Powerful Tools for Social Media Marketers

Are you looking for new social media marketing tools? Do you want to know which tools today’s social media professionals recommend? It’s not always easy to know which tools are worth checking out or how to use them. We asked 15 top social media marketers to share the tools they find most useful right now. In this article you’ll discover 14 tools to add to your social media marketing toolbox and why you should consider using them.

IFTTT (If That Then This) is a new free web service that lets you automate your online life. You can connect with 50+ online services and set them up to conditionally react with each other. IFTTT calls these conditional reactions recipes.

Some people share recipes through IFTTT’s built-in option to share recipes. Users have already created over 2.5 million recipes.AllThingsD The service makes it easy to do things like have all the photos you are tagged in automatically uploaded to Dropbox, get a text message when snow is on the way, or even use Siri to turn your lights on and off (you will need a Belkin Wemo Switch for that last one).

IFTTT lets you take advantage of a new era of APIs and Web 2.0 services using an easy-to-use interface that is not only intuitive but powerful too. Is it the best website for personal automation? Yes. And can it help you automate your online life? Certainly. To top it off, IFTTT recently raised $7M so they can afford do things like give you a free phone number to use with your connected services.PandoDaily

Services IFTTT Connects With

Social Media Analytics and benchmarking Industry has grown multiple folds in the last 2-3 years. Brands have started realising the importance of testing and measuring their performance compared to the Industry. With the emergence of Big Data Trends, Organisations have started looping in Social media data as a key subset of the important data they generate from various marketing sources. Quintly is one of the social media benchmarking tools which performs analytics on your owned & competitive presence on major platforms.

Quintly makes it easy for an individual to get started with a minimalistic interface to emphasise on the first thing there is to get started à Adding Profiles. Quintly supports data for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube & Instagram. For Twitter & LinkedIn, you might have to authenticate with your account for them to start pulling data for the accounts you specify.

You can search your Brands by names and select the correct ones from suggestion box from different platforms at once. The search box also gives you the idea of authenticated accounts (tick-marked & verified) so that you choose the right account over the stream of results. Below is the result of searching Samsung, which gave in all the verified accounts, followed by the regular ones as results. If you manage a Facebook page (or pages), you can add them as well to measure your own business along with the competition right within the Quintly Dashboard. Just click on ‘Connect with Facebook’ and it will auto-import your pages and you can choose the right ones you wish to analyse.

For those who haven't been following the Vine phenomenon, here's how it works: With this popular app, you shoot six-second videos either continuously or stopping and starting at will. The videos, themselves called Vines, are square, and they loop endlessly when played back on Vine's own thriving social network. You can embed the finished product into websites or share them via Twitter and Facebook. Vine's strong social networking features let you find, follow, and view the Vines of others using the service. We took the iPhone version of the update out for a spin on an Apple iPhone 5s.

To shoot a Vine video, you still simply hold your finger on the screen. You can lift it to stop recording, and you press it again to add mini-clips or even a stop-motion effect.

Extra shooting tools have accumulated since the launch of Vine two years ago. Most of these hide under a wrench icon. They include a ghost tool to help create stop-motion videos by showing you the last image shot as a transparency, a grid overlay to help you with framing, a flashlight-on button, and (new for this version) a level. The leveler is kind of cool because it switches from gold to green when you're holding the camera perfectly horizontally. Also handy is a delete button that erases the last segment you shot or loaded from the Camera Roll.

To use an existing video clip from your Camera Roll, you tap the upload icon at the left of the shooting interface, which presents a thumbnail grid of videos you've shot. Tap the one you want and then Select, and it will take you to the Trim & Crop page.

Cropping is necessary for the rectangular videos shot with the iPhone's iSight camera, and of course you'll have to trim if your video is longer than six seconds. If you have seconds to spare, you can shoot more from the app. But Vine is finicky when you're combining shooting with Camera Roll clips. When we tried adding more than one clip from the Camera Roll, it combined them only if the total time length was under the limit. If we added a longer clip, the playback would be black. In fact, the app's behavior was very strange whenever adding more than six seconds of video.

Zapier allows users to automate tasks between different online services. Instead of waiting around hoping that your favorite service will start working to integrate with other services, Zapier does that for you.

You start by setting up a “Zap”, which is essentially a rule that “if A happens, then do B”. WIth Zapier, you can automate over a dozen of KickoffLabs related events!  For example, you can automatically send every KickoffLabs lead that comes in straight to Salesforce or a CRM like Highrise.

It’s a simple tool that can spare you time from doing repetitive tasks over and over again.  Right now they boast integration with over 249 web services and offer a free plan for a limited number of Zaps and tasks per month.

Magisto transforms the videos and photos uploaded to the platform into polished short movies with emotion and excitement in the core of every story.

Upload any type of creative ranging from images, slides to short videos etc. The Magisto uses an artificial intelligence engines which breaks down the uploaded content in three parts:

You just have to upload your content and let Magisto do the rest of work, and by the way one can also upload music files as a background score.

If your business relies heavily on social media, this one is for you.  Buffer helps you manage and automate (to an extent) your activity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and App.net. I love it because I can dedicate half an hour a week and fill up a buffer of posts for our audience that goes through the next week..

People check social media at various times during the day, and Buffer lets you schedule your updates at the best times so the most people see, comment, like, and share your updates.

With their free plan, you can connect one account on each platform. With “The Awesome Plan”, you can link up to 12 different social profiles, and have unlimited posts/updates for just $10 a month. You can also add a user to have someone manage it for you, and you’ll get analytics and tracking capabilities to see how many tweets, shares and comments you get.

Although you can use a tool like Twitter Counter to watch the growth of your number of Twitter followers, you may need to analyze your followers more carefully. Followerwonk breaks down your followers into demographics so you can understand them better. The best part about Followerwonk could be its analysis of what time your followers are online, helping you to know what times you should tweet to reach more people.

You can also find out when the people you follow tend to be online--just in case you're trying to start more discussions with those Twitter users.