List of the best Instagram marketing tools for social media marketers and managers.
Brands and marketers across the globe have identified the vast opportunity and potential that Instagram carries, and hence are trying to capitalize on the network it brings. With over 1 billion active monthly users, the numbers say it all. But other statistics like 500 million stories being created daily, also indicate a lot of competition.
With so many people engaging on the platform, it is humanly impossible to keep up with the algorithm. If you want to use Instagram to its full potential, you will need the right set of tools to help you out. We have simplified it for you by making a list of the best Instagram marketing tools to create a comprehensive toolkit.
Instagram Marketing Tools You Absolutely Need
These are some of the best Instagram marketing tools available to help you get a headstart on the platform.
Radarr
When you closely track the conversations on Instagram about topics, hashtags, and keywords related to your brand and industry, it’s called Instagram listening. The insights you gather here can help you create an informed and sound strategy for Instagram marketing.
Radarr is a well-known and powerful social listening tool that can give you a bird’s eye view of everything happening in your industry and can help you strategize campaigns to reach a broader and more relevant set of people. It gives your incredible insights by putting comments, shares, brand mentions, ongoing and upcoming trends in context.
Using the social listening feature, you can understand exactly what is it that excites your target audience. Radarr also comes with a sentiment analysis module that helps you understand the driving force behind any online conversation and how you can leverage them to reach your Instagram marketing goals.
It is not just a reactive tool that helps you perform better on Instagram; it’s a proactive solution that ensures you stay ahead of your competition.
Canva
In addition to photos and videos, you’ll also need original and appealing graphics to get the desired output from Instagram visual marketing. And there’s no better tool than Canva to do it for free.
This is an easy-to-use design platform using which you can create a variety of graphics for your Instagram marketing strategy. This tool offers a wide range of design types, be it an image for social media, web banners, or presentations– Canva has it all. Not only this, it has templates for all your needs too, which comes in handy when you have to create graphics for Instagram marketing on a scale.
Let’s say you have to create a post for your brand’s Instagram account. You can start by opening any accurately sized Instagram Post Template of your choice. You can jump directly into the customization part once you find the template with the desired look, feel, and format. You can easily swap photos, change the layout and background of the post, adjust font, add additional elements to make it more relatable—all of these with simple drag and drop.
VSCO
High-quality visuals and aesthetics are the foundation of Instagram, and for this reason, it is essential to have a photo editing app in your toolkit. Sometimes the default filters of Instagram are just not enough. If that’s the case, you should lookout for a photo editing tool like VSCO to add a beautiful and artistic touch to your photos.
VSCO is an app designed for and by creators and is also one of the must-try photo editing apps. It stands out because of the versatility it has to offer. You can effortlessly tweak elements like sharpness, contrast, brightness, and color balance. It comes with a good range of impressive filters, free editing tools, and some amazing presets.
If you become a member, which you should, you’ll be able to unlock tips, tricks, and creative tutorials. Want to improve the quality of your Instagram posts to capture your audience’s attention? The tips and tricks you get in VSCO membership will allow you to unlock the true potential of this powerhouse of presets and editing tools.
Repost for Instagram
Is using the user-generated content(UGC) in your plans for the next campaign? If yes, you need a tool like a Repost for Instagramin your arsenal. After all, UGC is a great way to keep your audience engaged while also ensuring the trust is entirely intact.
This tool streamlines the process of posting user-generated content. It automatically gives the necessary credit to the original creator when you repost their content. With its help, you can get high-quality and more authentic content that will help drive audience engagement.
That said, it is essential to first get permission from the creator before reposting their content. And you will, most likely, get their permission knowing they will get all the recognition.
Social media is all about being intentional, fast, and efficient. And sitting on planning how and when to publish a post doesn’t help the case. Buffer makes things streamlined and effective for you with its three apps module: Buffer Reply, Buffer Analyze, and Buffer Publish. The latter, Buffer Publish, is more prevalent in the market compared to its partners.
Buffer is one of the most recognized tools for social media marketing. It allows you to schedule posts for your Instagram account or other social media platforms. The automation schedule is entirely customizable– you can decide if you want to post every day, on weekdays, or on weekends.
It doesn’t end here. You can use the follow-up tool to analyze which posts performed the best and why. You can link both personal and business accounts easily with this tool. Moreover, it helps effective collaboration as you can invite other members of the team and can decide the layout for posts.
Later
Later is another good tool for scheduling on social media platforms. They claim to be the world’s favorite social media marketing tool. You can create a visually appealing and stunning profile grid using this tool. There’s a drag and drop visual planner that you can use to design the profile grid and schedule posts accordingly.
It has a wide range of features for Instagram, such as scheduling, photo resizing, analytics, hashtags, and much more. Later’s primary focus is Instagram, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t use it for branding on your other social media platforms (Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook). There’s a free version available for individuals who want to manage only a single social media account.
Boomerang
Boomerang allows you to show off your brand in a unique, fun, and engaging way. It’s the modern approach to multimedia content marketing, and the trend guarantees that it works. Instagram developed this video app back in 2015, and ever since, it has only evolved.
This tool records a looping video that looks somewhat like a GIF and runs back and forth for approximately six seconds. Its tagline says– it’s not a photo, not a video, not a GIF, it’s a boomerang. The best part is that your Boomerang videos don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be authentic and need a storyline to market your business, services, and products uniquely.
Android and iOS users can download this app for free from Google Play Store and App Store, respectively.
