26 Social Media Tools for 2021 and Beyond
There are more than 244 million social media users in the United States, and that number is expected to exceed 257 million by 2023. Today’s school marketers know social media is an essential part of marketing campaigns; each social media channel is an opportunity to engage with their target audiences.
Managing multiple social media channels can be overwhelming unless you are utilizing the right social media tools.
Social media tools can save time, lower costs and help safeguard your school’s online reputation. They can save you time by automating common tasks, save money by allowing you to allocate resources to other tasks and maybe even protect your school’s reputation by catching a negative comment in time to resolve the issue quickly.
There is a plethora of social media tools on the market, so it can be overwhelming to determine which ones make sense for your marketing team. Today’s post lists social media tools that have become increasingly essential in the marketer’s arsenal.
Here are 26 social media tools to consider for 2021 and beyond.
Social Media Listening Tools
#1. BrandMentions
BrandMentions monitors web and social media channels. This tool will keep you up to date on mentions related to your school in your inbox. This allows you to discover who talks about your school and what they say, at the moment they say it. One thing that makes this such a great tool is that all major social media platforms are represented, along with non-social websites. If your school shows up on a website, blog or in the news, BrandMentions will find it. This tool also offers a way to save, organize and report the social mentions that can be used for ongoing reports and business intelligence.
#2. Awario
Awario tracks mentions for keywords across the web. Suitable for small schools or large institutions, there’s a price point / service package for all levels. The focus on analytics will provide your school with the tracking and feedback you need to develop short- and long-term strategies.
#3. Mention
Mention has been around a long time, and there’s a reason for its longevity. I’ve always appreciated Mention’s resources in the form of a marketing library and blog. A simple but powerful tool. Mention offers a free plan and a 14-day free trial if you’d like try a plan with more features than the free version offers. Mention also offers a simple social media publishing tool.
#4. Keyhole
Keyhole offers advanced research on specific topics. It is an excellent social media monitoring tool, offering data that will help with your strategic planning efforts.
All-In-One Marketing Software
#5. Hubspot’s All-In-One Marketing Software
Hubspot is the leader in marketing software. I’ve used Hubspot for many years. It is, in my opinion, the gold standard when it comes to inbound marketing. I give Hubspot my highest recommendation for school marketing professionals.
Hubspot offers many features, such as:
- Publish optimized blog posts
- Design and launch landing pages
- Design stunning emails
- Marketing automation
- Lead management
- Analytics
- Partitioning by team
- Social media
- SEO
- Calls-to-action
- Ads
Social Media Scheduling Dashboards
Social media scheduling tools allow you to manage your social media networks efficiently. Social media networks have different best times to publish content; it would be impossible for marketers to publish every post “live”. For this reason, there are multiple software solutions that allow you to schedule multiple posts at once. Many of these tools offer different features and integrations with other applications, so keep looking until you find the best solution for your team.
#6. CoSchedule
CoSchedule offers a calendar, email marketing, social publishing, social campaign templates, social automation and a host of integrations. This tool is especially designed for team use. CoSchedule also offers a tool for analyzing and improving your headlines, called the Headline Analyzer.
#7. Buffer
Buffer is a simple, but powerful, social media scheduling tool. One nice feature is the browser extension that allows you to publish curated content right from the browser.
#8. Sendible
Sendible is a powerful social media dashboard, offering planning, scheduling, team collaboration, listening and mobile solutions. Sendible offers a wide range of integrations.
#9. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is designed with a clean interface, a library of evergreen updates organized by categories and designed for team use.
#10. Hootsuite
One of the oldest social media schedulers, this tool remains popular with small and enterprise organizations. Hootsuite offers the usual social media dashboard features — planning, scheduling, content library, engagement inbox, analytics and reports.
#11. SproutSocial
SproutSocial offers planning, creating, scheduling and publishing content on multiple social media networks. Also offer listening and analytics tools.
