Everything You Wanted To Know About Social Media Marketing Tools

We say McDonald's, you say...

I'm loving it!

Nothing else that comes to mind, does it?

Before you start dissing about their ice-cream machine or claiming that Burger King is better, let us tell you how McD made it to mind, body and soul faster than its competitors. Nostalgia and hunger aside, how did everything about McDonald's get imprinted in the minds of... well, almost everyone? That's some spotlight-holding skills!

The secret is: McDonald's is present where its consumers are.

As a brand that has sent out more than 766.9 thousand Tweets and has 81,352,052 Facebook followers (at the time of writing this article), Mc Donald's knows how to reach out to its target audience (Millennials and GenZ) who are all about social media. They know, we know, you know – and we all know that the world connects on social media these days. With its unique brand voice and proactiveness in sharing trending content, the brand gained more popularity than the rest.

With 200 million Americans on Facebook, 180 million on LinkedIn and about 112 million on Instagram, it is a smart choice for businesses to promote their brand on social media. This means, as a business, you need to create spot-on content that connects with your audience and shares across social media. No, you don’t just have to generate A LOT OF spot-on content. You have to create A LOT OF spot-on content, REGULARLY! Not to forget that the responsibilities of a social media manager include responding to messages, replying to comments, and engaging in witty Twitter conversations. All of this at the same time and promptly, might we add.

Phew! Breathe! Don't panic! We know it's a lot to deal with; the job of a social media manager is not as easy as it seems, is it? Relax, they have one good friend, though- *enter* Social Media Marketing Tools (SMMT)!
 

What Are Social Media Marketing (SMM) Tools?

Social Media Marketing Tools are those digital tools that help businesses to develop, publish and market content by utilizing social media pages of the company such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and many more.  Why do that, you ask? The reasons are:
 

• Increase brand awareness by promoting brand content

• Build Customer Relationships 

• Understand where the traffic is coming from and where it could be more

Moreover, Social Media Management Tools via feedback management provides an added advantage, which lets companies track post engagement, interact more with their audience by responding to their DMs or reactions, etc. SMMT also helps in devising social media campaigns, scheduling it and implementing it, which in return will help in generating substantial leads, exceeding the number of visitors on the website and acquiring more followers. The excitement doesn’t end here, these SMMT often include advertising management on social networking sites to help businesses and organizations extend their business scope.

That's pretty straightforward, right? Next, let's learn who could possibly have thought of creating such a tool? Well, it was a combined effort of several geeks over the years.
 

History And Evolution Of Social Media Marketing Tools

The concept of social media began with Samuel F.B. Morse, a painter-turned-inventor, who sent encoded messages, a combination of dots and dashes transmitted through a telegraph device. Using this device, operators started chatting with one another ensuring that the message was accessible to all the operators available on the line, who’d then join the banter - thus creating an unofficial chat room.

It leaped further and the digital journey began. In 1996 appeared Six Degrees, which unified features like profile and friend lists, an add-on to the previous list of just having school affiliations. In 2001, we welcomed StumbleUpon to the party; Friendster joined in 2002 and LinkedIn, their serious friend, joined in 2003. Things were good for a while and then Orkut joined the party in 2004; followed by Facebook in 2004 and many more in the times to follow, which essentially rattled the entire social media game. As the number of platforms and the number of users on each of these platforms began skyrocketing, businesses started their search of finding unique ways to leverage them to increase website traffic and gain customers.

To help businesses, Social Pilot became one of the first Social Media Marketing Tool, soon followed by Hootsuite. Rest was history. Competitors poured in a jiffy and everyone got busy making cooler and easy-to-manage tools for SMM. Not just scheduling content on different platforms, the same SMM Tools now enabled businesses to create social media strategy, content creation and curation, analysis, engagement and more (smart move, indeed!).
 

How Social Media Marketing Tools Works? 

If you ask us in a nutshell, we'd say Social Media Marketing Tools schedule, engage and analyze social media content and strategy on multiple platforms together.  

Zooming in, let's break the process into three parts.
 

• Scheduling

  Think of it as a perfect soldier that listens to your instructions and follows them to the T. Similarly, on the SMM Tool, you feed in your brand content, schedule it according to your calendar and the tool will publish it on your social media accounts consistently.

• Engagement

  In this part of the process, you assign the tool to become your eyes and ears in the wild world of social media. Anytime your brand name is mentioned, or a hashtag related to your campaign is used, the tool will update you. It is sort of like the curse on Voldemort's name; whenever his name was spoken out loud, Death Eaters and Snatchers were alerted to the speaker's location.

• Analyzation

  At last, just so you don't get carried away, the tool would let you know whether the content you are posting is working or not. It prepares a report telling you about how people feel about your brand (brand sentiment), how much people interact with your brand (engagement) and whether they want to connect with your brand or not (followers). If you want to see this in action, you can explore popular tools like HootSuite, Buffer, Sprout Social and Sendible – they're doing a great job of social media marketing.

However, do you really need such a tool? We think so. Here’s why.
 

Why Businesses Need Social Media Marketing Tools?

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if you regularly publish good content, people like your brand and engage with your content. Through your content, you can redirect your target audience to your website or urge them to take the desired action, including coming to your store, buying your product/ service and even purchasing from you. Isn't that the whole point of running a business?

To cut to the chase, Social Media Marketing Tools don't just help you be present on social media platforms; they also help you manage your social media footprint and bring traffic to your website (talk about killing two birds with one stone!). Maybe learning about Social Media Marketing Tools' key features will help you understand their importance better.
 

Features Of Social Media Marketing Tools

The various features of Social Media Marketing Tools are based on the different types of content promoted on social platforms and have multiple functionality levels. Some SMM Tools are fancy which will show dancing unicorns every time it publishes a new post; however, some features are standard amongst all, including:
 

• Single dashboard to view all your social media activities

• Social media widgets and browser extensions 

• Content creation, scheduling and publishing on various social media platforms

• Social media monitoring

• Online reputation management

• Organize social media contests and user engagement games 

• Hashtag management 

• Campaign management and social media analytics 

Unless you are living under a rock, it’s quite obvious that neither social media nor the business of social media is going anywhere anytime soon. So, let’s explore what can we expect from SMM Tools of the future.
 

Future Of Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media is rapidly evolving for which your Social Media Marketing Tools should also become future-proof. At the moment, many of them are prioritizing to utilize influencers, stories, social commerce also Augmented Reality, to show content that's more relevant to you and help your brand to engage with your customers. Also, SMM Tools would soon provide content scoring and storage to help you build an entire library of high-quality content. That will help you save time trying to figure out what's going to work.
 

Conclusion

All said and done; you can't run a business in this day and age without promoting your brand on social media. You've got to stay updated on all that's trending and chip in wherever you can. Similarly, you need to stay updated with the latest that technology has to offer.