Shorby
When you look at the lists of Instagram disadvantages, the feature to add only one link in the bio will be a part of almost every list. And if your account does not have more than 10,000 followers, you can’t even add useful/relevant links to your stories. These missing features are pretty inconvenient for new and small businesses who are just starting out and want to market their products, services, and content to their Instagram audience.
This is where tools like Shorby come into the picture. This tool is a godsend for those who want to get more out of their Instagram bio link. You can add clickable links on a mobile-optimized landing page that leads to various destinations. You can add as many links as you want to and can customize the landing page to blend well with your Instagram profile. When you are done adding the links, you just have to share the Shorby link on your bio for your followers and viewers to access it.
Ritetag
Ritetag is one of the parts of RiteKit’s toolkit for social media. It’s specially developed for individuals and businesses who aim to leverage Instagram for increasing their revenue. It can, however, be used as a standalone tool.
Based on real-time hashtag engagement, this tool gives crazy hashtag suggestions instantly. It can provide you with hashtags for photos, videos, and even text. Once you install its extension on Google Chrome, you literally just have to click on the picture or make a text selection and choose Get Hashtag Suggestions. That’s it. You’ll have the best working hashtags for the selected image or text on your screen.
It will also color-code the most suitable hashtags in various categories, so you can easily pick the ones that align with your marketing goals. Moreover, you can effortlessly analyze the hashtags’ performance using one of the above-listed tools, Radarr. This way, you will make more informed decisions about which hashtags are working for you and which are not.
Preview App
Managing and scaling your Instagram profile becomes easier when you have access to an Instagram planner. The Preview App is a feed planner that Instagram officially approves as safe to use. Being used by more than 9 million business and content creators, it is one of the most popular management tools available.
It does not manage any platform other than Instagram. Using this tool, you can schedule and publish your posts, plan the content using Planoly’s visual calendar, crop and edit images, and analyze the performance of your Instagram account.
Its advanced photo editing capabilities amalgamated with an intuitive user interface for both mobile and desktops is one of its biggest pros. It supports collaboration, meaning you can add your team members for planning the schedule. It is a far more reliable and relatively affordable Instagram management solution than its competitors.
Colorcinch
Colorcinch is a straight forward design platform that lets you transform your photos into personalized artwork. You can crop, resize, enhance your photos, and make their colors pop with just a few clicks.
It comes with hundreds of AI-powered filters and effects along with a vast collection of creative assets- stock images, vectors & icons, masks, and overlays. You can add texts to your photos, make use of drawing tools and blend modes to personalize your graphics. And just be creative with your banners, avatar, profile picture, memes, etc. With Colorcinch, you can craft your social media visuals on the fly.
Using Any of These Instagram Marketing Tools?
Businesses can now see the immense possibilities of social media platforms. It’s one of the reasons why most brands are now leveraging Instagram to connect better with their audience. It would help if you keep all the relevant Instagram marketing tools streamlined so you know exactly when to use which tool and for what.
However, before you start creating content and strategizing campaigns, it is essential to do thorough market research. Hence, start with social listening and understand what your audience wants from you. Their interests and engagement behavior should be an integral part of your strategy.
Learn how Fitbit uses social listening for better marketing and community building.
Despite the growth of health tracking apps and solutions during the last couple of years, Fitbit is still the second-most popular wearable brand across the globe.
As per statistics, Fitbit has over 31 million users across the globe and despite the increasing competition from the likes of Apple and other wearable technologies, the brand has been able to grow sustainably, despite slight dips in its popularity.
So what are they doing right?
Fitbit has been using social listening to be where their audience is, talk about things they truly care about, and keep them engaged in their journey to good health with proactive marketing campaigns.
But if you are aware of what social listening is, let’s look into how Fitbit has made it a crucial part of its growth strategy over the years.
Different ways in which Fitbit uses social listening
There are a number of ways in which Fitbit has been using social listening to strategize better for marketing, customer support, service, and sales. Here’s taking a look at some of the ways they have been using insights from social listening:
1. Tapping into social media trends
Social media trends move fast. Brands that are able to catch on with these trends in a timely manner are the ones who are able to tap into their full potential and reach a wider audience, riding on the high waves.
Fitbit does not make the mistake of not cashing in on trends. Take a look at how they have been using this meme on Beyonce for Superbowl on their social media accounts, giving it their very own twist for high context. Tell us you didn’t like this one!
Learn more about using social listening for identifying and predicting trends here.
2. Identifying their active markets
Since Fitbit was one of the first health-related wearables in the market, they were able to expand to global markets really quick. But instead of just relying on their first mover’s advantage, Fitbit has been proactively tuning into online conversations to see where most of their users come from.
They use these social listening insights to identify their primary markets and where they tend to get the most customer support requests or queries from. Using that, the brand now clearly states the languages they offer support in, making it much easier for its users to reach out to them and strike conversations to address their concerns.
3. Tapping into seasonal campaigns
Seasonal campaigns are the essence of marketing for direct-to-consumer products and services. This is the time when consumers are the most likely to make purchases for themselves or for their loved ones, and Fitbit is not the one to get left behind to position their products as seasonal buys.
They have identified the core seasons, occasions, and events their audience actively engages with. Using the same, they create their social media content to join the celebrations and become a part of the conversations happening around the time.
Here’s one from around the Lunar New Year:
And here’s how they subtly positioned themselves as a great Valentine’s Day gift in the month of love.
Learn more about using social listening for online conversations here.
4. Offer proactive customer support and service
Whether it’s a wearable, an app, a web app or a product, the one thing you definitely need to ensure to keep your customers engaged, is to offer proactive customer support and service. This may include addressing the simplest of questions like how to change the wearable settings to getting answers to repair, exchange, refund policies.
