Social media marketing tools (from creative to analytics) are essential to a successful digital marketing strategy. The click stream journey from social to website interaction is as important as ever and the right tools will provide you with a key that will help you overcome your competition quickly. This is why we’ve compiled some of2018’s best tools for social media marketing, monitoring, and analytics for organizations.

The information below is broken down into the different functionality required within social media marketing.

Creative Marketing

I would divide this into different functions:

1. Post Scheduling : While post automation gets a bad rep because users can get overly reliant on it, sometimes marketers are stretched so thinly that we must use them. That’s ok. Just be sure that you are engaging with your audience and relevant. One of the most popular tools out there is Buffer.
2. Creative Posting: If a picture speaks a thousand words, why not use that knowledge to have a greater impact on your social media. Canva has been a great place tool for us in 2018 and Pablo by Buffer has been a close second.
3. Curation: Sharing content from other people is often a critical part of a good social media strategy. Curation of that content will not just help your brand but it helps you become an authority in the industry. RSS readers (like Feedly) are some of the better tools for staying on top of industry publications. Use Google News Alerts and Twitter lists to gain insights into some of the industry leaders you can learn from.

Monitoring and Analytics

There are a number of tools that will notify you when people engage with your content – from Tweetdeck to Hootsuite for social media streams all the way to SEMRush, Moz, and Mention to help you find mentions across the entire internet.

The trick with finding the right an Analytics tool is that it needs to continuously feed into your agile marketing practices for it to be valuable. While getting 100,000 fans is great, if your post engagement is near 1% when your strategy dictates you need leads & conversions, you will have a problem. This is why many people end up getting frustrated with Dashboard tools. They get stuck with viewing the same KPIs all of the time even though their strategies have changed.

You need analytics tools to determine how well your social media strategy is performing, while it evolves. As a result, the best tool will be one that combines your website data with your social media. Google Analytics should be your first line of defense as it can inform you on how much traffic is coming from social media, how it’s behaving in your site, and what was the result of the visit. Make sure that if you’re running any paid social media ads, you’re tracking those with a UTM link so that it tracks well within Google Analytics.

Once you’ve set up your Analytics, consider a tool that will give you the KPIs you’d want to start off with, while at the same time, maintain some level of flexibility as your strategy evolves. I would recommend using Factivate to bring together your social media analytics and your web analytics in one place. You should check out their Spreadsheet Template Marketplace .

It gives you ready-made spreadsheet templates that automatically pull the data for you and give you custom social media analytics reports + dashboards in one place. We’ve been very bullish on these type of templates to help marketers get started.

There are hundreds of tools for marketers available to you today. Remember, when you’re making a decision on which one works best for you and your organization, you should consider: ease of use, customization ability, and ability to add text descriptions for context on your reports.