Just about every company you talk to or read about has embraced the power of social media, particularly in recent years. Business owners and entrepreneurs have acknowledged that social media is the next big thing of the future and are quick to cash in.

In essence, social media is not just about sharing content with your followers but rather discovering new and diverse opportunities to serve customers instantly, grow followership, build the brand, and much more. If we talk numbers, it is no surprise that almost half of the global population is living and breathing social media. As Vala Afshar points out:

Here we list more than a couple of super-awesome tools which not only let you manage your social accounts but also help you grow and monitor your social presence whilst outpacing your competitors.

Buffer has become the ultimate choice for most social media marketers. This superb tools allows you to schedule updates according to different time zones, in addition to providing a complete analytics overview of your updates, in terms of “most popular” and “least popular”. It also lets you monitor the number of clicks your updates receive, and many other interesting features. Buffer also offers integration with Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus.

See how it works:

Getting Started With Buffer

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Price: Basic Package – Free, Business Package – $10/month

Imagine a complete dashboard that gives an overview of brand mentions, demographics metrics, engagement opportunities, real-time reports, interesting widgets and tons of other great features. Say hello to Cyfe.

If you need to track the different aspects of a campaign on a daily basis, this tool will be your trustworthy advocate.

Price: Basic Package – Free, Premium Package – $19/month

This tool is designed for managing B2B social media marketing. You can schedule your content; create different campaigns, track performance of each campaign, engagement rate & conversions. The best feature of Oktopost is that you can integrate your Salesforce and Marketo CRMs so valuable leads-related data is just a click away.

Price: Free 30 days trial – Premium Package – $55/month

Brands are now very curious to know what people think or say about them on the social media and web sphere. To fulfil this need, Mention is your messiah. It is similar to Google alerts in some ways except it delivers instant results from all the major social networks including Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus.

Mention provides metric-data of more than 42 languages and you can get instant notifications via email, even if someone casually mentions your brand on Twitter.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Plan – Free – Premium Package – 29 € /mo

If you’re a fan of a great design and interface equipped with high end functionality then Sprout Social is something you can’t afford to miss. Gorgeous graphical representation of data, real-time monitoring, loads of CRM & reporting tools, analytics, team collaboration, Android/ iPhone apps and various other benefits are offered.

The best thing about this tool is its simple design and the way they incorporate countless features; and better still, you won’t require a special tutorial to know how to use it.

See how it works:

A Review of Sprout Social - Social Media Management Software

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Price: Free 30 Days Trial – Premium Package – $59/month

Nod3X

This tool completely transforms your social data into something that gives you a clear edge over your competitors. Nod3x also helps you identify influencers within your industry and gives suggestions on the basis of your data, like who you should connect with, what hashtags you should use, what are the best performing days etc. among other great features.

Price: Basic Plan – £75Per Month

Brandwatch is a very powerful tool that gives detailed insights of ongoing communication about a brand on all social media channels. BrandWatch says their sentiment analysis feature can capture both positive and negative customer sentiments across all blogs, articles, news, forums & social media.

With support of 27 different languages, 70 million+ data sources and numerous features, this social media tool really is in a class of its own.

See how it works:

Brandwatch's Interface for Social Media Analytics

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Price: Pro Package – £500/month

ShareTally is an instant tool that tells you who has socially shared any link. Imagine the scenario, when your plugin crashes and you have to present social numbers from scratch to your client or boss. Well, in this catastrophic situation, ShareTally has your back. Just put the URL in the Tally bar and see the magic happen within seconds.

Price: Free

This is another highly popular social media management tool for businesses and individuals alike to manage, collaborate, schedule & track campaigns. By connecting with over 35 different social networks, HootSuite is the easiest web-based dashboard that gives instant data on the performance of social accounts while being integrated with Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Plan – Free , Pro Plan – $9.99/mo

Social mention is among the most favorite ‘listening’ tools for social media marketers. It analyzes data in a completely different and detailed format with four metrics: Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach. You can also set email alerts, download results in real-time with top keywords, hashtags and sources.