Fitbit offers customer support over Twitter. Considering the thousands of queries that come in, Fitbit has been able to keep up with them all using a social listening tool.
This helps them tackle negative experiences into positive conversations, helping them boost customer loyalty.
5. Building out features and capabilities
One of the things that’s important for apps and products to take into account is adapting to their target audience’s changing needs, preferences, and challenges. But basing a roadmap of features based on assumptions or your ability to build isn’t the way to succeed. You need to be able to build out features and capabilities that your users or your target audience actually wants.
Fitbit has been doing this pretty proactively. Looking into the trend of how people started to focus a lot on mental health as well, and leverage apps like Calm during the pandemic, Fitbit built out their integration with it. This feature now enables those who use their wearables to also access Calm much more easily throughout the day.
Building features that your audience wants is a great way to show you’re tuned into their needs and are building ‘for them’.
6. Influencer campaigns and collaborations
Influencer marketing has proven to help businesses reach their target audience much faster. But brands tend to have mixed experiences with the marketing strategy, depending on who they collaborate with to create content or run marketing campaigns.
Fitbit uses social listening to identify influencers that its target audience really connects with. They have been able to rope in influencers from across the globe based on the topics they proactively talk about, their influence, and how they impact the sentiments of their followers. This has led to massive success in their marketing campaigns, helping them further build a stronger community.
7. Proactively engaging in social conversations
If you want to build a loyal following, you need to use social media for more than just broadcasting your content, product announcements, and offers. You need to leverage the true potential of social media and actually make use of it for having conversations – beyond what is required for offering customer support and service.
Fitbit makes sure to focus on their social media engagement with the help of social listening. They use every comment as an opportunity to strike a conversation, involving their customers with the brand on a much deeper and day-to-day level.
8. Creating branded hashtags
Seeing how the consumers who bought from them share their purchases on social media, Fitbit also created branded hashtags to improve the awareness around their products. This has also helped them follow posts and conversations around specific products of theirs to help understand their consumers better, and how they feel about them.
Here’s a glimpse at the currently branded hashtags they leverage, and the number of people who are using them:
9. Creating a community on social
Building a community helps boost customer engagement and retention rates dramatically. More than 70% of consumers have stated that they tend to stay loyal to a brand if they feel a sense of belonging to a group or a community. Fitbit did not hold back from tapping into this consumer behavior.
They created a branded hashtag to encourage their customers to become a part of their community. This is the hashtag their customers use when posting about their fitness progress on social media or sharing their daily progress screenshots.
What’s more? The community made posts also serve as authentic content for the brand to reach more people!
10. Using image analytics to plan their ad creatives
Cracking the code on ad graphics can be tough. You never know what visual can exactly trigger a response from your potential customers. Should you show your products, feature set, product pricing, use emojis or customer pictures?
This is where image analytics in social listening comes in. With the help of social listening, Fitbit has been able to identify what visually appeals to its customers – for example, the number of steps and heart rate monitor. Using this strategy, the brand has been able to drive higher conversions from their ad campaigns, and improve their ROAS as well.
A big part of online success for apps and products is the ratings and reviews they get. By leveraging social listening, Fitbit has been able to strike active conversations with people who talk positively about their brand and wearables, leading them to drop positive reviews and ratings on app stores and other review platforms.
They also leverage social listening to identify potential negative experiences and use the opportunity to converse with the users, find solutions to address their problems and turn that experience into a positive emotion in the best way possible.
Is it time for you to start using social listening with Radarr?
The use of social media platforms is increasing by the day. From what used to be an app to take breaks, social media channels have now become a part and parcel of our lives, and we’re actively using them to share content or our opinions on topics that we care about.
These social conversations hold a lot of insights when it comes to understanding what your consumers want, how they feel and what you can do better to keep them engaged in a fast-moving, highly-competitive market.
So whether you’re an app, web or product developer, if you’re not using social listening, you’re leaving opportunities for your competitors to take on your market.
With social listening, you can actually do your product a lot of good:
Streamline your product roadmap to include features your customers ‘actually’ want
Proactively offer customer support and service to reduce user churn
Use ongoing conversations and trends to reach more people
Leverage different content formats to educate your audience
Plan out ad campaigns better to reduce user acquisition costs
Improve product/ app reviews on app stores and review sites
Looks like exactly what you need to build a successful product, right? It is.
The complete guide on Instagram hashtag strategy using social listening and analytics.
No matter what some social media gurus have to say, hashtags are still very important. If you don’t have the right set of hashtags when making a post, you potentially lose the opportunity to reach your audience – unless of course you have a massive following that dedicatedly awaits your posts every day and then engages with it.
But in times when trends and consumer behaviour, and our definition of ‘what’s cool’ changes so fast, keeping track of hashtags is becoming a task by itself.
Many social media marketers struggle with finding the right hashtags for their posts on a day to day basis. Despite having sets of hashtags ready to use in their calendars, most struggle to reach even a thousand people in their target market.
While some say it’s about the ‘quality’ of content posted, let’s be honest – the competition an organic post is up against is massive, to say the least.
As per statistics, there are 95 million photos and videos shared on Instagram every day. Add to that the ads being run on the platform by creators and businesses to reach their audience faster, and you’re standing in a long line just to be able to get to your audience.
So how do you create a hashtag strategy that gives you a chance to reach the right people at the right time?
Let’s start from the very beginning to tell you how this works.
What are Instagram hashtags?
A hashtag is basically a combination of letters, numbers and emojis preceded by the #symbol; created by leading social media channels to help categorize the content posted on them and make it more discoverable.
