When I first began as a social media manager, I spent weeks scouring the internet for social media tools. I compared reviews, functionality, usability, and compatibility, but only now – after testing a plethora of tools in action – have I reached a place where I’m happy with my social media toolkit.

You’ll probably have your own likes and preferences in terms of tools, but I thought I’d give you a place to start your social media scavenger hunt by highlighting the tools we use here at Kinetix to manage our clients’ social media campaigns.

We use different tools for different parts of a campaign. To make things easy, I’ll split the tools into categories based on what part of the social media campaign they support.

I’ll try to post a new list each Friday for the next month that contains links to each tool and a description of how we use it here at Kinetix. Most of these tools and resources are free but a few cost money. I’ll try to provide free alternatives for those that require memberships.

Let’s start with tools for researching your environment, target demographic, and competition.

RESEARCH

SocialBro (paid)

A Twitter tool that lets you gather accurate information about your twitter community (and that of your competitors). It lets you filter information by using different search criteria like language, location, influence, number of followers, etc.

Discover who your target demographic are, where they are located and the optimal times to tweet your targeted content.

Listorious (free)

Another Twitter tool, but this one lets you conduct searches to find your specific niche following on Twitter. Find lists containing your industry’s opinion leaders, then see who their followers are. Suddenly, you’ve found yourself qualified followers who are more likely to be interested in your content.

HubSpot’s Competitors Tool (paid)

The King of Inbound Marketing, HubSpot, has many tools which I’ll list throughout this series, but here I want to talk about their Competitors Tool. It assigns you and your competitor, a score out of 100 based on your online participation. We use this to see how our campaigns stack up against our clients’ closest competitors. It’s also a great way to find areas for growth.

Fourthmedia.com (free)

This is a fantastic resource if you’re looking for campaign ideas or social media case studies. They have an archived list of campaigns on all the major social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, YouTube, and Linkedin (no Google+ unfortunately).

MarketingProfs.com (free)

Chances are you’re already familiar with marketingprofs.com. They’re a great resource for marketing news and statistics. I use them to stay up-to-date on the latest social media demographics, but they have a lot of other great tips and marketing advice.

Keyword Discovery: (paid)

Keyword tools are a great way to discover how people are searching for your brands, product or service online. There are hundreds of keyword tools to choose from. Depending on your campaign, you may want to use all or none of them – but that’s a post for another day.

The king of keyword tools is Keyword Discovery, which compiles keyword search statistics from all the major search engines world wide. If you don’t want to spend the money, Google’s keyword tool is a great option – though it limits you specifically to Google’s keyword statistics.



Come back next Friday for a list of tools we use to aggregate and schedule content!