#12. Later
Later is an Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok scheduling tool. This tool is built for photos, videos and stories. It also generates hashtags and offers insights. Later offers extensive training and other features like Linkin.bio.
#13. Tailwind
Tailwind specializes in Instagram and Pinterest scheduling. You can set up your Pinterest account to automatically “drip” pins from up to 3 secret boards so you are publishing content at the best times for your audience. Tailwind also offers Tribes, a community of bloggers to help build collaboration and get your content seen. This tool is an indispensable tool for school marketers.
Miscellaneous Social Media Tools
#14. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great tool for content research. It allows you to determine top keywords and topics related to those keywords. There is also a Chrome extension to make it easier for you to conduct research on the go.
#15. Hashtagify.me
Hashtagify.me searches for the best hashtags related to your keyword. You can search on Twitter and Instagram.
#16. Audiense
Audiense is an audience intelligence platform that offers competitive intelligence, audience-centric social listening, audience-centric content creation, public relations, audience segmentation, market and consumer research.
#17. SocialFlow
SocialFlow is a dashboard where you can manage all your paid, owned and earned social media campaigns. SocialFlow makes recommendations on which posts should be promoted based. It also works to improve performance of social ads and includes an ad builder to make creating ads quick and painless.
#18. Click to Tweet
Click to Tweet is an easy-to-use tool that promotes your website/blog content on Twitter. The tool creates a link and publishes to Twitter. It is a great tool for Twitter Card support and for tracking and organizing your tweets.
#18. IFTTT
IFTTT stands for “If This Then That”. This is a great little tool for building automated rules, called social applets. For example, you can set up an applet to “Selectively post your Instagram posts to a Facebook Page when you include a specific hashtag #hashtag”.
#19. Rebrandly
Rebrandly is a custom URL link shortener that customizes your links so they are consistent with your school’s branding.
#20. Canva
Canva is a social media tool that gives you the ability to create graphic layout design and presentations. Canva offers many templates and options, such as animations, images, icons, fonts and design types.
Some of the graphics you can design include:
- Social media posts
- Instagram stories
- Social media banners
- Posters
- YouTube channel art
- Invitations
- Postcards
- T-shirts
- Videos
- Print products
- Infographics
- Brochures
- Flyers
- And much more!
#21. Pixlr
Pixlr is an online photo editor that allows you to edit photos and create great designs. This tool uses artificial intelligence to make it easy to create exciting visual graphics.
#22. Kicksta
Kicksta is a tool that helps build a qualified audience on your Instagram page. Kicksta uses artificial intelligence to boost your Instagram growth.
#23. Nuvi
Nuvi is a social media listening and analytics tool that researches thousands of sources, including social media, RSS feeds, blogs, websites, etc. The data generated can be used to help with strategic planning.
#24. Feedly
Feedly is a great tool for following blog feeds. It allows you to organize and curate content by creating feeds with blog topics. I love this tool for discovering new marketing trends and finding the best content on a particular subject.
#25. Evernote
Evernote is an essential tool for storing and organizing information. You can send information from your email or drag it to the app. Evernote seamlessly syncs between multiple devices. Evernote ensures you can always find your information.
#26. Google Trends
Google Trends is an essential tool for determining the best topics for content creation. It helps you find topics for your content, exploring topics for social media channels, determining the perception of specific subjects. It helps you identify trends and the history of search topic volume.
Social media marketing continues to be an effective strategy for school marketing. Even more compelling, the global pandemic has amplified the need for a strong, consistent online presence. These social media tools will help your team increase brand awareness, build online engagement and boost enrollment. These tools will help you manage your social media marketing efficiently and reliably. Incorporating these social media tools will save you time, improve your social media performance and help you develop a better strategic marketing plan.
Have I missed one of your favorite social media tools? Have you used any of the tools listed above? Please share in the comments below.
Disclaimer: I am an affiliate for some of these resources which means that, at no cost additional to you, I make a commission if you purchase via my link above.
This post first appeared on SchneiderB Media.