For example, when you click on #sociallistening on Instagram, the search page will present to you all the content posted around the topic.
Why should you use Instagram hashtags?
There’s been a lot of noise around hashtags not being relevant anymore to the Instagram algorithm. But when it comes to comparing posts with and without hashtags, it is tough to rule them out of the equation, because some of the best-performing posts without hashtags also use other parameters like trending audios, trending filters and more.
Here’s why we think your Instagram marketing plan needs to include hashtags:
1. Helps you get more exposure
Hashtags are meant to categorise posts of all formats – single images, videos, reels and carousels, as per the topic they’re covering. So when someone clicks on a hashtag or enters it in the search functionality of the social media platform, they’re able to see all the posts made around it. The simple way how hashtags work is what help you get discovered by the right people.
2. Encourages audience engagement
When you reach the right people with the right content, it helps you drive better engagement. At the same time, if you create branded hashtags for your business, the tagged posts will help you discover posts and stories around you or a topic relevant to you, with ease, and engage with the accounts. For example, if you’re a social media marketer sharing growth hacks on Instagram, we can use the hashtags to discover your content and reach out to you to add more value, or tell you a little more about our social listening tool and how it can help you grow.
3. Makes tracking competitors easy
Owing to having the same or similar product/ service and a target audience, there is a high chance you and your competitors are creating a lot of overlapping content. This may also mean using similar hashtags in your posts. When you make use of hashtags and include them in your strategy, it also makes it easy for you to track the share of voice of your competitors on Instagram and plan your next moves accordingly.
4. Helps you conduct content research
Hashtags are similar to keywords in many ways. Just as you conduct a thorough SEO keyword research to identify what your audience is looking for, the content you need to create to tap into their intent, hashtag research helps you understand what topics your Instagram marketing strategy needs to include. For example, if you sell skincare products, you need to look into what topics around the same are relevant to your audience. This can also help you discover accounts talking about skincare, identify best-performing topics and also identify concerns you may not have taken into account before.
5. Ties your online and offline campaigns together
Hashtags have the power to sync your online and offline campaigns. This is especially important for businesses that have both brick and mortar, and digital presence and are using both proactively to communicate with their audience as well as customers. For example, if someone makes a purchase from you offline, you can encourage them to use a hashtag while sharing the purchase online, to help you get discovered by more people and tap into the other benefits we listed above.
Now that you know the benefits of Instagram hashtags, let’s look into the different types of hashtags on the platform.
What are the different types of hashtags on Instagram?
Hashtags are used in different ways, to address different user intents on Instagram. That’s why when you’re creating your Instagram marketing strategy, you need to take into account all the different types and integrate them into your approach to posting content.
Location hashtags – Used to categorize posts as per places, neighborhoods, cities and countries.
Branded hashtags – Used to categorize content based on campaigns, events and other themes relevant to your brand.
Industry hashtags – Used to categorize your posts as per your business niche/ topics relevant to what your business does.
Community hashtags – Used to categorize content in such a way that it creates a group of people associated with your brand, to build a community.
Descriptive hashtags – Used to categorize your post based on the content of it; the thing you’re actually talking about.
Then there are also other types of popular Instagram hashtags on the social media platform. The nine distinct types we have found, include:
Product/ service hashtags – Words/ keywords that basically describe your product or service highlighted in the post.
Niche hashtags – These are hashtags that basically share a little more context on which industry your content fits into.
Instagram community hashtags – With its wide user base, Instagram has slowly evolved into a place where communities thrive; bringing people with similar interests together. For example, #writersofinstagram.
Seasonal hashtags – These are phrases that describe a specific event, holiday or season to categorize your post into the theme.
Daily hashtags – Words/ phrases that define every day routines of the users or something they do repetitively every day. For example, #mondayblues, #dailypost or #ootd.
Phrase hashtags – These are phrases that combine words from other hashtag types to tap into the existing communities. For example, #womenintech taps into two communities – women and tech.
Acronym hashtags – The new-age users are proactively using acronyms in their day to day communication, and they have found their way into hashtags as well. For example, #TBT for throwback thursdays.
Emoji hashtags – Emojis too are a big part of our day to day communication; and so they have made their way to social platforms as well in the form of hashtags. For example, #😍.
Too many hashtags to consider or evaluate? Well, there’s a way to find the best hashtags for your Instagram marketing strategy.
How to find the best hashtags for your Instagram marketing strategy?
There are a number of ways in which you can discover hashtags for your business or your content. While hashtag research may vary from person to person, here’s looking at some of the effective ways:
1. Using a hashtag suggesting tool
There are a number of online tools that help you find hashtags around a topic or industry that is relevant to you. You can leverage these tools to shortlist a few batches of hashtags for your Instagram marketing strategy. For example, we like using Ingramer to do our initial Instagram hashtag research.
2. Using the Instagram explore page
The next stop for you to find hashtags is the Instagram Explore page. Use the search functionality of the platform to look for posts around topics that interest you. Take a look at the top posts and then note down the hashtags they are making use of. This is also a good place to look into the accounts your content will be competing with.
3. Use Instagram’s tag search tool to check volume
The next thing you need to do is see if the hashtag you have chosen is being used actively. You don’t want to end up using a hashtag your audience is not making use of for months or hasn’t been growing with time. This is where checking the post volume becomes important – use Instagram’s tag search tool to take note of how many times a hashtag has been used; make sure you have a set of high volume, mid-volume, and new hashtags.
