The 17 Best Social Media Tools for Marketing in 2024

Whether you handle one social account or work in a marketing agency, using social media tools is essential. All these tools are designed to make your work faster and more effective with data. Which ones are the best? And how do you pick the right ones?

Social media tools are specialized software designed to streamline user efforts with scheduling, publishing, managing, advertising, and analytics features. Depending on your needs, social media tools can support your entire range of activities or focus on just one specific area.

You might ask yourself: Do I really need social media tools for marketing? And I think that’s the right question!

After all, most social networks have their own management, scheduling, and analytics features. So, should you spend your time and money on external solutions? Will they enhance your social media strategy?

The shortest answer: Yes. The slightly longer answer: Absolutely yes!

Social media management is very complex. To fully leverage the potential of your social channels, you need a lot of data and automation.

Sure, you could try doing it without social media software, but trust me, it’s not worth the effort. Especially if you manage multiple platforms.

There are hundreds (or even thousands) of social media tools out there. It’s impossible to test them all. You must define your needs and reduce your scope.

As for your needs, that’s something you’ll have to determine yourself. But let me help you narrow down the scope of your search! 

Here is a selection of the 17 best social media tools to use.

Let’s dive in!

Top Social Media Tools:

1. Brand24 for social listening, competitive analysis & influencer marketing
2. MavSocial for multi-channel management
3. Canva for visual content
4. Sprout Social for content planning
5. Bitly for bios
6. Google Analytics for tracking conversions
7. Buffer for multi-platform scheduling
8. Post Planner for scheduling posts
9. Metricool for managing multiple social media accounts
10. Audiense for audience intelligence
11. Vaizle for reporting & ad campaigns
12. Feedly for inspirations
13. HootSuite for content & analytics
14. Friends+Me for small businesses
15. Onalytica for influencers
16. CoSchedule for advanced scheduling
17. Motion Array for video content

01 Brand24

Free 14-day trial.

Let’s start our list of social media tools for marketing with Brand24.

It is an AI-supported social listening and media monitoring platform that provides in-depth insights into your online popularity, reputation, competitors, niche influencers, and many more. 

Brand24 gathers and processes data from multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, Twitch, and Telegram.

You can use Brand24’s to upgrade your social media strategy by:

• Social media mentions monitoring
• Social media reach measuring
• Understanding the sentiment regarding your brand and social media efforts
• Advanced competitive analysis
• Identifying and monitoring trending hashtags
• Finding top influencers and your most influential social media platforms
• Tracking Reputation Score
• Upgrading your social media strategy thanks to personalized, AI-boosted conclusions & suggestions

… and many more.

Ok, let’s explore the tool’s capabilities in practice! Our first stop is the Mentions tab.

Mentions volume and reach chart is the first thing you’ll notice. It informs you about the current popularity of your brand.

You can easily adjust the view with numerous filters regarding period, sources, sentiment, geolocation, etc.

It’s worth underlining that Brand24 tracks all the media mentions – also the untagged ones.

You can switch the chart view to discover the sentiment towards your brand. In other words, the chart shows you what emotions the mentions carry – positive or negative.

Here is an example of Inter Miami’s sentiment chart from 30 days. As you can see, there is a visible spike of positive sentiment towards this soccer club on February 21st. 

What happened on that day?

You could spend a while checking it manually or find a quick answer thanks to the AI-driven Anomaly Detector. It’s enough to click on the exclamation mark next to the spike on the “Mentions & Reach” view.

Anomaly Detector automatically identifies unusual changes in your mentions chart and analyzes the possible causes.

The rise of positive sentiment towards Inter Miami was caused by the team’s victory in their MLS season opener match and the good performance of Inter’s superstar – Lionel Messi.

Let’s jump to another sphere, showing that Brand24 is definitely one of the most comprehensive and best tools for social media marketing. I mean its competitor analysis features.

Brand24 allows you to proceed with two types of competitive analysis: benchmark your project against your market competitors or compare your social media performance over time.

Below, you can see the comparison of two recognizable Middle Eastern airlines – Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways.

It’s easy to spot that Qatar Airways has a much stronger social media presence than Etihad. When you scroll down the report, you can see various charts benchmarking both brands.

Among metrics to check, pay attention to the social media’s share of voice and categories share.

As for the Compare Periods feature, let’s go back to our Inter Miami example. Let’s check the start of the MLS season impacted the club’s online popularity.

Interestingly, Inter Miami’s social media mentions volume has increased since the MLS season started, but the reach has dropped.

