Social media is here to stay in the marketing world and it will further penetrate all aspects of life and work.

To be prepared, it necessary to organize our social-media tool boxes, adding some new tools that can be game-changers in terms of how effective this platform is for certain strategic objectives.

Here are 20 recommended social-media tools to add to your game plan, if you don’t have them already.

1. Canva
With the need to include more visual content as part of your social-media posts, you can turn to Canva for high-quality images that fit your budget. They offer numerous templates that help you look like a great designer, even if you don't always know exactly what you are doing.

2. Buffer
Posting your social-media content across multiple social media accounts gets a whole lot easier with this tool. It allows you to create a posting schedule for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ pages all in one place, creating a queue and saving you considerable time.

3. Brand24
Rather than have to search around for what people are saying about your brand, Brand24 delivers real-time information on what’s been said as well as what is going on with your competition. This continual insight can help you effectively respond to positive and negative comments across your social-media platforms, so you can stay engaged with your audience as well as effectively gauge any potential sales opportunities.

4. Edgar
It’s okay to re-use old content on social media as long as its relevant, but it is often hard to find that great content among the daily social-media posts. Edgar can solve that by helping you to locate some of that incredible content that many followers may have missed, because they were inundated with the constant flow of information. But they might catch your great information this time around. This social-media tool provides a way to categorize your posts, so you can more easily track down the content that you want to re-post in the near future.

5. Bundlepost
This social-media tool is another option for scheduling your posts but one that comes with features that improve upon other options. One highlight is Bundlepost will replace common niche keywords with hashtags, vastly improving your engagement results.

6. Nuzzel
As both a web and iOS app, this social-media tool helps you organize the stories shared by your Facebook and Twitter friends, aggregating the information into easy-to-read links and providing a way to add influencers that you can leverage for your own marketing needs. You can also go deeper by accessing the stories shared by friends of friends to develop a better understanding of your audience.

7. Cyfe
To understand what is working and not working, it’s important to add many analytics tools to your social media toolbox. Cyfe delivers detailed reports related to SEO, Google Analytics, AdWords and brand mentions that even a small-business owner can afford to use. It also gives you customizable dashboards to store and review this data. Beyond just its social-media application, Cyfe also helps with industry and competitor research as a business intelligence tool that helps turn data and trends into actionable insights.

8. Social Clout
As another analytics tool, Social Clout looks at where you can make significant improvements in engagement, campaigns and keywords. It also delivers reports on demographics and social-media results. All of these reports provide data on multiple social-media accounts to help you track the progress and be able to note the differences in responses across platforms.

9. SecureMySocial
Tracking what is being said on social media goes beyond just looking after your audience. You need to consider what your employees are saying and doing that might reflect on the company. This tool provides a way to get an alert in real time if any social-media posts which others make violates a company policy or the law. It is also possible for you to have the person posting information get a notification that they are in violation, which could help maintain the reputation of the company when you don’t necessarily have time to track every post.

10. AgoraPulse
If you primarily use Facebook and Twitter for business, this tool enhances what you can do with both social-media platforms, offering customer relationship management software, applications, analytics reports, contests and more.

11. Nuvi
As an analytics tool, Nuvi can see what others cannot see in terms of Facebook conversations, including private and public posts. This means you can get insights into what people are saying behind the scenes that can help you to further shape your social media messages.

12. Follower Wonk
As a Moz app solely for Twitter analytics, Follower Wonk helps you find, analyze and optimize your social-media efforts on this platform. You can get deeper information about your followers, where they are located, and when they tweet plus the ability to locate new influencers and optimize your own tweets.

13. Feedly
To help gauge what others are saying in terms of content and identify the key industry trends in relevant information that should shape your own social-media posts, Feedly offers content curation and content sharing that integrates with Buffer.

14. Inkybee
This social-media tool provides a way for you to locate those influencers who can elevate your brand and attract more potential customers. It provides a way for you to search for bloggers and social-media celebrities interested in your industry, so you can connect with them.

15. Adobe Post
This app is a new to the photo scene app but has become something very near to my heart. I use it for creating stunning photos for my blog and social-media presence. Best part about it is that it's free. You simply choose from millions of photos, and it'll put together what looks like the best presentation in the world.

16. Sendible
This is a powerful social-media tool that brings together all aspects of your social-media management responsibilities. This includes pulling all posts and comments into one dashboard for analysis, measurement and engagement. Other features include publishing, collaboration, customer relationship management and mobile tools.

