7 powerful SEO & management tools to make your social media efforts more effective

Looking to give your social media efforts a boost? Columnist Jordan Kasteler shares info about his favorite SEO and management tools so you can add them to your arsenal.

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Bob Villa Tools1Social media marketing has been around for a while, and it’s become a proven tool for increasing traffic and generating new leads. Incorporating social media such as Facebook and Twitter into one’s business development strategy is an absolute must for any business these days. Ninety-two percent of marketers declared that social media was very important for their business, and 77 percent of them stated that their social media efforts increased traffic to their sites, according to Social Media Examiner research.

Those are not new facts. What’s new, though, are the tools you can use to enhance your social media efforts — like SEO and management tools. Let’s review seven tools that can improve your social media management and increase revenue.

1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo allows you find the most popular content and share relevant content filtering by categories: videos, interviews, guest posts, giveaways and so on. It’s also a good way to discover hot topics and know how many social shares each post generates via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on.

buzzsumo

You can use BuzzSumo to monitor top competitors and get a clear picture of which types of content resonate with your users and which posts get the most social shares. It’s a good option if you want to learn new ideas for your content marketing projects and define top influencers in your niche who can boost your site visibility and brand awareness.

buzzsumo screenshot

[blockquote] BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for search marketers who want to gain greater insight into their content’s performance. With a low price tag for acres of data at your fingertips, it’s a no-brainer. Larry Kim via Search Engine Land[/blockquote]

2. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media management tool for B2B companies that generates qualified leads for online business. With this tool, it’s simple to schedule and share your content to different social profiles and measure its effectiveness. You can also detect relevant conversations, replying to them in a natural way.

oktopost

Oktopost keeps tabs on your social media marketing and conversions and reports on clicks for each post. The tool determines the most shared content with your audience and keeps them involved at all times.

[blockquote] Oktopost supports social media marketing on all of the main platforms but has been built specifically to support B2B marketers and focuses on their favourite platform, namely LinkedIn. Steve Rayson via Social Media Today[/blockquote]

3. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an all-in-one SEO platform that offers a wide range of useful tools, including some you might not expect to find in SEO software. It’s cool, progressive and innovative. As SEO Hacker puts it:

[blockquote] SE Ranking is an honest to goodness helpful tool. This is one of the best and promising SEO tools of this generation. It’s very new, but it’s already proved so much about itself. [/blockquote]

Social media management is among the unexpected features that make SE Ranking a different kind of SEO platform. The tool offers scheduled publishing, comprehensive reporting and valuable ranking data to show you what’s working and what requires your attention in terms of getting more relevant traffic to your site.

What’s so valuable about it? The tool enables you to auto-post all social media updates to social networks (Facebook, Twitter). But what’s also cool is that you can see how your social media activities are affecting your SEO metrics because you have it all on one platform within the same interface.

SEranking

Other useful features include the ability to see the best time to post in order to interact with your audience and the type of content that brings the best results. And if you run different social media accounts, you don’t need to switch from one account to another.

SEranking graphs

The SE Ranking social media management tool comes with a detailed analysis of user activity, demographic data, retweet and bookmarks statistics, and much more. It notifies you when your website is mentioned in a post or tweet, and even presents you with information on people who comment or reply to your posts and tweets.

4. Cyfe

One of the most dangerous pitfalls of social media marketing is overthinking each post. A 2014 article about one agency’s seemingly endless meetings and discussions surrounding a single branded tweet caused a bit of a stir in the industry, prompting many to wonder about the best ways to avoid this type of waste.

Everyone’s situation is different, so there’s no magic bullet to ensure that your time investment is balanced across social media management activities. Regardless, an important aspect of the solution is maintaining a broad view of activity.

No matter how far you drill down into per-post performance analytics, it’s important to keep it all in perspective. When you use a tool like Cyfe to build your own social media dashboard, you can access all of your channels’ analytics in one place, with widgets for each channel displaying visualizations of your impact over time.

cyfe

Cyfe also offers pre-built widgets for other aspects of your business that have little to do with social media, which gives you the ability to correlate traction on your social channels with whatever’s happening elsewhere — your web traffic, email engagement, advertising campaigns, or even accounts receivable.

