Social Media Marketing tools are making it easier for professionals to share content and grow the reach of their users towards a positive ROI.

We’ve been having a little steamy discussion in the Digital Marketing Skill Institute office about the various kinds of social media tools that are best for driving profitability.

After a little back and forth, we decided to do an article on the subject matter.

Though, you can check out our digital marketing training course if you are new to social media marketing.

We had to come up with the very best top twelve social media marketing tools available out there for Nigerian brands to drive engagement, conversion and profitability.

After reading, maybe you can decide for us, which tool works out best for your business.

Here are my picks of the top 12 social media marketing tools:

1. Mention

As far as social media is concerned, mention is one of the best tools out there to improve your presence online.

With Mention:

You can monitor what the web is saying about your company and products, also about your competition and finally, Mention also takes notice of what the web is saying about your brand and keywords related to your industry.

Mention allows you to monitor the activities surrounding this mentions on social media, forums, blogs and other social media platforms.

Mentions also have the feature of social features that allow you to share industry news that you find and also mentions about your brand.

Using the tool Mention.

At the homepage of the Mention Website, sign up for a free trial first. Then choose how you want to use Mention. Mention can be installed for Windows, iPhone, Android or Chrome extension.

Next create a Mention Alert, naming your alert, including and excluding expressions and choosing a language.

The next step is very important because you need to filter the right sources where you want to get mentions from. Except you want to exclude certain sources or block a website, just allow from the whole web.

You can also choose if you want alerts coming in from influential people to be marked differently than others.

Once you’re through click “Create my alert.” At this point, you can choose to share your alert other users. Anyone can then see the alerts, but you’ll be the owner with the ability to edit and manage settings, add or delete users as well as delete the alert.

2. Buffer

There are lots of publishing tools out there that help to distribute content to your social media users, but buffer goes a step further with incredible analytics to cater for the key metrics on all the platforms where content is shared.

Buffer sends your updates to Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more

It also helps you understand the best periods for posting content, this way you understand how to build your social media presence on solid data.

Buffer for business is one of the most robust tools out there for managing social media for businesses.

You can see most clicks, retweets, likes, or whatever other metrics you’d like to see, so you can sort your social media analytics by the metric you want to see.

Order your posts on images, link posts and quotes, this way you can know whether posts with images are performing better than those that aren’t. And there is so many more features buffer allows you to track your social media activities apart from distributing content.

Remember most of these analytic services are available on their paid features.

Losing progress on twitter can be done easily, growing mentions and building your account is done better when you understand how to track your progress and Twitter Counter allows you to do that effectively.

It’s a free service that tracks changes in your follower count and predicts future growth over time.

Twitter counter is very useful in knowing the progressive growth of your followers, this information can be very useful for sharing and growth.

Twitter counter is great for the following areas:

Compare your follower growth rate to others: You can also compare growth with other people with similar accounts that also use TwitterCounter.

The reasoning behind comparing followers between certain accounts can be related to content sharing. If a competitor has more followers than your account, you need to take a look at what type of content he or she shares.

The most important thing is that your followers are growing.

4. Zapier

Zapier is a connector tool that helps you to integrate all your services and independently connecting those services to make your work simpler and easier.

You can also connect productivity apps like Asana and Evernote to social networks like Twitter and even Dropbox and Google drive.

Imagine receiving a new lead on your WordPress blog and simultaneously creating a new lead form on salesforce, without creating a single line of code.

That’s the power of Zapier that you can create have these integrations that save you time, money and development.

5. Feedly

Finding great content to share with your audience 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.

Some tips on using Feedly:

Sprout social shares similar features with Buffer.

However, it focuses more on customer relationship management through social media platforms, enabling individuals to quickly manage and respond to engagements to keep customers happy.

Sprout functions as an all-in-one social media marketing tool to help content managers control their efforts effectively. It’s not as thorough as Buffer at this but makes up for it in other areas.

It offers multi-level access, which means it’s perfect for businesses large enough to have teams of editors and writers. Some can have directorial control, while lower-level team members can log in to receive and update tasks.

The detailed analytics platform helps managers keep on top of engagement, to foster and nurture it through responding quickly and effectively to comments and requests.

7. HootSuite

If there’s one tool on this list you’ve probably already heard of, it’s HootSuite. It allows you to post the same content across multiple platforms at once.

HootSuite is a simple, but powerful tool for the average social media marketer. They have worked hard to overcome previous limitations of content optimization for different platforms, and now offer better control over content.

There is now an option to schedule posts in advance on a number of different social platforms.

HootSuite can now help people create campaigns, competitions and curated collections of user-generated content easily and across platforms.

There’s a cool feature introduced focused on ‘sentiment’, that allows you to see how many of the comments directed at your social media profiles are positive, neutral or negative.

8. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a different kind of search engine, which helps you find the hottest content and search terms in your niche.

This is one of the secret tools every social media marketing expert should have.

This is one my favourites. It enables you to see what the best performing content is and take inspiration from it.

Even better, you can search for a topic or even keywords, and see what the best performing posts look like across categories, so your search can be super specific.

You can even see who the influences are that share successful content so you can target them and build relationships.

9. IFTTT

IFTTT stands for If This Then That.

If This Then That is a free to use resource that allows you to find super simple ‘applets’ that create a single time-saving response to a pre-set condition.

I remembered when an employee of mine introduced me to this useful tool.

There are tons of great little features.

Things like automatically syncing your profile images across social media platforms, or tweeting your Instagram photos as native images on Twitter.

You can create ‘recipes’ that use multiple applets to describe more complex circumstances. So for instance, if you get a positive tweet you can auto-retweet it, where if you get a negative one, you auto-respond with a DM request.

These are little things that can save a lot of time when combined together. You just need to form a habit of using them.

10. Canva

Canva is the easiest way to create arresting, web-optimized graphics using images and text, and it continues to be one of the most impactful social media marketing tools out there right now.

With Canva, you can create great image content for social media.

This is my favourite tool for creating stunning images for social media posts. (Some of our featured images are created using this as well!)

The interface is as simple as drag and drop, but with font and colour control, image editing and positioning, and more, it is often used for menus, CVs and other professional applications.

Despite pro results, it’s free to use!

11. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is a social media marketing tool that helps you to monitor any Facebook page with the best analytics and statistics tool. Create insight reports and optimize your social media marketing strategy.

Fanpagekarma is a tool for following and tracking the fan pages you manage, as well as the fan pages of your competitors.

You can use this tool to follow a limitless number of fan pages whether they’re your own pages or another page in your niche; whether you’re an administrator for the page, or not.

This tool also has key performance indicators and the insights that can be gleaned using this excellent tool for facebook fan page optimization

12. Bitly

Bitly is used to shorten any URL so that it will fit nicely across every social media channel without eating up space and character counts. You can also have customized shortened URLs using the API.

Using a Bitly link allows you to track analytics for one post using one source, instead of having to collate your click-throughs from different portals.

To sum it all up:

There are literally thousands of social media marketing tools and management dashboards out there to choose from. Some are more specialized than others to different social media outlets or different forms of doing business.

These are the ones I have found to be most valuable and influential.

If you are looking to perfect your social media marketing skill, then navigate to this page to see details of our digital marketing training.