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14 Most Effective New Social Media Tools to Use Right Now (and how to use them)

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Whether you are a small business owner or an individual, boosting your social media efforts doesn’t require a lot of money or loads of experience. There are a variety of tools designed to assist you with listening to your audience, getting detailed analysis, improving your content or finding and contacting influencers.

The social media tools landscape gets bigger every week as people create and launch new tools. This is further amplified by constantly emerging social media platforms that grab our attention and become part of our daily lives.

Because there are just too many social media tools to choose from, we created a list of the most effective new tools that’ll help you to stay on top of the trends.

Content Curation Tools

Quuu

Hand curated content suggestions that you can share on social media

Select Relevant Intereste Categories

Price: Free (up to 2 posts per day & up to 5 categories) or $10/month (up to 10 posts per day & unlimited categories)

Description: Quuu has an amazing community of real people that curate great content by hand and fill your Buffer queue, which makes content curation really easy! Hand curation definitely ensures quality and complete relevancy of the content.

How to use it: Simply log in to Quuu and connect it with your Buffer account and select categories of interests that are relevant to your audience.

Quu How To Use It

When you select the categories you want and the frequency, Quuu will automatically send hand-curated content to your Buffer queue. You can choose from more than 300 different topics and you can manually edit the suggestions later in Buffer.

Panda

A smart news reader built for productivity

Price: Free or $4.99/month
Description: Panda 5 is the 5th iteration of the popular app for reading the news. It allows you to browse multiple websites at once which helps you speed up content curation process. It also integrates with other websites and pulls RSS feeds.

Panda
Panda 2

How to use it: First you’ll need to authorise Panda with your Twitter account. Then, based on who you follow, it’ll recommend a list of feeds to follow, but you can also search for more feeds to add to your reader.

You can also read articles in the app itself.

A cool feature that Panda has is the pre-integrated feeds for a number of popular sites, such as Dribble, Medium, Product Hunt, Brain Pickings, Inbound.org, The Verge, etc. You can also download its Google Chrome extension and personalise your new tab with 9 different options such as a notepad or a to-do list.

Zest

Fresh marketing inspiration with every new tab

Price: Free
Description: Zest is a Chrome tab extension that helps with finding great marketing articles.
How to use it: Just download the Chrome extension, and Zest will show you the latest curated marketing articles whenever you open a new tab.

Zest Fresh Marketing
Zest Fresh Marketing 2

Currently, there are 29 different topics (or tags) that you can select to customise your feed. Some of the tags that you can choose from include inspiration, SEO, social, content, email and metrics. Another cool feature is that you can suggest your content. Zest profile is something that is currently in development, which will allow people to follow you.

Yotpo – Curation

Collect customer photos from Instagram

Price: $299 onwards
Description: Yotpo makes it really easy to collect the best user-generated content on Instagram which you can use for your business. Curation helps you collect user Instagram photos, but you’ll need proper permissions.

How to use it: There are a few ways that you can use Yotpo:

  1. You can create a feed of Instagram photos from yourself, influencers and your customers using advanced search functions.
  2. You can really easily get the permissions needed and thank the photo creators using their automated workflow. Getting permission is a very important step in order to stay compliant with Instagram’s terms of service and you should also do it in respect of the creators.
  3. After you collect the photos, you can easily create a shoppable Instagram feed with photo galleries. This way, your customers can go directly from Instagram to the product page where they can complete the purchase.
  4. You can also use curated photos for promotion on your website or social media.
Yotpo Curation

Zest

Fresh marketing inspiration with every new tab

Price: Free
Description: Zest is a Chrome tab extension that helps with finding great marketing articles.
How to use it: Just download the Chrome extension, and Zest will show you the latest curated marketing articles whenever you open a new tab.

Zest Fresh Marketing (1)
Zest Fresh Marketing (2)

Currently, there are 29 different topics (or tags) that you can select to customise your feed. Some of the tags that you can choose from include inspiration, SEO, social, content, email and metrics. Another cool feature is that you can suggest your content. Zest profile is something that is currently in development, which will allow people to follow you.

