8 social media marketing tools to help your business

Social media marketing can require a tremendous investment of time. But with 3.5 billion people visiting social media sites regularly, it's an opportunity you can't ignore. With a massive audience at your fingertips, how can you take the pain out of your social media marketing? These 8 tools are the answer.

Look, most lists of social media marketing tools are endless repetition. They present 10 different pieces of software that essentially do the same thing: manage and schedule your social media posting. But you only need one, so which one should you choose?

There are a lot of great social media management tools out there, such as Hootsuite, SproutSocial, Buffer and Agorapulse. For our money, though, eClincher is one of the best. Like other social media management platforms, you can schedule and queue posts, manage your social media messaging and comments and track your analytics.

A few features set eClincher apart, though. First, it supports a wider range of social media platforms than many other management tools. You can manage your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube accounts from eClincher. It also has a feature to suggest content based on keyword or category popularity, and a tool to search for influencers on Twitter. Best of all, it's one of the cheaper social media management platforms available.

Price: From $59 USD per month for 1 user with up to 10 social profiles to $219 USD per month for 6 users with up to 40 social profiles.

Brand24 helps you manage your brand's image and reputation by keeping you up-to-date on conversations happening about your brand online. You simply enter your brand's URL and keywords related to your brand, and Brand24 will scan social media and blogs, and will notify you whenever your brand or terms relating to it are mentioned. You can even monitor mentions for competing brands. And it integrates with Slack to notify you immediately.

Price: From $99 USD per month for the Professional Premium Plan to $399 USD per month for the Professional Max Plan.

OK, let's get something out of the way up front: automating your Instagram engagement can be risky. Plenty of shady companies have built bots to like posts, follow accounts and leave automated comments with the promise of growing users' Instagram following, and many times the result has been a lot of irrelevant posts in your newsfeed, a following comprised of a few bots, a bunch of spammy looking comments from your account and an eventual banning.

So it's with great trepidation that we recommend another Instagram automation tool. But SocialCaptain earns its mark of approval by using a much more sophisticated AI to follow account relevant to your brand, leave human-like comments and bring in real, organic followers. It does what you would do to build your own audience: engage with your target audience, like their posts and follow them. But SocialCaptain does it 150 times faster than you could do it manually.

Price: Prices range from $15 USD for one week to $99 USD per month for the ongoing premium plan.

To grab attention on social media, you need great imagery. Unfortunately, not everyone has graphic design skills.

Canva holds your hand by providing you easy templates to design beautiful images for social media. It uses a simple drag and drop interface along with a library of stock fonts and imagery to make graphic design achievable regardless of your artistic skill level.

Price: Canva has a free plan, or a Pro plan for $9.95 USD per month.

What Canva does for graphic design, Lumen5 does for video. It provides you easy templates and a drag and drop interface to help you make video optimized for social media. But Lumen5 goes a step further, employing a sophisticated algorithm that allows you to feed in text and get an auto-generated video with relevant title cards and stock video. Huge companies like Starbucks and Adidas have used Lumen5 to generate video content, and the software's powerful features make it easy to see why.

Price: From $19 USD per month for the starter subscription to $500 USD per month for the Enterprise edition.

BuzzSumo is the industry standard for generating content ideas and researching trends. It allows you to find the kind of content that's being shared most on social networks, monitor competitors' social content, create alerts to see content that matches a particular keyword and find influencers in any topic area. If you want to know what's trending and what's likely to engage your audience, BuzzSumo is the place to start.

Price: From $79 USD per month for the Pro plan to more than $499 USD per month for the Enterprise plan.

Audiense is a tool specifically geared towards building your Twitter following. It helps you laser focus to identify Twitter users who fit your brand's target market. You can filter by demographics, Twitter activity, influence or a variety of custom filters. You can use the tool to build segmented audiences and target your Twitter marketing for specific audience buckets. It will even give you data on the best time to send tweets to engage certain audience segments.

Price: From around $10 USD per month for the Starter plan to around $100 USD per month for the Standard plan.

Tailwind is another platform-specific tool, geared towards Instagram and Pinterest. It helps you manage both accounts with bulk image upload, multi-board pinning, post scheduling and analytics. You can schedule posts to go out for times when your audience is most engaged, automatically apply relevant hashtags and get curated content delivered to you.

Price: The small business plan starts at $9.99 USD per month, with the professional plan going up to $799.99 USD per month.