Welcome to 2016, where social media is essentially a requirement for every brand.

Problem is, businesses are packed in like sardines on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and getting attention from users is harder than ever.

This means your strategy has to be smart, unique, and calculated. And you can’t do it alone. You need numbers, predictions, and assistants – the virtual kind.

These killer tools have been developed by the smartest marketers out there, and trying to create a strategy without them would be like shooting in the dark.

These are a few that we’ve personally found good success with. Let us know if you think we missed a good one.

Tools for better social media marketing

Manage Flitter– find new followers

Without a decent sized following you won’t you won’t get anywhere. Peddling content to less than a 500 people on Twitter is like trying to move a kayak through a river by paddling the water with toothpicks – it just doesn’t work.

At the most basic level, you must first have these 4 requirements –

A complete and unique profile with an alluring picture (being unique is key on Twitter) Links to make your profiles easy to find in your profile and elsewhere Great content (of course) Great people that you can interact with

After this base is established, Manage Flitter gives you all the other tools you need to make your profile the stuff of legend.

Here’s a quick list of what it can do:

Sort your followers/following lists by a range of criteria

Find new people to follow with their robust search

Find the time when your followers are most online

Schedule tweets appropriately with their advances posting feature

Track those who unfollowed you

Manage multiple Twitter accounts

What we like to you this for most, is to get information on users to build the right follower to following ratio. It important that you aren’t following more users than you having following you as that gives users a “spammy” image of your brand.

BuzzSumo– share the right content

M

anage Flitter can help grow your follower base on Twitter – but what about engaging that following? BuzzSumo tells you what’s trending, where it’s trending, and a ton of other useful information about that content.

This information can tell you what you might want to consider building content around.

It can give you keyword information and a list of the most popular content that day, week, and month.

Not only an idea springboard, you can use it to hop on a post and create a comment, to build your brand’s authority.

You can also see what’s popular on specific social networks. If certain topics are more popular on one network than another, build that into your sharing strategy.

SocialClout – Figure out what to do and how to do it

This tool is one of the most powerful we have seen when it comes to assisting you in building, improving, and executing a social strategy.

Here’s just a few ways it wins our recommendation:

Plan and run social campaigns to generate leads

Find out how you stack up against the competitors with in-depth competitive analysis

Identify individuals who are talking about you the most or have largest following

Identify your brand advocates or negative sentiments with auto-sentiment analysis

Geography and demographic discovery tools

Aggregated view of the activities across social platforms

Hundreds of KPI’s packed into insightful Reports

Track a name, brand, or service and even your competitor’s mention with keyword search

What we really love about this tool, is that it guides us and keeps us from second guessing ourselves on a decision. With so much data on what we should do next, we can make decisions both faster and with more confidence.

A close runner-up to that mention, is that this tool turns otherwise nebulous social channels into lead-filled opportunities. It clears up the ambiguity social media naturally has and shows us what leads are really at our finger tips.

Little Bird– Finding and communication with influencers

Social influencers are all around us – it’s up to you to find and engage with them.

Little Bird can help with that. Influencer marketing is all the rage nowadays and Little Bird is starting to lead the way in finding and connecting with the right influencers.

And exactly that is why it’s so useful. The number one rated problem among marketers using influencer marketing is that they can’t seem to connect with the most relevant influencers to their niche.

This tool really drills down on this specific gap in the strategy and takes pains to solve it.

You can build influencer lists by topic with keywords, and it will suggest powerful influencers that are most relevant to you.

But the best part is that is uses a huge wealth of data to identify who exactly to suggest to you. Some of this data is the geo-targeting, the language, the connection overlaps, the interests of that influencer, and their networks.

If you’ve tried a different influencer marketing tool and haven’t been completely satisfied, this is our suggestion.

Mention– social listening and monitoring

Why these functions are priceless:

Give you new and valuable content ideas

Allows you to reach out to those already talking about your brand

Tells you exactly what your competitors are doing and what people think of them

Allows you to expand on your current branding strategy

Analyze and conversation on any target keyword

Monitor what’s being said about any name or keyword online, then react and analyze conversations.

We specifically like this tool because it gives us feedback and information on our brand that we never would have known about otherwise. This feedback is more powerful than you would imagine.

Knowing the raw, uninhibited thoughts your competitors customers have about their brand is also a valuable weapon in your social media arsenal.

And that’s our top 5!

You can hire a squadron of social media pros, or you can pick up a few of these awesome tools.

Let us know if you think we missed one!

You can read more about what we do with social media here.