What’s in a social media manager’s toolbox?

Whether you are a pro social media manager, or just handle it for your company or personal website, managing social networking promotion has become a job in itself. A job that can be made much easier if you use the right tools. Of course, you need to know what you are doing, or these tools will just be useless.

In this post, I’ll focus more on free and cheap services, but there are some more expensive ones that will give you other unique features.

1. Social Mention

Social Mention is a great tool for any marketer who is involved in content creation and need to understand what the people want. It let you search for a topic and get a good understanding of what’s going on on social media sites. It is also woth noting that social mention is a good tool for SEO and a pretty good for keyword analysis. The best part, it’s entirely free.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of these very useful tools that lets you analyze your competitors to learn from what they do right. You can analyze the topics you want, or find out what topics work well for your competitor, then try to steal their lunch. BuzzSumo can also be used to find out who the influencers are on specific topics. The app is free for a very limited number of searches, then you’ll need to pay.

3. Buffer

Buffer is the first app I show to my clients who want to get started with social media sharing. The app let you share on multiple social media networks at once, and gives you some statistics about each post’s performance.

4. Follower Wonk

Understanding and analyzing your Twitter activity and followers is just as important for growth as being active on the social media site. Follower Wonk gives you amazing tools for that, by letting you know who your users are, what are your best posting times, and much more tools to manage your Twitter account. All that for free.

5. ViralWoot

If you are a designer or a design blogger, ViralWoot is probably a tool for you. Targetted at Pinterest, one of the best social networks for visual content nowadays, it helps you promote pins and gain more followers on that site. It also comes with scheduling and alerts tools.

6. Google Analytics Reports

A condensed weekly report that you can create with Visually’s Google Analytics Reports, a tool that gives you a 5 minutes overview of important stats from your website, with an emphasis on social media data and trends.

7. My Top Tweet

A simple tool that does only one thing, but does it good and quick. MyTopTweet takes any Twitter username and tells you what his or her best tweets are in terms of results (retweets and favorites).

8. Beevolve

Beevolve is probably the most comprehensive dashboard that you can get to track your social media accounts and campaigns. It is not a free service, but if you use it right, the money you’ll spend for the app will quickly be paid back by return on investment.

Get detailed stats about your social media posts and followers. A dashboard with well-presented statistics, real-time conversion tracking, and customizable reports.

9. Swayy

Free for one account, Swayy is a spectacular tool for social media users who are also bloggers. Very simple to use, all you have to do is to connect with your account, the app will suggest you some good content to share or to blog about.

10. Rapportive

Rapportive only does one thing, but it’s a useful one if you are a Gmail user. The app will tell you everything you need to know about the person who emailed you, right in your inbox.

11. NinjaOutreach

NinjaOutreach is your all-in-one influencer prospecting and outreach tool that lets you create an outreach campaign from start to finish all within one app. You can find influencers from any niche or even find the most shared content to give your business a boost. You can also automate your campaigns and schedule follow-ups to cover all your bases. The app offers a 14-day free trial and paid plans from as low as $69 per month.