5 Awesome Online Tools for Social Marketing

Awesome and Free Tools for Social Media Marketing

You know Facebook and Twitter can serve as excellent platforms for marketing your business online, but they're not the only ways to encourage conversation about your brand, products and services. Many companies engage in social media with little understanding of the impact it has on their business. Are your tweets seen? When and by whom? The more information you can glean, the more you can put your efforts to good use. And the more niche opportunities you can find to sway customers toward your brand, the better your chances of long-term social marketing success.  To help you along, here are five awesome and free online tools for social marketing.

1. Mention

Mention has both free and paid plans, but the free plan is an excellent place to start. What does it do? It's kind of like Google News Alerts on steroids – it searches blogs, news outlets, social media, and other sources for mentions of your brand and other targeted topics. See statistics and, best of all, monitor your social world in real-time so you can respond as the conversation takes place, rather than hours or even days later.

2. LSIKeywords

Content is king, and if you want to show up in others' topic feeds you have to know which keywords to use on your blogs, websites and social media posts. LSIKeywords helps you do all of those by analyzing documents for latent semantic keywords you can work into your posts (and other content) to help your brand get found by both humans and search engines.

3. Social Mention

Similar to Mention in that it monitors social media trends, but it also gives you data regarding current sentiment toward a topic, passion, strength and reach. You can also locate the top users and sources that mention your topic, thereby allowing you to go straight to the source and join the conversation with relevance.

4. Board Reader

Forums host some of the most underrated communities in term of social value, and many of your competitors likely do not tap into forum marketing at all. You can use Board Reader to find forums (boards) that pertain to your topic, then join the conversation to boost your online reputation.

5. Followerwonk

You tweet and tweet, but what good is it doing you? Followerwonk answers that question with deep, niche Twitter analytics. You can also search Twitter bios, compare and track users, and analyze your followers.

What free social marketing tools do you use? Share them with us in the comments!