Refind
Refind Feed

Refind

Discover the best links on the web

Price: Free
Description: Refind can re-discover the links you’ve saved in the past and it can also show you what links your friends have saved.
How to use it: Download Refind extension and save any link you want by clicking the extension button. You can then tag it yourself or choose a tag from the recommendations. It also displays how many times the link was saved by other people in order to give you some sense of the popularity or quality.

You have the option to search for articles in your Refind feed but you can also rediscover the links you previously saved by searching for a topic on Google, and then Refind will highlight all the relevant links in the search results. If you like to read some articles, but can’t at the moment, you can simply hit the “Read Soon” option in the Refind browser extension.

There are 3 simple ways that you can use Refind to discover new content or re-discover old content:

  1. Links that you previously saved
  2. Links that your friends saved
  3. Refind recommendations that are based on your past saved links

You can also download Refind app for iOS or Android if you like to read an article on the go.

Content Creation Tools

Adobe Spark

Create images, videos and stories in minutes

Price: Free
Description: Adobe Spark is a great way to create appealing images, stories, and animated videos in minutes.
How to use it: Using Adobe’s browser editor, you can do the following

  • For graphics, you can resize it, change the background, colour palette, theme, and text.
  • A web story is basically a simple web page with pictures, videos, and text that you can arrange to tell a story. You can include text, buttons, photos, videos and more!
  • For videos, you can start from scratch or pick one of the story templates. Then on each slide you can add text, icons, photos and music.
Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark My Projects

When you want to create a video, you don’t have to start from scratch because Adobe provides some nice templates for you. Examples include:

  • Teach a lesson
  • Tell what happened
  • Promote and idea
  • An invitation
  • Show and tell
Rocketium

Rocketium

Create stunning videos from text & media

Price: $10 or $25
Description: Rocketium is a great tool for creating short videos with overlaid text.
How to use it: Creating short videos using Rocketium’s browser editor is a very simple 3 step process:

  1. Add content to the editor. You have the option of uploading your own images and videos or selecting copyright-free images or videos from Rocketium’s gallery.
  2. Choose a pre-made theme or build your own.
  3. Further customise the video with animations, filters, fonts and more.

A great feature that Rocketium offers is that you can publish your videos in different aspect ratios (square, portrait, and landscape) and your captions will automatically be resized for you. You don’t need to go through the entire process again to create a square and vertical version of the video.

Pixabay 2.0

Over 810,000 free stock photos, vectors, and videos

Price: Free
Description: Pixabay has more than 810,000 free photos, vectors, illustrations, and videos. The community over there contributes 1000+ new high-res images and videos every single day!
How to use it: Simply use the search bar to find images, videos or graphics that you need. All resources there are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CCo, meaning that you can use them freely for any purpose. If you are not sure for what terms to search for, you can then browse the images and videos by category, including animals, backgrounds, food, health, religion, science, places and people.

Pixelbay
Gifs

Gifs

Create gifs in seconds

Price: Free
Description: With gifs you can take any video (from YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and live video (YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitch, Periscope, etc.) and turn it into a gif.

How to use it: Simply copy and paste the URL or upload it as a file. Then the browser editor gives you a variety of options of adding captions or stickers, cropping the video, and applying effects. You can select the length of the gif by using the slider located below the video.

It’s super simple to create your favourite meme with its one-click meme feature. All you need to do is to select the meme and the gifs will add the effects and captions for you. You can also set up a gif so it links back to URL you choose.

Social Media Branding

Rebrandly

Create links with your custom domain name

Price: Free or $99/month (with advanced analytics)

Description: Rebrandly is a custom URL shortener that you can use to share your branded links. Turning long and complex URLs into branded ones has never been easier.

How to use it: After registering your account, you’ll need to set up a custom domain that you’ll use for branding. You have the option to register a new domain through Rebrandly or use another domain you have. Then download the browser extension so you can quickly and easily rebrand any links you want. When you are at a page you’d like to share, just click on the browser extension button.