The most likely answer is that Inter Miami played very high-profile pre-season matches.

Lionel Messi’s club was on a world tour, visiting Japan and Saudi Arabia, where they played a game against Cristiano Ronaldo’s club – Al Nassr.

We could spend hours and hours exploring Brand24’s capabilities. You can try them on your own.

Key features:

• Social media mentions volume & reach
• Sentiment Analysis
• Hashtag monitoring
• Trending hashtags discovery
• Advanced competitor analysis
• Share of Voice
• AVE
• Influencers Tab
• Influence Score
• Influencer Analysis
• Emoji Analysis

02 MavSocial

MavSocial is an enterprise-level social media management platform for multi-location businesses, brands, and agencies.

The tool supports multiple social media platforms: Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, YouTube, and WeChat.

Its main advantage is that you can manage social media ads and publish posts on multiple social media channels from a single dashboard.

Besides, the tool has team collaboration features and basic social listening features.

MavSocial’s top sphere is content creation and management. It has a built-in stock image library and quite powerful editing tools. All of that is supported by the AI image recognition tech.

As for MavSocial’s downsides, you might not be satisfied with its old-school user interface and experience.

Key features:

• Unified social inbox
• A large stock image library
• AI-supported image editor
• Team collaboration
• Intuitive reporting

03 Canva

Canva is a widely known online graphic design tool. The platform is recognizable mostly thanks to its advanced visual content creation, allowing you to produce social media posts, templates, and videos.

You can enjoy basic Canva’s features with a free plan. But to use its full potential, you should switch to their Pro plan. Why?

With Canva Pro, you can access over 100 million adjustable graphic resources, including stock photos, videos, and animations.

Besides, the tool offers extra social media features, such as Content Planner, that help schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn.

Moreover, Canva Pro gives access to basic audience engagement tracking.

Key features:

• Rich stock library
• Image and video background remover
• Content Planner for scheduling posts
• Audience engagement tracker
• AI image generator

04 Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform combining publishing content, social media listening, and analytics features.

It allows you to manage your social media presence across many platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.

The tool enables planning, organizing, and scheduling posts.

Solutions like a content calendar and suggesting optimal publishing time based on your audience’s behavior can be a nice add-on to streamline your content strategy.

Besides, Sprout Social lets you track your social media’s real-time engagement and gives valuable insights into your social media performance.

However, access to insights and reporting features requires purchasing a Professional Plan.

Similarly, if you’d like to support your efforts with media monitoring (which is undoubtedly critical for measuring social media presence), you must prepare for a high cost.

Key features:

• Content planner
• Smart inbox
• Conversation management
• Advanced reporting
• Social listening features

05 Bitly

Bitly is a tool that became recognizable thanks to its URL shortener feature. I guess you may have seen a short link containing “bit.ly” – that’s what I’m talking about.

But Bitly offers some additional solutions that can enhance your social media efforts!

The link-in-bio feature enables you to create and design a simple landing page, consolidating various links (to your website, podcast, YouTube channel, etc.) in one place.

Moreover, Bitly equips you with basic analytics – you can track which links on your landing page people click the most frequently.

In addition to the URL shortener, which is still the tool’s core feature, Bitly allows you to convert links to QR codes.

This feature ensures your message will reach your audience without taking up as much space as the usual URL.

Key features:

• Link-in-bio
• Simple link landing page creator & analytics
• URL shortener
• QR codes creator

06 Google Analytics

I think there is no need to introduce you to Google Analytics (GA4).

In short, it’s a customizable analytics platform that tracks websites, mobile apps, and event traffic to generate invaluable insights. Used wisely, this GA can be one of your best social media analytics tools. 

How?

Google Analytics allows you to track which social media platforms bring you the most traffic, leads, and conversions.

It’s also an invaluable source of reliable audience & demographic data you can use to improve your overall content marketing strategy.

Besides, GA4 is great if you want to calculate your social media campaigns’ return on investment (ROI).

Key features:

• Social media traffic, leads & conversions sources
• ROI analytics
• Demographic metrics
• Customizable analytics dashboards

07 Buffer

Buffer is one of the most well-known social media marketing tools. It’s designed to help small businesses manage their social media content with scheduling, publishing, and analytics features. 

The tool supports multiple social networks, including Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, TikTok, and so on.

Along with Buffer’s content marketing features, you can enjoy its analytics capabilities.

You can discover your audience’s demographics, measure your stories, posts & hashtags performance, as well as compare your organic and paid social campaigns.

Moreover, Buffer is a type of social media management software that allows you to track engagement on various social channels from a single dashboard.