17. Person App
This app essentially puts a face to all those followers and friends in the social-media world. You can also create specific personas that then interact with this audience. Together, social media becomes more personalized and human.

18. Openr
Make the most of your social-media efforts with this tool, which lets you add a promotional message to any message you share on your social-media profiles. The result is more leads and traffic while letting you learn more about your audience.

19. Socedo
Marketing automation is increasingly driving success for businesses in terms of enhancing sales whilst reducing cost and effort. Socedo automates the lead generation process by bringing in relevant prospects through social media. The platform matches users' interest with your defined criteria and engages prospective customers, automatically using a customizable workflow. In addition, Socedo also provides analytics and insights, so you can fine-tune and tweak the workflow in order to get better quality leads.

20. Babbly
Meanwhile, virality is one of the main goals of marketing through social-media channels. Babbly enables you to amplify your audience by sharing content through its own community of users and influencers. The tool is very simple. You just enter or paste the URL you want to promote, and the platform does its job. Babbly comes in a straightforward interface that's also mobile-friendly, which means you can grab attention for your content across different kinds of devices.
While there are hundreds of apps and tools now available that deserve your consideration as viable solutions to enhance your social-media presence and investment, these 20 social-media tools offer a range in capabilities and costs to appeal to everyone from a growing startup to a full-fledged established company.

6 REASONS ANY BUSINESS OWNER NEED SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE.

Technological advancement has brought the world to the point where virtually everything happens online– and the importance of social media presence on a business cannot be overemphasized. While some business owners think that social media is not needed because they believe that conventional marketing techniques can replace it. You should know that conventional marketing cannot replace social media presence for various reasons we are going to be exploring on this post.

1.BRAND AWARENESS
One major reason why you need social media is it makes brand awareness easier. An entrepreneur just starting a business, will have few people with knowledge about his product-which may include friends, family members and probably neighbours, there are still billions of untapped traffic out there, what happens to them... the good news is, that’s where social media comes in play. Take a second and think about this, how many times have you seen a product for the first time on a social media post and a few days/weeks later you see that same product in a shop…frankly, you are likely going to try it out, especially if you don’t see the brand you came for. Having a social media presence puts you in a better position over competitors that are not taking advantage of social media platforms.

2.INCREASES BRAND AUTHORITY
Your brand is most likely going to have a competitor at some point, using social media increases your brand authority because it is a platform that creates engagement between you and your clients while answering all their questions concerning your brand, it builds trust and they see you as an expert in that niche.
Also, constant publishing excellent content and sharing it on social media shows you’re an expert in that niche. This is extremely beneficial as customers will begin to think of the brand as a thought leader in their industry, leading them to trust whatever you say.

3.FEEDBACKS
Feedbacks are good for any business, whether positive or negative …it gives room for improvement on a product or service. Businesses that interact with their consumers are likely to do better and the best way to get feedback is through social media platform-should know not all feedbacks will be free from prejudice but just have to filter and know the most common criticism. Getting feedback about your product from consumers through social media platforms is easier than you think with social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn are making it easy for businesses to connect with customers.

4.REACH A LARGER AUDIENCE
The reach of social media is overwhelming i.e. According to Wikipedia 3.2 billion have access to the internet and with over 2.32 billion monthly active users on Facebook. With the click of a mouse, you have the potential to reach billions of people.

5.COST EFFECTIVE
There is a belief that something free might be taken for granted, which might be true. Having a social media account is easy and free to use. If you know how to strategically create your campaign on social media, you will be able to reach thousands of people for a fee less than $20 (₦7000) doing the same reach through an offline campaign will cost far more.
Businesses with social media presence will automatically drive traffic to their website through social media platforms. if you provide a link to your site on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn page or post, you will get some clicks on that post which will land customers to your website or blog.
Another way that businesses use social media is through posting articles and quotes that relate to their niche, as well as other unique ideas. These kinds of pieces of content will entice and intrigue your audience and will result in them researching further about your brand and exploring your website (increasing traffic to your website).

6.ENHANCED WEB RANKING/SEO
Linking your social media channels to your blog post will automatically redirect traffic from social media to your blog and will boost your ranking on search engines –
Google deems your site reliable and will obviously favour you much more than if no one clicks on your links.
Social media aids search engine optimization, so use it!

If you need help with your Social Media Marketing, or any other digital marketing concepts, contact us at 0805 902 3566 or mail hello@kongmarketing.com and our team would be more than happy to help you and your business. Thank you.