Social Media Marketing Tools: Our Recommendations

Having a strong social media presence is a core component to a successful inbound marketing strategy. Put your business at an advantage by leveraging social media marketing tools to drive more traffic, engage more users and increase conversions.

Social Media Marketing Tools: Our Favorites

Whether you're just getting started with a social media branding strategy or are looking to increase engagement and grow your brand, we're sharing some of our favorite social media marketing tools to help you reach your goals. Here are our recommendations:

1. HubSpot
2. Bulk.ly
3. Buffer
4. Canva

HubSpot

There are so many benefits of HubSpot, and our team loves the platform for a variety of reasons. Its social media management software makes posting content a breeze.

Create, schedule and publish posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn directly within HubSpot. We often use the scheduling feature to plan out our social posts ahead of time, which helps keep us organized.

Automatically share new blog content to these four social platforms by connecting your social accounts to your blog. This way, your audience sees your blog content the second it gets published live on your site.

Analyze the performance of your social posts within HubSpot by looking at key metrics like the number of likes, comments, HubSpot tracked clicks, network tracked clicks, replies and retweets.

With 800+ integrations in the HubSpot marketplace, easily integrate your social media advertising platform, like Facebook Ads for example, with HubSpot.

Buffer

One of the social media marketing tools the Groove Commerce team uses is Buffer, because it helps us easily publish content and analyze campaigns. See all of your scheduled social posts for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest within a single dashboard.

Draft social posts that everyone on the team can see, and provide feedback to refine the content as a team. It's important to note that everyone's posts will be shared within your preset schedule, so be sure to review the quality of the posts to ensure they align with your brand voice.

Amp up your Instagram marketing by scheduling posts directly to your account, creating a first comment when you schedule a post, including a shop grid to drive traffic and sales from your bio, planning posts in advance and receiving notifications to post natively.

Visually plan out Instagram Stories on desktop or mobile, and Buffer will send you a notification when it's time to post. Plus, Buffer creates an easy environment for collaborating with team members.

Bulk.ly

Automating your social posts has never been easier. We use Bulk.ly, a bulk social media automation software for your Buffer account, to automatically keep our Buffer queue filled with content so that our tweets, Facebook posts and LinkedIn posts are shared automatically.

Edit one CSV file for each social platform to include the URL and messaging. We like to edit each CSV file individually as we add more content to it, since it's a best practice to change the messaging to fit each social media platform.

Not all companies have the same brand voice, which is perfectly fine. However, we encourage tweaking your messaging for each platform so that you sound more professional on LinkedIn and a little more laid-back and trendy on Twitter (depending on your brand image/brand voice.)

Bulk.ly automatically pulls the images from our blog content into the social post, so there's no need to manually upload a featured image that is already embedded in your blog.

Canva

Our marketing team loves using Canva, a graphic design platform, to create visual content for social media. We appreciate the design templates that make it easy for us to keep our posts congruent with our brand image.

Since Canva is really easy to navigate, it's perfect for those with little to no graphic design skills. The drag-and-drop feature creates a seamless user experience, since it lets you see which photos, text and elements look best on your design.

Upload your own images or search for images, fonts, elements, music and more. Many are available for free, and those labeled "pro" come at a cost of $9.95/month when paid annually.

This tool also provides for frictionless collaboration between team members. Just click the "Share" button at the top to send the design to someone via email. Or use the share button to directly post your design on your preferred social platform.

Conclusion

We encourage eCommerce businesses to leverage any of these social media marketing tools to increase interaction and engagement from your targeted audience. If you need some social media marketing inspiration, check out these branding examples to see how these companies are doing it right.

Want to learn more about how Groove Commerce's marketing services can help your business grow? Contact us through the form below with any questions or concerns, and a member of our team will be in touch soon!