Also, you can create a personalized landing page and embed it in your bio.

Unfortunately, many users face many bugs when using the platform – especially regarding Instagram. It’s also quite tricky to learn to use the software.

Key features:

• Content calendar & planning
• Audience engagement and demographics
• Single dashboard to manage social media accounts
• Landing page creator

08 Post Planner

Post Planner is a social media management tool and content planner. It allows you to create, manage, and schedule content on multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest).

Besides, the tool is perfect for finding viral niche content. Post Planner offers features that identify popular posts, quotes, memes, and articles from your industry.

The tool shows in-demand results, so it’s up to you what type of content you’d like to share with your audience.

As you might have expected, Post Planner also provides analytics features. Quite a unique one is the option of quickly re-posting your top-performing content with just a few clicks.

Key features:

• Content planner
• Bulk post creation
• Content curation
• Dynamic analytics

09 Metricool

Metricool is an all-in-one social media management tool. It provides you with many solutions to handle your business’s social channels, including analytics, a content calendar & drag and drop features.

The tool supports multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and some others.

Metricool allows you to integrate, calculate, and schedule social media posts. With just a few clicks, you can set up your social media content and publish it simultaneously on multiple platforms.

It also provides analytics showing how the individual social media platform performs and a general overview of your posts. 

Additionally, you can choose the particular report to see the metrics you’re interested in and monitor hashtag performance.

Key Features:

• Content planner
• Hashtag tracker
• Social media ads manager
• Bio landing page & smart links creator

10 Audiense

Audiense is a social media & competitive intelligence tool offering features regarding two primary spheres: X (Twitter) marketing and audience intelligence.

As for the X platform, Audiense allows you to research, manage & analyze followers, and run targeted ad campaigns. Besides, the tool provides a feature to track and analyze hashtags on Twitter.

But the real Audiense’s power lies in its intelligence capabilities.

The tool offers three complementary analytics products.

Social Intelligence is the most fundamental. It is responsible for uncovering consumer segments and deeper understanding with the help of social listening.

In practice, Audiense allows you to uncover detailed audience demographics, interests, and behaviors. You can also identify influencers within your target market.

When you add its reporting features it turns out that Audiense is one of the best social media marketing tools.

The other two levels – Digital Intelligence and Demand Intelligence – offer large-scale data analytics and insights. Therefore, Audiense is one of the most interesting competitive intelligence tools.

Any downsides? Well, although Twitter analytics is relatively cheap, access to audience intelligence is very expensive. Therefore, this area is reserved for businesses with large budgets.

Key features:

• Twitter community management & analytics
• Twitter hashtag tracker
• Very advanced audience intelligence solutions

11 Vaizle

Vaizle is a social media analytics tool tailored for competitive analysis and performance benchmarking, supporting Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), and YouTube.

The tool stands out for its easy-to-understand reports, making complex data more accessible. Vaizle is especially useful for actionable tips based on your performance, helping you improve your social media strategy.

Besides, Vaizle is one of these social media marketing tools that gives you a holistic view of your ad campaigns across multiple social media accounts. Moreover, it offers a pretty detailed demographic analysis.

While it’s great for competitor analysis, remember that the Vaizle feature set is quite narrow. Therefore, Vaizle must be supported with other social media marketing tools.

Key features:

• Competitor analysis
• Ads management
• Demographic analysis

12 Feedly

Feedly is quite a unique social media tool. In short, it is a content aggregation platform designed for those who need to stay updated with industry trends and news.

It’s especially popular among content creators for its ability to streamline information gathering.

Feedly allows you to follow various blogs, news sites, and other online sources, organizing them into an easy-to-navigate feed.

Okay, but what can you do with it?

Feedly is particularly useful for curating content relevant to your audience. By staying updated with your industry trends, you can share timely and relevant posts on your social channels.

Feedly also offers features to organize articles into collections, making accessing information for different topics or projects easy.

Moreover, Feedly integrates with other social media tools, allowing you to share interesting articles across your networks directly.

Remember though that Feedly doesn’t provide direct social media management features like scheduling or analytics. It’s best to support it with other social media tools.

Key features:

• Content curation
• RSS feed
• Sharing content directly from the platform

13 Hootsuite

Hootsuite is definitely one of the most recognizable social media management tools available. Regardless of your experience, I assume you have seen this name at least once.

For clarity, let’s explain what Hootsuite is.

So, it’s an all-in-one social media management platform that combines content creation, scheduling, and analytics features.