4. Use Instagram social listening
While the above steps are definitely effective at finding the best hashtags, it can be extremely time-consuming. Add to that the inability to continually keep track of hashtags owing to the changing trends, and it only becomes even more overwhelming. This is where using Instagram social listening tools like Radarr comes in.
The tool helps you not just track conversations around topics that are relevant to your business, on Instagram, but also proactively see how they change with time. This helps you monitor millions of accounts together, instead of having to browse through each post or analyse each account one by one.
Radarr also comes with powerful Instagram hashtag tracking and analytics that help you compare hashtags over time. This gives you an overview of what’s working and what’s not, and how a certain topic is progressing on Instagram.
Not all hashtags carry the same intent and hence, you need to be careful about the ones you put to use. This is where you should be using a sentiment analysis tool to identify the emotion posts with certain hashtags carried on Instagram. The goal is to categorize your hashtags into positive, negative, and neutral topics to talk about using a tool like Radarr sentiment analysis.
We recommend using the above approach to nail at least 5 sets of 30 hashtags each that are relevant to your campaigns. Make sure you update this set on a monthly basis to keep the hashtags that are relevant.
You can use up to 30 hashtags on a regular post on Instagram, and up to 10 hashtags in your Instagram Story.
If you try to include more hashtags in any of the content types you post on Instagram, your post will not go through and will display an error.
That means you have a considerable number of hashtags you can put to use in different content formats on Instagram. But at the same time, that does not mean you ‘should’ use as many hashtags.
While there is no ‘right number of hashtags’ recommended or found, there are a few best practices you should be following:
Make use of relevant hashtags
Try to tap into the different types of hashtags when creating batches
Create category/ topic-wise hashtag batches
Update your hashtags regularly
Experiment with the number of hashtags regularly
Measure the impact of the hashtags you use
And now, we shall address the elephant in the room.
Should you use hashtags in the Instagram post caption or comments section?
Over time, there has been a lot of conversation around where you should be adding hashtags to your post. While some say that you should add hashtags in your caption, others believe adding hashtags to comments is better.
After analysing thousands of Instagram posts, we found that using hashtags in the caption or in the comments has no impact on the performance. The only thing your approach has an impact on is the readability of the content you add in your caption.
For example, if you do not space out your caption from the hashtags, it might become too overwhelming or difficult for your audience to consume your content. This is where adding hashtags in your comments section comes into play.
Similarly, you can also use emojis, the title ‘tags’, simply a series of full stops or hyphens to separate out the caption from the hashtags.
What the most popular hashtags on Instagram in 2022?
Hashtag trends change all too rapidly. But here are some of the best Instagram hashtags to include in your 2022 Instagram marketing strategy:
#love
#design
#style
#foodie
#homedecor
#travel
#halloween
#photography
#beauty
#fall
#interior
#instagood
#interiordesign
#fashion
#inspiration
#foodstagram
#healthylifestyle
#adventure
#homedesign
#delicious
#handmade
#food
#realestate
#health
#wellness
#ootd
#architecture
#skincare
#selflove
#vegan
#selfcare
#fitness
#lifestyle
#art
#smallbusiness
#shoplocal
#motivation
#home
#photooftheday
#business
#entrepreneur
#linkinbio
#shopsmall
#nature
#instafood
#supportlocal
#luxury
#healthy
#beautiful
#foodporn
While these continue to trend on the social media platform, we do recommend using a tool like Radarr for Instagram listening, hashtag tracking and analytics to stay on top of your game.
Ready to create an Instagram hashtag strategy that helps you reach the right audience and grow?
Looking for Twitter marketing tools that can help you strategize better? This is the only list you need.
Be it keeping an eye on trending topics, becoming a part of proactive brainstorming sessions or simply tapping into some word (gossip) around your competitors in the industry, Twitter is the place to be.
But with 6,000 tweets being posted on the platform every second (on average), it’s practically impossible to tune into the right conversations at the right time, and make the most of the engagement in the threads.
That’s where having the right set of Twitter marketing tools comes into play.
Twitter marketing tools you absolutely need
We’re listing some of the best Twitter marketing tools to help you get a headstart on the platform. But feel free to explore other options available!
1. Radarr
The trick to hacking your Twitter growth is to be able to tap into ongoing conversations proactively, gauge interest and sentiment, and leverage it to plan out tailored marketing campaigns to meet your goals.
Radarr is a powerful social listening tool powered by artificial intelligence that enables you to tap into online conversations with ease. It brings to you all the relevant tweets around topics, names, industries and themes you want to proactively contribute towards, making it easy for you to keep up with what your audience is talking about.
For example, here’s how we tracked all the conversations around NFT in marketing with Radarr:
2. Radarr (sentiment analysis)
We mention the tool again because not every conversation on Twitter requires a response from you. You need to understand the true intent behind the conversations happening on the platform before joining them so that your tweets don’t negatively impact your brand image.
Radarr also comes with a sentiment analysis tool that is able to break down a tweet’s true meaning – beyond the words written. This lets you see how the person tweeting it feels towards the brand mentioned or the topic being spoken about. Using this information, you can always choose to contribute or not, or tailor your engagement approach.
3. Buffer
The second most important aspect to growing on Twitter is staying consistent. You need to consistently share valuable information with your target audience to be able to drive in the desired engagement and of course, follower growth. But managing your tweets manually can only go so far.
Buffer is a social media tool that you can use for scheduling your tweets for an entire week, month or even a year, depending on how you plan your content. It automatically publishes your tweets on the platform at optimal times (which you can edit if required), and also tracks the performance of your content pieces on the same dashboard.
