Social media and email marketing are indispensable ways for marketplaces to gain influence and establish a strong online presence. Email marketing remains the most effective marketing medium today, a fundamental component for your content strategy. Meanwhile, platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram serve as essential sources of market information, and have morphed into important platforms of interaction between businesses and customers.
Albeit their usefulness, it takes a ton of time to maintain multiple social media accounts and to build up an email list. Save yourself from these tedious tasks by utilizing the thousands of handy tools that can help us schedule updates, analyze data and compile useful information – perhaps even all at one go!
Social Media
Buffer
A convenient and simple way to help you schedule, publish and analyze social media posts all in one place. Buffer comes with browser extensions and mobile apps, which allows you to easily add and queue social media content whenever and wherever. Using its in-built function, you can create aesthetically-pleasing images for your posts within Buffer, saving you the trouble of sourcing external image-editing apps or sites.
Available for multiple popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest. Instagram, this software has a free plan for individual users and comes with varied price plans.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most widely-used tool for social media management. It possesses an all-rounded set of analytic and social media monitoring tools, supporting social network integrations with more than 35 popular social networks in a single dashboard.
Hootsuite comes with a free plan and tiered pricing plans for businesses of different scales and sizes.
With access to so many different applications and websites , it can be frustrating and messy having to painstakingly collate useful content from various sites for your social media page. Pocket saves you from all that hassle, as you can save whatever you see from your browser or apps directly into this virtual pocket – whether it is articles, videos or pictures. You can access the content on your devices, without requiring an Internet connection.
Pocket is free for all users.
Photo credit: Best Free Apps.
Tools to manage social media accounts
Brand24: Retrieve social insights about your brand
Grum: Schedule Instagram posts using computer
Holr: Allow you to engage with your Instagram and Twitter followers with automated messages.
SumAll: Combines data from social media, web traffic and more to track business metrics
TweetDeck: Facilitate engagement and organization of your Twitter experience by letting you view multiple timelines in one easy interface
Twitonomy: Comprehensive Twitter analytics and monitoring tool
Tools for content promotion
Buzz Bundle: Bring in targeted traffic from various online sources to your website
Quora: A widely-used Q&A site which can help you drive traffic and build credibility to your site
Ritetag: Notifies you which hashtag works for marketing purposes of your business
Slideshare: Post your presentation to garner additional traffic
Snip.ly: Adds custom call-to-action to any page, facilitating engagement with your followers
Thunderclap: Crowd-speaking social media platform that amplifies messages
Other useful tools
Bitly: URL shortener and link management
Digg Digg: All in one share buttons plugin
Share Link Generator: Create share links for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Pinterest and email
MailChimp
MailChimp is a popular email marketing service that allows businesses to promote themselves and broaden their reach of customers. The software allows you to send marketing emails, automated messages and target campaigns, thereby simplifying the whole process of email marketing. Campaign reports will also be generated that allows you to monitor trends and track performance and more. In addition, you can now advertise through Facebook and Instagram via their integrated Ad campaign.
You can send up to 12,000 emails per month for less than 2,000 contacts for free on MailChimp. For more emails and contacts, MailChimp also comes with tiered packages for businesses.
Photo credit: MailChimp.
Send In blue
A relatively new player in the field of email marketing, SendInBlue aims to make the complicated and confusing process of email and SMS marketing much more user-friendly, whether in email campaign creation or management. Indeed, this easy-to-use software is packed with powerful functions that allows you to send beautiful newsletters, emails and SMS messages without much hassle.
SendInBlue's free package allows unlimited contacts and up to 9,000 emails per month for free, although more advanced features are only available with the paid plans. A similar platform is RedCappi, which is free for up to 100 contacts and a free trial for their paid plans.
Benchmark
Benchmark boasts an intuitive design, which makes it a good choice for first-time users of email marketing service. It possess several admirable email editing features, such as ability to edit photos and the Drag & Drop elements, which facilitates a fuss-free creation of email and newsletter.
You can send email campaigns to up to 2,000 subscribers and 14,000 emails per month for free under Benchmark.
Campaigner
Campaigner supports multiple advanced features that fulfils more than your basic email marketing needs. Boasting cool and all-rounded features ranging from highly-targeted email workflows to customer relationship management, this easy-to-use email automation platform stands out in the market for its attractive advanced email marketing services.
Campaigner offers a free 30-day trial for their paid plans, which are designed to appeal to various business scales.
Other useful tools
Anymail Finder – Find verified email addresses of people at any company in seconds
Gleam – Marketing app designed to help businesses grow through giveaways, sweepstakes, competitions, and more
Hello Bar – Convert more visitors into subscribers
LeadGrab – Build up email list by sharing articles
Mailshake – Simple tool for email outreach for sales and marketing
SmartBribe – Get free traffic to your site by incentivizing people with content
SumoMe – Offers a suite of tools to increase your website traffic
TweetLead – Collect leads from within Twitter
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