7 Powerful Social Media Tools Inbound Marketers Must Try

Social media plays a very important role in Inbound Marketing* in attracting prospects and converting them into sales leads for ours organization (read our previous post: How Social Media Helps Inbound Marketing). As such, it is critical for us to manage social media efficiently, and this can be done with the help of some tools such that we are not bogged down by the tedious task of managing the various social media platforms being used.

There are so many social media marketing tools popping up nowadays. With so many to choose from, how do you know which to pick? This article will help you identify the good ones from the rest.

1. Buffer: Social media publishing with powerful analytics.

Buffer is a powerful social media tool that sends your updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other popular social media platforms. It also has built-in analytics to help the user analyze why certain posts are working while others aren’t. For an easy-to-use tool to manage your company's social media accounts, try out the newly launched Buffer for Business.

2. Mention: Google Alerts for the social web.

Mention is one of the best online tools to monitor your brand's presence across the web. It helps you monitor the mentions of your brand or the keywords you want on social media networks, blogs or forums. Mention also allows you to respond to mentions of your brand and to share industry news that you find.

3. Zapier: Integrate favorite social media sites.

Zapier is an integrator for most of the online services you use independently, connecting those services to make your work easier. For example, if you use Facebook to connect with your friends, Zapier can help you retrieve your contacts from your Gmail account and send them messages and notifications.

4. Feedly: Content discovery.

Finding good content worth sharing with your network is easy with Feedly. Not only can you subscribe to RSS feeds to keep on top of industry blogs or news sites, you can also use Feedly to discover new content related to your topics of interest.

5. Bottlenose: Intelligence for social networks.

Bottlenose features a real time search engine that searches all public information from social networks and displays it in order of importance. The result? A great list of content arranged by most to least important. For instance, "economic insights". I’m sure you'll find a number of great resources. And of course, you can easily share the top results.

6. Twitter Counter: Track Twitter progress.

It can be easy to lose track of how your Twitter account is growing; that's where Twitter Counter comes in. It's a free service that tracks changes in your follower count and predicts future growth over time.

Twitter Counter can be useful in understanding how quickly your number of followers is growing, and using that information to make decisions about the content you share, like re-sharing older content that new followers would have missed.

7. Followerwonk: Follower analysis for Twitter.

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.

Using the tips in this blog post, get started on these tools to handle your social media presence more effectively!

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.