4. Followerwonk
With millions of active users on the platform, finding and connecting with the right accounts can be both time-consuming and overwhelming. This is especially true if your brand is looking for influencers or active micro-bloggers for a campaign.
Followerwonk is a Twitter marketing tool that helps you optimize the time spent on this search. It lets you find users that match the parameters of your requirements based on their bios as well as the content they post and build connections with them. It also lets you categorize your followers based on interactions or even demographics, letting you measure specific audience segment growth in a strategic manner.
5. Meet Edgar
As we said before, Twitter marketing works only when you remain consistent at it and are able to contribute to the right topics at the right time. This is where not just scheduling, but smart timing of tweets also comes into play.
Meet Edgar is a Twitter marketing tool that lets you add content to different categories and assign a publishing schedule for each. This lets you target certain niches and time zones effectively without having to manage your calendar on multiple platforms. It also comes with a feature that automatically reposts certain content based on its performance to reach a wider audience.
6. Twitter Lists
We can’t exactly call this a Twitter marketing tool because it is an in-built feature of the social media platform. But at the same time, not many users are leveraging the potential this feature/ micro-tool has to offer for Twitter marketing.
Twitter Lists helps you declutter your account and really organize things on the fast-growing platform. It lets you sort users into various categories depending on the goal with which you’re connecting with them. For example, partners, affiliates, influencers, industry experts, potential customers, etc; you can call it your very own directory wherein a curated feed of tweets for that category awaits you.
7. RiteTag
While Twitter is a lot about the quality of conversations and content you push, somewhere hashtags still play a crucial role in getting you discovered. But on a platform where trending topics change at the blink of an eye, how do you know which hashtags are really effective?
RiteTag is a Twitter marketing tool that you can use to get hashtag suggestions for images and texts you intend on publishing. You can also group hashtags to compare them on the tool to see how effective they have been in reaching your target audience or driving engagement.
8. Canva
The power of visuals is the same across all social media platforms. Canva makes it easier to create graphics for Twitter marketing at scale. It comes with a number of templates that you can leverage by customizing and creating your posts. Edit out the text or change the colors, and you’re done!
Remember to find templates that are not-so-common. You don’t want to look like just another person who picked a template for their content!
9. BuzzSumo
Being consistent on Twitter doesn’t mean posting just about anything that comes to your mind. If you want it to add value to your end goal, you need to tweet about content that your audience is interested in.
BuzzSumo is a smart tool that lets you see what content performs best for absolutely any topic, and who shares it. It also gives you an insight into what content has been working best for your competitors.
10. Twinder
Imagine if you could “match” with users on Twitter and decide who you want to connect with beforehand – before you even follow them or engage with any of their tweets.
Twinder is an interesting Twitter marketing tool that offers Tinder-like functionality. It presents one account from your follow list at a time and you get to swipe right/ left based on who you want to continue following and who you’d rather unfollow. It’s almost like cleaning up your email list!
11. Nexalogy
With the growing user base on Twitter, there’s also a growing base of spam accounts, bots, and irrelevant content. All of these things can actually harm your Twitter marketing campaigns by bringing down your engagement rates.
Nexalogy helps you sift through the users, hashtags, and keywords you follow to give you a comprehensive picture of what conversations are relevant to your brand. It lets you clean out irrelevant topics and bots to find meaningful, actionable data.
12. Foller.me
If you are someone who likes to run regular competitor analysis, it’s time to bring that logical side to your Twitter marketing efforts as well. But you don’t have to manually scroll down and go through all the content they have been posting.
Foller.me lets you scan public Twitter profiles for insights. It gives you a peek into when your competitor’s followers are the most active, what their audience is talking about, and who they are engaging with the most. It also consolidates details like a user’s join date and follower ratio.
13. Trends24
Twitter trending hashtags and topics change throughout the day. Your audience segment could be talking about ramen through the wee hours of the morning, and then suddenly switch to air-fried food. The pace at which trending content changes is hard to keep track of.
Trends24 lets you draw up a timeline of what has been buzz-worthy throughout the day. It gives you an insight into what the day’s most prominent or important topic of conversation has been, and tracks trending hashtags globally.
14. Tweepi
Another Twitter marketing tool for spring cleaning your account will only equip you with the ability to truly measure your growth.
Tweepi basically scans through your Twitter account to highlight inactive or irrelevant accounts that may be following you. It also lets you analyze the value of active followers and engagement, so that you can focus on accounts that are proactively interacting with you or have more potential to.
15. Keyhole
If you’re in a competitive industry, you will need to continually keep track of your competitor’s strategies, learn from the responses their campaigns get and optimize your own.
Keyhole lets you do exactly that. It lets you create reports of your own accounts and benchmark/ compare them with those of your competitors. It also offers real-time data analysis so that you can identify ongoing trends and themes that your competitors may be cashing in on to grow.
16. Mentionmapp
Imagine if you could identify all the people, topics, events, places and more that your target audience is interested in or plans to attend. You could actually step up your marketing game and meet them on-ground, at the right time with the right message to talk about!
Mentionmapp lets you do exactly that. It lets you look into who your audience is talking to, what they’re saying, what events they intend on attending and so on. This lets you diversify your marketing efforts.
17. Twitonomy
No number of tools are enough when it comes to doing a thorough competitor analysis on Twitter. That’s why we’re adding another Twitter marketing tool that you may like to explore to analyze various profiles on the platform.
Twitonomy gives you an insight into anyone’s tweets, retweets, replies and even mentions. You also get a comprehensive view of accounts that don’t follow you, and get detailed analytics on the keywords, hashtags and URLs you have been posting.