You can organise Rebrandly shortened links in the other apps you might be using, such as Bitly, Goo.gl, and Clickmeter.

Rebrandly
Rebrandly Shortened
Engage By Twitter

Social Media Monitoring

Engage by Twitter

Grow your Twitter audience

Price: Free

Description: Engage is an app from Twitter that will help you manage your Twitter profiles and provides more data about your profile and tweets. You can easily connect with influencers by checking highlighter important mentions.

How to use it: There are 3 main tabs in the navigation:

  • Engage: check out top mentions, notifications, and interactions with verified Twitter profiles.
  • Understand: displaying profile metrics such as the number of likes, follows and retweets.
  • Posts: check the performance of individual tweets.

Social Clout

Your gateway to the social media

Social Clout

Price: Free, $49/month, $99/month

Description: Social Clout helps you to monitor your brand’s or personal mentions across Facebook and Twitter in real-time by providing detailed reports with useful metrics that you can use to understand your social health. You can also gauge where do you stand against your competitors by analysing them.

How to use it: To monitor your mentions across social media, simply connect Social Clout with your Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram accounts. All mentions will be updated in real time so you never miss out on any conversations.

If you’d like to search for mentions of keywords from Twitter, then use the keyword search option. With it, you can track your brand and services and even your competitor’s mentions on several social networks.

Check out the insightful reports of social media analytics tool to learn about engagement, competition, audience, leads, and campaigns.

Waaffle

Aggregate, analyse, and publish content from social media

Price: $9/month per campaign

Description: With Waaffle, you can aggregate but also monitor social media posts from Instagram and Twitter, analyse them and publish content.

Waafle
Yala
Authorise Yala

Social Media Scheduling

Yala

A smart bot that learns the best time to share your posts

Price: Free

Description: Yala is a simple Slack bot that makes use of machine learning to determine the best possible time to post to your social media.

How to use it: Add Yala to your Slack team if you are the team admin. Then once is added, she will send you a direct message in Slack or you can say hi to her in order to begin scheduling.

You’ll need to authorise Yala to post on your Facebook and/or Twitter profile. After that you can:

  • Schedule a text post or an image with text
  • Change the publishing frequency
  • Look up scheduled posts by sending series to Yala (series is your queue)

Yala might be brought to Facebook Messenger in the future so you can use it if you are not using Slack.

Hootsuite

Manage and schedule all your social media

Price: Free, $9.99/month, $34.99/month, $99.99/month

Description: With Hootsuite you can easily manage and schedule all your social network profiles and posts for future publishing. It also features great

How to use it: When you connect your social media profiles (Hootsuite supports over 35 social media networks), click “Publisher” from the launch menu and you’ll be able to schedule messages that will publish on a specific time and date. You can also use “AutoSchedule” feature to schedule the posts for you.

Hootsuite offers much more the content scheduling, though. You can:

  • Listen and monitor what your audience is saying about your brand
  • Social media analytics tool will give you a deep understanding of how well your social media campaigns are doing
  • Reply with a single click to mentions, comments and messages in a single dashboard
Hootsuite
PostReach

PostReach

Simple analytics for bloggers & content marketers

Social Media Analysis

Price: $10/month or $29/month (21-day trial included)

Description: PostReach is a content reporting analytics tool. It shows you the number of shares, traffic statistics, and the influencers who shared your content.

How to use it: You can set up PostReach with a single click. After that, it will automatically create reports for every post.

The following information is available within PostReach dashboard:

  • Reader engagement (average time on page and bounce rate)
  • Traffic breakdown (views and unique views)
  • Reader acquisition (sources that brought readers to your page)
  • Twitter breakdown (total number of tweets, retweets, and shares)
  • Shares breakdown (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn)
  • Influencers (influencers who shared your content along with their social stats)

Conclusion

While there are thousands of tools and apps available, selecting the right one requires you to know your needs and requirements. Each of the tools above can help you to work smarter and save time.

Social media tools are constantly advancing in order to help us do our daily tasks more efficiently and quickly. We hope that you’ve found a few new useful tools that you can add to your daily workflow.