Price: Free

Trackur is another social media monitoring tool that gives you the freedom to explore your audience in a more sophisticated manner. Just point to what you want to monitor and it will search every blog, mainstream media, forum, videos and social media. It also reports on who’s talking about you and what their authority is, including their Klout score.

See how it works:

Price: Free 10 days trial , Pro Plan – $97/month

This is a great Twitter tool to keep an eye on your own hashtag performance. Just input your hashtag and it gives you a detailed report on conversations, images, tweets containing links, retweets and reach; you can also share these results with your followers. It’s a great tool for organizing Twitter chats and for a live Tweet Binder demo, participate in the weekly chat hosted by SEMRush, using the hashtag #SEMRushChat.

Price: Basic Package – Free , Pro Plan – $45/month

Radian 6 is a product of exacttarget, the company more commonly known as Salesforce.

This monitoring tool shows real time conversations about your brand and automatically converts them into stunning visuals. It is not limited to social media but can also track over 150 million public sites (blogs, comments, forums, videos and photos) across the world and presents every minute detail about your brand.

If you want to build your own brand in a major way, this one is highly recommended.

See how it works:

Price: Basic Package – $600/month

Marketers call it the “Twitter Search Engine” because of its real-time search capabilities. Sign in with your Twitter account and enter the company name, keyword or hashtag you want to search.

Before you get a chance to blink, it displays information on top influencers, most active and latest users, popular tweets, top RTs links, related trends and photos. You can also directly get in touch with these users.

Price: Free

If you want to manage your marketing, and monitor activities under one dashboard then you ought to try out Beevolve. This affordable tool gives a good overview of your social media marketing campaigns by showing post statistics, demographics & channel measurement.

For the monitoring, you can utilize their comprehensive dashboard with competitive intelligence capabilities, real-time conversations, channel sources and top follower reports.

Price: Starter Package $19.95 /month

This superb tool behaves like an examiner and judges your performance across all social channels. It gives you a magnitude score out of 10 based on the activity performed within a week, on over 36 social media sites.

It can be a great tool for competitive analysis as it identifies the channels your competitors are most active on, and where you need to catch up.

Price: Free limited account. Basic package $9/per 3 months

It’s a powerful social media management tool for serving customers in a timely manner. Standout features include: role-based separate UI, content publishing, unified social inbox, knowledge base, CRM integration & clear ownership with pre-defined templates. It analyzes data across all social media channels, from blogs, comments, photos and videos, and provides it to you in a nice graphical format.

See how it works:

Mentionmapp allows you to analyze Twitter connections in a unique visualization. The more you interact with people, the denser your nodes get. You can view which hashtags your most engaged followers are using and who they are talking to. This revolutionary tool can get you many targeted followers.

Price: Free

It is rated as the best Twitter analytics and monitoring tool as it gives you full authority to search everything about your own Twitter account as well as others.

Once signed in, it gives you all the vital statistics on the first screen which includes: how many tweets you make per day, how many mentions you get, who retweets you the most, top hashtags you use, how many links you share, and many more.

Price: Basic Plan – Free , Premium Plan – $20

This has got to be one of my favorite online tools that I just can’t get enough of. There are many great features found within BuzzSumo, however, for monitoring your social presence, I strongly believe you just cannot go wrong with this one.

It gives you a detailed overview of what kind of content is popular and sought after in your industry and what the social numbers are. By navigating to the “influencers menu”, you can check the most influential people in any industry.

Price: Free trial available, Pro Package $99/month

If you run multiple accounts and want to control them under one roof, Sendible should be in your arsenal. From monitoring brand mentions to critical data analysis; it does everything to make a social media manager’s life easy. And yes, they do have Android & iPhone apps.

Price: Free 30 days trial , Startup package – $59/month

The tools listed above are perfect for monitoring and developing the growth of your social presence. Is there a tool I’ve missed? I’m pretty sure I did so let me know in the comments section.