18. Daily140
Want an easier way to keep track of everything happening in your target market? Only if someone could send you a comprehensive email of it at the end of the day?
Daily140 is a simple Twitter marketing tool that sends out an email per day, outlining the most recent likes, tweets, retweets, and follows of accounts you want to keep an eye on. If there’s a potential target account, influencer or competitor you want to continually watch, this is the tool you need!
19. Radarr (Social Media Response)
Once you get really active on Twitter, you’re going to see your audience engage with you in different ways. Some might tweet to you, while others might tweet about you and you need to keep track of it all.
Radarr’s Social Media Response enables you to monitor all the conversations happening around you and with you so that you can respond to your audience in a timely manner. You can turn positive tweets into ongoing conversations that have the potential to reach more people on the platform. Or you could use the negative tweets to show you care by responding to them in a timely manner. All from one dashboard – without having to browse through tweets manually!
20. Twitter Analytics
This one is a free Twitter marketing tool that comes as a feature of the platform itself. And is still underused, like Twitter Lists.
Make sure you constantly keep watch on your Twitter analytics. The dashboard gives you a view of how many tweets you have made, impressions and engagement you have created, what time and day have worked the best for you, and how different formats of content seem to be working for your business.
Which Twitter marketing tool is the best for you?
There are a number of Twitter marketing tools out there. Each comes with its own set of features and capabilities.
Ideally, you want to create a Twitter marketing toolkit that is multi-purpose. Having too many tools may overwhelm you or result in having to move back and forth between various solutions to tackle a segment of your Twitter marketing strategy.
This is where having an all-in-one Twitter marketing tool like Radarr comes in handy.
Radarr is a powerful social media listening, monitoring, response, and analytics tool all rolled into one dashboard. It lets you tackle identifying trending topics, hashtags, influencer accounts, respond to users, run competitor analysis, and much more.
The only guide you need to improve your social media response time.
Ever reached out to a brand on social media, only to receive radio silence from them?
Well, brands have become quick at catching up with trends and leveraging the latest social media platform. But when it comes to talking to their audience, most of them fall short.
According to research, the average social media response time for most brands lies between 24-48 hours. In fact, some even take days to respond to their audience, owing to the increasing number of conversations happening on social media.
If you have been losing out on conversations, and the opportunities that come with them, we’ve got you covered.
In this guide, we’re going to talk all about social media response times and how you can up your game this year.
What is social media response time?
Social media response time is the time you take to identify, craft an ideal reply to a comment or query posted by your target audience on any of the social platforms – be it negative or positive and then reach out to them with it.
Now if you’re wondering why responding to a comment made on social media on time matters so much, let us explain.
Why are social media response times critical?
When it comes to using social media, most businesses use them as just another channel to broadcast their ongoing promotions. Be it deals, discounts offers or their content, it’s mostly a one-sided conversation for most.
If you go into the comments section of a post on Facebook, Instagram, or any other channel, you’ll probably see a series of questions going unanswered.
These are people who have been following the brands on social media platforms, are interested in what they have to offer, and genuinely want to know more about them.
This only goes to say, that not responding to their comments, is equal to losing their interest. And that validates exactly why customer acquisition costs are also increasing by the day!
Image this scenario – you’re spending hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars to reach your target audience. You’re creating enticing content and offering to nudge an interaction from them, but when they do ‘engage’ with you, you’re not responding and they walk away.
So you start the whole cycle all over again, hoping that they’d convert this time.
That’s exactly why your social media response time matters.
But let’s take a look at some more reasons why social media response times are so critical today.
1. Your competition is increasing
No matter what industry you are in, the quality of products/ services you offer, or the deals and discounts available with you, there’s always competition.
With businesses, big and small, moving to digital, a typical consumer has the option to make the same or similar purchase from at least ten brands. Each of them wanting to outdo the other with a powerful feature set or offers to make.
That makes it important that when you have a consumer’s interest, you need to tap in and make the most of it.
2. Your competitors are always listening
Owing to the increasing competition, businesses are now investing more in social listening and competitor analysis. Contrary to earlier times, they have turned these into regular tasks instead of a one-time effort.
Now considering how 39% of consumers take to social to share a bad experience with a brand, you can be sure that your competitors are watching. It gives them the opportunity to not just reach out to this consumer and entice them with what they have to offer, but also identify your weaknesses more proactively.
3. You are risking your potential sales
As per studies, businesses are losing up to $75 billion to poor customer service in the United States alone. This only goes to show that consumers are now seeking proactive customer service and not just reactive, and your response time is indicative of what you offer.
If you still fall under reactive customer service, you can be sure of risking losing your potential sales to competitors. Like we said, they’re always listening as it is!
4. You are risking losing customers
Not just potential sales, but also your customers are at risk of walking away if your social media response rate is at an all time low.
According to a study by Gartner, customers are more likely to stick to a brand for a longer period of time if their service expectations are being met. Now the time you take to respond to their social media outreach also falls under the same – for all segments of customers – happy, sad, and neutral.
For example, a customer is really happy with the purchase they made from you. So they take to social media to share their experience. Their WOW moment is created; but when you don’t respond to this ‘moment’, you lose out on the opportunity to reinforce the value you just bought to them, and it becomes a passing thing.
Let’s take another scenario.
A customer just subscribed to your service and is not happy with it. They go to social media and share their negative experiences with their network. Your inability to respond to them on time will only result in their message reaching more people, and an impression of you being ignorant to their challenges starts to form.
If your competitors are using social listening, that’s an opportunity for them to take a swipe at your customer!