[blockquote] I love this tool. I’ve only been using it for a little while, but Cyfe allows you to integrate a ton of different tools into one dashboard to report on projects that you’re running. Matthew Barby via Search Engine Land[/blockquote]

5. Inkybee

Inkybee plays a big role in social media marketing. Its primary goals are to monitor and share quality content, services and products with your target audience and interact and build good relationships with them.

Using the tool, it’s simple to find the right influencers in your niche on all of the main social media platforms. You just need to enter in keywords, and you’ll get all the data by filtering using the most important metrics: number of social media connections, size of audience, how often they post and basic SEO metrics.

Inkybee

The tool also shows a list of related blogs, filtering on visibility, location, data, SEO data and engagement. You can detect top influencers in the friends or followers of any Twitter profile, and it provides white-label reports showing all crucial metrics data.

inkybee screenshot

[blockquote] Inkybee helps you find influential blogs and bloggers in your industry while pulling in engagement metrics, audience, and social accounts. Its real glory lies in the ability to manage outreach. With its tracking functionality, Inkybee enables you to manage the outreach process, track engagement, and produce reports for the project’s stakeholders. Steve Olenski via Marketing Land [/blockquote]

6. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a simple, all-in-one social media marketing tool that allows you and your team to monitor mentions in all the major social networks and reply to users in your panel. It also helps you with directorial control, creating different tasks and assigning them to members of your team. This feature helps you better manage and delegate all tasks.

sprout social

The tool comes with scheduling capabilities and detailed analytics to better understand how to use the platform. Sprout Social comes with a suite of influential tools to easily interact with your fans and leads, solve key issues and build brand advocates.

sprout social screenshot

[blockquote] Sprout Social is a nicely designed social media management tool with lots of useful features. It offers a viable alternative that is simple to use, has a really nice user interface and has some great additional functionality. Ian Cleary via RazorSocial [/blockquote]

7. Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is another smart social media tool that provides you with the most important social media metrics such as number of retweets, followers, likes, comments, shares, impressions and so on. The tool gives you detailed reports on the best times to post or tweet in social media networks and guides you on possible opportunities for interacting with your users and followers who often retweet you.

crowdbooster

The dashboard helps you create customizable and beautiful tables and graphs to view, and you can export all the data to CSV files.

[blockquote] Crowdbooster is my tool of choice to manage social media activities on Facebook and Twitter. This tool does many things to help me save time and streamline activities.”Amy Porterfield via Social Media Examiner[/blockquote]

Bottom line

Do you want to rocket ahead of your competitors and take advantage of the power of social media? Consider using the tools above, and share with us what’s working for you.

SEO platforms: A snapshot

What is SEO? Search engine optimization encompasses a wide range of marketing activities, including content marketing, user experience strategy, technical analysis, and more, all with the goal of increasing the traffic websites receive from search engines.

What do the tools do? SEO platforms help marketers draw more insights from their work. They offer capabilities such as rank-checking, advanced keyword research, competitive intelligence, and backlink analysis. What’s more, enterprise-level platforms take these functions to new heights with extensive auditing and analysis of page performance, making it easier to find key areas needing improvement.

Why we care. SEO has remained one of the key foundations of digital marketing for years. Search drives roughly 50% of website traffic on average, according to a study on SimilarWeb data by Growth Badger. And while marketers have developed strategies to keep up, SEO’s growing complexity has made this a more complicated marketing discipline that companies cannot afford to ignore.

Dig deeper: What do SEO platforms do and how do they help marketers get found on search engines?


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Jordan Kasteler
Contributor
Jordan Kasteler is the SEO Director of Hennessey Consulting. His work experience ranges from co-founding BlueGlass Interactive, in-house SEO at Overstock.com, marketing strategy at PETA, and agency-level SEO & marketing. Jordan is also an international conference speaker, columnist, and book author of A to Z: Social Media Marketing.

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