may have missed, because they were inundated with 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, so you can more easily track down the content that you want to re-post in the near future.
5. Bundlepost
This social-media tool is another option for scheduling your posts but one that comes with features that improve upon other options. One highlight is Bundlepost will replace common niche keywords with hashtags, vastly improving your engagement results.
6. Nuzzel
As both a web and iOS app, this social-media tool helps you organize the stories shared by your Facebook and Twitter friends, aggregating the information into easy-to-read links and providing a way to add influencers that you can leverage for your own marketing needs. You can also go deeper by accessing the stories shared by friends of friends to develop a better understanding of your audience.
7. Cyfe
To understand what is working and not working, it's important to add many analytics tools to your social media toolbox. 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.
8. Social Clout
As another analytics tool, Social Clout looks at where you can make significant improvements in engagement, campaigns and keywords. It also delivers reports on demographics and social-media results. All of these reports provide data on multiple social-media accounts to help you track the progress and be able to note the differences in responses across platforms.
9. SecureMySocial
Tracking what is being said 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. This tool provides a way to get an alert in real time if any social-media posts which others make violates a 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, which could help maintain the reputation of the company when you don't necessarily have time to track every post.
Related: Why Online Reputation Management Is Like Brushing Your Teeth
10. AgoraPulse
If you primarily use Facebook and Twitter for business, this tool enhances what you can do with both social-media platforms, offering customer relationship management software, applications, analytics reports, contests and more.
11. Nuvi
As an analytics tool, Nuvi can see what others cannot see in terms of Facebook conversations, including private and public posts. This means you can get insights into what people are saying behind the scenes that can help you to further shape your social media messages.
12. Follower Wonk
As a Moz app solely for Twitter analytics, Follower Wonk helps you find, analyze and optimize your social-media efforts on this platform. You can get deeper information about your followers, where they are located, and when they tweet plus the ability to locate new influencers and optimize your own tweets.
13. Feedly
To help gauge what others are saying in terms of content and identify the key industry trends in relevant information that should shape your own social-media posts, Feedly offers content curation and content sharing that integrates with Buffer.
14. Inkybee
This social-media tool provides a way for you to locate those influencers who can elevate your brand and attract more potential customers. It provides a way for you to search for bloggers and social-media celebrities interested in your industry, so you can connect with them.
15. Adobe Post
This app is a new to the photo scene app but has become something very near to my heart. I use it for creating stunning photos for my blog and social-media presence. Best part about it is that it's free. You simply choose from millions of photos, and it'll put together what looks like the best presentation in the world.
16. Sendible
This is a powerful social-media tool that brings together all aspects of your social-media management responsibilities. This includes pulling all posts and comments into one dashboard for analysis, measurement and engagement. Other features include publishing, collaboration, customer relationship management and mobile tools.
17. Person App
This app essentially puts a face to all those followers and friends in the social-media world. You can also create specific personas that then interact with this audience. Together, social media becomes more personalized and human.
18. Openr
Make the most of your social-media efforts with this tool, which lets you add a promotional message to any message you share on your social-media profiles. The result is more leads and traffic while letting you learn more about your audience.
19. Socedo
Marketing automation is increasingly driving success for businesses in terms of enhancing sales whilst reducing cost and effort. Socedo automates the lead generation process by bringing in relevant prospects through social media. The platform matches users' interest with your defined criteria and engages prospective customers, automatically using a customizable workflow. In addition, Socedo also provides analytics and insights, so you can fine-tune and tweak the workflow in order to get better quality leads.
20. Babbly
Meanwhile, virality is one of the main goals of marketing through social-media channels. Babbly enables you to amplify your audience by sharing content through its own community of users and influencers. The tool is very simple. You just enter or paste the URL you want to promote, and the platform does its job. Babbly comes in a straightforward interface that's also mobile-friendly, which means you can grab attention for your content across different kinds of devices.
While there are hundreds of apps and tools now available that deserve your consideration as viable solutions to enhance your social-media presence and investment, these 20 social-media tools offer a range in capabilities and costs to appeal to everyone from a growing startup to a full-fledged established company.
Related: 7 Lesser-Known Tips for Growing a More Loyal, Engaged Online Following