The same goes for customers who have had a neutral experience with you. They can be easily swayed towards your competitors if they see a proactive response and engagement from them.
So if you ask us, your social media response time is more important than you think!
But to get better at responding to your customers on social media and collate insights from the conversations, you need a strategy in place.
How to create a successful social media response strategy?
Your social media response strategy may vary from industry to industry, depending on the segment of customers you’re addressing. But ensuring that you have the following accounted for in your strategy will go a long way in helping you succeed:
1. Develop clear social media guidelines
If you have a team managing different social media platforms, you need to ensure that their strategies are on the same page. While most businesses have their brand guidelines in place, their response guidelines are all over the place and usually reactive in nature.
Establish clear guidelines on what posts your team should be liking, reposting or replying to. At the same time, also define the organization’s tone of voice that needs to be followed on social media to keep it consistent with your brand guidelines.
2. Establish seamless communication between departments
Regardless of how big or small your organization is, or the number of departments you’re running, you need to ensure smooth communication between all members to ensure a good social media response rate.
For example, there will be times a customer reaches out on social media with a technical issue related to your product. In this scenario, it should be easy for your social media team to reach out for technical assistance within the other department, and get a response crafted quickly.
To ensure this, you need to agree on a standardized process for the flow of information. That makes our next step even more important!
3. Bring all your social communication to one platform
If you have a presence on multiple social media platforms, you’re responsible for managing conversations on all of them.
Now juggling between platforms, switching from one interface to another for replying to messages can be messy. But more importantly, you’ll end up missing out on a lot of messages or not being able to reply to them in a timely manner.
That’s why the very next thing you need to do is get all your social communication onto one dashboard.
With a social listening tool like Radarr, you can consolidate all your communication into a single dashboard. Instead of having to jump from Facebook to Twitter, to Instagram, and so on, you get a holistic view of all the conversations in one place; enabling you to reply to them from within the dashboard.
Imagine not having to ‘open a link in a new tab’ or keep switching platforms to just respond to a comment!
Bliss.
4. Create a few ready-to-use replies
Crafting unique responses to comments and mentions is part of the personalized experience you want to offer. While for some organizations, it may make sense to reply to on-the-go replies, doing this at scale for some, might get difficult.
It’s a good idea to create a few ready-to-use templates for frequently asked questions. These are comments and mentions around things that have a standardized response and do not require personalizing.
For example, if there’s a comment around your exchange policy, it is going to be the same for everyone.
Similarly, if there are certain things that you’d want to respond to through direct messages instead of a long trail of comments, having a templatized “Hey, please provide us with some information regarding your order through DM, and we will get back to you right away!” can be a life-saver.
This is also important for things that may require approvals before being sent out. A templatized message bank is basically a collection of pre-approved responses in the tone of voice you want to follow consistently.
Here’s an example of the same:
PS. That does not mean you don’t add in a bit of personalization to your responses. Brands that leverage both templates and add a hint of personalization are the ones to win hearts!
5. Guide customers to the right channel
Different customer segments will reach out to you in different ways, and on different platforms.
If you have a channel set up specifically for offering support, you need to tell your audience and customers about it.
So that instead of them reaching out to you on Facebook through comments, you can actually get them to tweet to you instead of a profile that is exclusively created for offering customer support and service.
You can include this information in your regular communication like emails too so that it gets reinforced.
Here are some brands that have established separate support profiles:
6. Leverage chatbots to bring efficiency
Similar to templatization, certain things can be responded to with the help of automation and chatbots.
Identify comments that are repetitive, categorize them and create templated responses for the same. Then leveraging chatbots, respond to those queries ‘instantly’ without taking away time from those conversations that require a more personal approach.
7. Understand the sentiment behind conversations
Social media response isn’t just about replying to a comment or mentioning in a timely manner with the right answer. It should also take into account what someone ‘feels’ when they posted a specific comment so that you can respond in a language that appeals to their sentiment.
For example, if a customer just shared their WOW moment and is ecstatic about it, your response should be equally positive and happy.
But when a customer shares a neutral sentiment, you should be able to detect the same and reach out with a response that exudes empathy and understanding, and shows you want to really help them out.
8. Ensure you’re monitoring tagged and untagged mentions
No two customers are the same.
While someone may tag you to get a response, the other might just mention you in a passing statement they make in a caption. Both these segments of customers are important and expect the same social media response time from you.
This is where having a social listening tool like Radarr helps up your social media response rate. It helps you track brand mentions across the entire digital landscape, bringing conversations onto one dashboard to help you respond to them in a timely manner. It takes into account mentions in social media posts, online forums and communities, publishing sites, and more so that you don’t miss a beat!
9. Set benchmarks and performance KPIs
Just like your marketing strategy, you need to continually improve your social media response strategy.
The only way you can do this is by setting clear benchmarks, objectives and performance indicators for your team.
You need to keep a close watch on social metrics like the number of messages, comments and mentions received, the number of them responded to, your reply rate and your average response time in minutes.
Taking into account your resolution rate for negative remarks can also be helpful!
The goal is to let your team analyze their performance, identify loopholes and opportunities, and get better at social media responses.
How fast does your social media response time need to be?
In times when things move really fast and trends change every minute, your social media response time needs to be as quick.
While there is no set one-size-fits-all social media response time for businesses, it was found that ‘instant responses’ are the most preferred and tend to leave a more positive impression on the customers. After which comes responses that took a few minutes or hours, followed by 24 hours; but every hour added also saw a drop in the positivity a consumer attached to the business.
So the faster you respond to your audience, the better!
Want to see how you can improve your social media response time?
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