In practice, Hootsuite offers a social media posts & bulk scheduler, AI writer support, best times to post, and so on.

As for engagement, the tool provides a common inbox with automated tagging and some basic social media monitoring features.

We also shouldn’t omit Hootsuite’s social media analytics features, including post performance reports and Sentiment Analysis reporting.

To enjoy Hootsuite’s full potential, you must consider purchasing the Team or Enterprise plan.

Key features:

• Post scheduling
• Multiple integrations
• One inbox for multiple accounts
• Custom analytics and report
• Competitive benchmarking

14 Friends+Me

Let’s leave big and wealthy social media tools for a moment. It’s time to introduce you to Friends+Me, which is a simple social media management tool designed for single users and small businesses.

Focusing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Pinterest, this tool is all about efficiency and ease of use.

Friends+Me specializes in scheduling posts and their distribution, allowing you to share content across multiple social media accounts.

The tool has the ability to repost content from Google My Business, making it unique in the social media landscape.

Sure, Friends+Me lacks the advanced analytics of larger platforms. But that’s the point!

It has an easy-to-use interface and focuses on essential features, making it a great fit for those who need a handy and budget-friendly solution for managing their active social media presence.

Key features:

• Post planner
• Mobile app
• Browser extension
• Link shortener

15 Onalytica

Onalytica is an influencer marketing software that helps brands in scaling their influencer programs. The tool streamlines the whole process of binding and maintaining influencer relationships.

In practice, Onalytica helps you find influencers and events that might be interesting for your social media campaigns.

Afterward, the tool analyzes the social media data and identifies the influencer’s share of voice in the niche.

You shouldn’t be surprised that Onalytica enables you to contact and manage relationships with niche influencers too.

Last but not least, the tool offers analytics features that help you to understand your brand awareness and engagement evaluations.

A visible downside of the tool is its old-fashioned interface. Besides, the tool is for one purpose only.

Therefore, if you need software supporting your holistic social media marketing strategy, you must consider subscribing to other tools.

Key features:

• Influencer discovery
• Influencer profiles
• Content seeding
• Analytics and reporting

16 CoSchedule

CoSchedule brands itself as an all-in-one marketing calendar for content, social, and more. Okay, let’s see that bet!

The tool indeed offers one calendar for nearly all content-related marketing actions. You can schedule not only social media content but also blog posts and newsletters.

To streamline your work and remember your daily responsibilities, CoSchedule provides a task template feature.

The calendar is easily manageable. Changing your content publication time is simple, thanks to a drag-and-drop interface. You shouldn’t be surprised that CoSchedule also offers a bulk scheduling feature.

Moreover, it analyzes your past content and, based on that, suggests the most adequate publishing time.

These are just some examples of how you could use CoSchedule to streamline your everyday work. For me, CoSchedule is one of the most interesting social media tools on the list!

Key features:

• Advanced content calendar
• Bulk scheduling
• Team collaboration
• Best publication time suggestions

17 Motion Array

Motion Array is a comprehensive video asset & visual content creation platform.

It offers a vast library of video templates, stock videos, music, and sound effects, which can significantly enhance the quality of social media posts and campaigns.

In an age when grabbing people’s attention is more difficult than ever, creating compelling posts, stories, and ads is invaluable. Motion Array’s assets make crafting visually appealing content possible.

But that’s not the only key advantage of this tool. The second one is the intuitive interface that makes it accessible even for those with limited video editing skills & experience.

For those reasons, Motion Array is one of the most exciting tools for social media marketing, and you should check it on your own.

Key features:

• Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Photoshop integrations
• Vast videos, images, and sounds stock library
• Social media content templates

Conclusion

“Social media tools” is a general term that covers many different types of software designed to improve your social media efforts.

Using them is essential to boost your social media presence, understand your audience, streamline content creation, enjoy the power of influencer marketing, benchmark your brand, and many other reasons.

Final thoughts:

• Identify your specific needs before choosing a social media tool. The right tool can streamline your work and enhance your strategy.
• There’s a tool for every level, from single users to large agencies. Consider the size and scope of your social media activities and budget; 
• Social media monitoring tools for marketing like Brand24 show that comprehensive data and automation are key to unlocking the full potential of your social channels.
• For creative content, platforms like Canva and Motion Array are indispensable for crafting visually appealing posts that capture attention.
• Remember, while social media tools are powerful, they’re just one part of a successful marketing strategy. They support but don’t replace creativity and understanding of your audience.

Are you curious how using the right tool will improve your social media performance? Start a free trial and check it out for yourself!