The 12 Best Facebook Marketing Tools Available in 2016
Facebook certainly doesn’t need any introduction to the world. As of this post, it boasts over 1.6 BILLION*, monthly, active users. Time and again we have small businesses come to us and ask “why do I really need to be on Facebook?” Our question back is “what on earth are you waiting for!?
The good news is that overall, Facebook has made it pretty easy to create a page for your business so you can start accumulating a following right away. However, doing this the right way will require you to get acquainted with many tools to maximize your efforts to succeed in social. It’s not as important to have more followers than the next guy. It is important that you have the right followers.
And once you start curating the right followers, you then need to engage with them. Track your analytics to see what content is being shared which will provide you with insight on what type of content you should publish and when.
So to jump right into the tools to kick-start your Facebook marketing efforts, here are 12 of some greats!
Agora Pulse is a social media platform designed to help you manage all social media messages in one place. Schedule and publish content and then get stunning reports.
The platform provides users with their own social media inboxes to keep track of their incoming interactions analytics reports, and data regarding their follower’s behavior!
Features:
- Publishing and Scheduling to multiple platforms
- Platform-specific inboxes
- Collects content from all of your feeds into a daily report
- Creating custom rules to keep social media pages clean
- Analytics to export for PowerPoint presentations!
Pricing starts at $49.00/month | https://www.agorapulse.com/pricing
Hootsuite is another multi-platform social media management tool with a price point a bit lower than Agora. We like Agora better, but if you are new to the social media management world, Hootsuite will do just fine.
Features:
- Single dashboard for managing and monitoring social interactions
- Create automated responses to your followers
- Use filters to narrow down interactions from followers located in a specific area, or using a particular language.
- Scheduling tools, targeted content, and designate team members. The team member functionality could be a bit better, but it’ll do if you only have a few accounts and a small team to manage.
- Track engagement thorough analytics reports, which can be automatically shared among your team.
- Includes Facebook ad support
Pricing: Free. Premium plans starting at $8.99 per month | https://hootsuite.com/plans
Buffer is a fairly easy tool to use to manage all of your social accounts from the same place. It doesn’t have as robust functionality as Agora and Hootsuite, but the UX is great and a much simpler platform to adjust to than the others.
Features:
- Create and schedule your social posts
- Includes its own powerful graphics editor which provides you with the necessary tools to make your images stand out.
- Has a browser extension to automatically add content across the web
Pricing: Free. Premium plans starting at $10.00 per month | https://buffer.com/pricing
Oktopost is another social media management platform, but it is explicitly designed as a B2B solution. Much larger price tag, but well worth it if your larger business is looking for an upscale solution.
Features:
- Much more strategic tool featuring categories and extensive analytics.
- Provides you with a detailed editorial calendar.
- Using queues, you can add posts to your calendar and assign them to previous customized time slots
- Social acquisition statistics while tracking conversions driven by your social media outreach
- The analytics platform tracks which kinds of content perform better for different audiences.
- Built-in content curation engine, that helps you discover relevant content for your social media accounts.
Pricing: starting at $400 per month | http://www.oktopost.com/
Discover your performance versus your competition on social media – delivered to your inbox in minutes. Socialbakers is dedicated to providing analytics focused on social media platforms. Users can access information regarding performance of competing brands and pages along with general industry trends.
Features:
- Compare the performance of your content to your competition
- Track how your organic content is performing against its promoted counterparts
- Detailed reports that can be set to be automatically delivered at specified intervals of time during the week
- Includes through analytics regarding Facebook ad campaigns
Pricing: From $75.00 per month | https://www.socialbakers.com/
DrumUp might look like any other social media management platform on the surface, but this platform is mostly focused on automating your content strategy and marketing efforts. Using Drumup you can cut down on the TIME spent managing your social media pages.
Features:
- DrumUp automatically looks through the web to find high-quality content relevant to your followers which indeed is crucial to increasing your following.
- It offers Twitter and LinkedIn account support as well as Facebook
- Hashtag recommendations for your content to maximize the number of viewers for your content
Pricing: Starting at $19.00 per month | https://drumup.io/
Post Planner helps users to find more engaging content for their field and helps schedule for the prefect time! It is a simple platform and a low price point making it a groovy choice for small businesses that are looking to boost their Facebook marketing strategy.
- Simple scheduling enabling you to plan your content strategy to boost productivity
- Includes a recycling feature to reuse your most popular content after a certain period of time.
Pricing: Starts at $7.00 per month | https://www.postplanner.com/
Pagemondo is a platform meant to help users created a Facebook social media presence from scratch. It’s fairly easy for a newbie to use.
Features:
- Professional-looking Facebook page design
- Easy page launch
- Add custom tabs and contest creations
- Provide coupons on your page
- Ideal for ecommerce companies
- Suggested posts to find engaging content then schedule in advance
Pricing: From $9.00 per month | https://www.pagemodo.com/pricing
LikeAlyzer is a zero-frills tool that provides you analysis of any Facebook page you would like. The home page doesn’t look like much indeed, but it provides a fantastically useful tool for anyone looking to gain quick insight into performance in a matter of minutes.
Features:
- Generates a Facebook insight report with a single click
- Provides an overall performance score and median scores of the competition
- Tracks engagements statistics
Pricing: Free | http://likealyzer.com/
Qwaya is a Facebook ads manager tool that provides marketing professionals with multiple key functions to manage their work from a single platform.
Features:
- A/B testing tool for your ad campaigns
- Enables automation of your ad structure so you can handle larger campaigns more easily
- Provides timing information to maximize the return on your ads by running them during the most effective windows, statistically
- Integration with Google Analytics right from your dashboard.
- Add tracking URLs to your ads to ink them to third party tools
Pricing: From $149.00 per month | http://www.qwaya.com/
Driftrock is another B2B ad campaign managing tool for Facebook. The tool provides you with a customer relationship management platform to increase your Facebook leads and ensure your ads are displayed during the best time windows.
Features:
- Helps you to increase lead conversion through a comprehensive relationship management system
- Schedule ads for peak conversion times
- Smart ad creation technology helps cut down on ad costs while maximizing efficacy
Pricing: On request | https://www.driftrock.com/
SAVING THE BEST FOR LAST!
AdRoll is THE best as far as we are concerned. It is a marketing platform that works with over 500+ ad exchanges in total, including social media. Their Facebook services are focused on retargeting tools, reach maximization and the use of predictive technology to increase conversions based on the behavior on users online and how they engage.
Features:
- Provides you with early access to the newest Facebook ad features
- Ensures your ads are designed to work with mobile devices to maximize reach
- Save money by letting AdRoll bid on behalf of you
- Automatically schedule your ads so they display at the best possible conversion times
Pricing: Depends on the size of your campaign | www.adroll.com
Quick Recap
For a quick recap of this “Facebook [social media] endeavor”:
- General management tools: Agora Pulse, Hootsuite, Buffer, Oktopost, DrumUp, and Pagemodo.
- Analytics: Socialbakers and LikeAlyzer.
- Content curation and scheduling: PostPlanner.
- Advertising: Qwaya, Driftrock, and AdRoll.
References:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/