edX Online

Social media marketing tools

Written by: James M. Tobin, Edited by: Marie Custodio Collazo

Published: May 12, 2025

Social media connects businesses with consumers in powerful ways. Companies have made major investments in their social media marketing strategies, with marketers using purpose-built tools for tapping into social media's vast potential for driving brand recognition and customer loyalty.

Discover leading examples of social media marketing tools across multiple categories and use cases.

Basic toolbox

As a starting point, businesses often focus on discoverability, branding their online presence, and analyzing the results of their online marketing strategies.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing improve discoverability by making the business more visible in search engine results. Web design and social media management tools create a consistent and branded digital presence. Analytics tools dig deep into the numbers, generating insights into key performance indicators (KPIs) like engagement and conversion rates.

Scheduling tools

Scheduling tools help digital marketers manage their content publishing needs. Professionals use them to:

  • Post to multiple platforms and profiles through a single action
  • Schedule posts and content publication for times when data indicates customers are especially engaged
  • Create long-term content marketing plans

Popular examples include Sprout, CoSchedule, and Planable.

Analytics tools

Analytics tools collect performance data related to your online marketing efforts and present it in dashboard format. Marketers can then dig into specific KPIs to identify both the strengths and shortcomings of their strategies.

Widely used analytics tools include Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and HubSpot.

Engagement tools

Engagement tools help businesses open and maintain dialogues with existing or potential customers. They also help businesses build online followings, handle messages and requests, and create a consistent customer service experience.

Social media tools with strong engagement features include Sprout, HootSuite, Buffer, Tailwind, and Zoho Social.

Listening tools

Social media offers consumers a direct path to providing a business with feedback and areas for improvement. Listening tools analyze these user inputs and help companies take strategic action based on extracted insights.

General listening tools with large user bases include Brandwatch, Brand24, BuzzSumo, and Keyhole.

Monitoring tools

Casual observers often conflate social media monitoring tools with listening tools. However, monitoring tools serve a different purpose: They focus specifically on rounding up what people are saying, rather than why they're saying it or how those insights could be put to use.

Examples of popular social media monitoring tools include Agorapulse, Rival IQ, Mention, and Hearsay.

Automation tools

Some aspects of social media marketing involve routine and repetitive tasks. Automation tools take care of these, freeing up time for human personnel to deal with more creative and productive tasks.

Leading automation tools include Buffer, Workflow, Sendible, Later, and Tailwind.

Marketing tools

Digital marketers also use software suites designed for specific social media services. These tools help businesses connect with customers on the platforms and networks they use the most.

Meta

Meta's major social media networks include Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The company offers free marketing tools to its business users, but companies can also use third-party services that work well on Meta platforms.

Examples include:

  • Facebook: Marketers use tools like Canva, Desygner, and Manychat as supplements to Meta's native marketing tools.
  • Instagram: Widely used third-party services for Instagram marketing include LeeTags, VSCO, Iconosquare, and Gleam.
  • Threads: EmbedSocial, Vista, and Social Champ rank among the leading providers of marketing tools that translate well to the Threads environment.

X (formerly Twitter)

Formerly known as Twitter, X supports many different analytics, publishing, scheduling, content creation, engagement, and affiliate marketing tools. Marketers often prefer tools with features that save time on X while improving on the platform's native capabilities.

Some of the options meeting that description include Hootsuite, Sprout, Later, Sprinklr, and Buffer.

YouTube

Like Meta, YouTube offers native marketing tools to businesses and content creators. You can boost their capabilities by using browser extensions, statistics trackers, SEO tools, and market intelligence assistants like TubeBuddy, VidIQ, Social Blade, and Tubics. These platforms and services have features specifically designed for marketing video content and YouTube channels.

LinkedIn

This job search and career-building platform is popular with individual professionals seeking to build their online followings and with employers and recruiters looking to fill job vacancies. Companies also use LinkedIn to generate sales leads.

Categorized by purpose, popular LinkedIn tools include:

  • Recruitment tools: Corporate recruiters use tools like Crystal and Aeroleads to screen and validate candidate profiles when seeking matches for specific vacancies.
  • Outreach tools: Services like Expandi help individuals and businesses automate their LinkedIn outreach initiatives.
  • Lead generation: Businesses use tools like Dux-Soup, Leadfeeder, eLinkPro, and Zopto to generate sales leads on LinkedIn.

Snapchat

Snapchat's marketing tools are mainly designed to encourage interaction and increase brand awareness. To these ends, companies can access the platform's native Snapchat Business Manager and Snapchat Insights services. These tools offer analytics, tagging, product marketing, and augmented reality features known to drive user engagement.

Explore social media marketing with edX

Upgrade your toolbox with edX's online courses, certificates, and degrees covering social media and other essential digital marketing topics.

Frequently asked questions about social media marketing tools

What are the most popular social media marketing tools?

It depends on the platform, but popular general-purpose social media marketing toolkits include Buffer, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, HubSpot, and Sprout. Marketers also use social media tools designed for specific purposes, such as data analytics, post scheduling, user engagement, market listening, and task automation.

What is the most used social media platform?

Comparative analyses indicate that Facebook's active user base is the largest of any single social media platform in the world. On February 1, 2024, Meta reported that Facebook attracted 3.07 billion monthly active users as of year-end 2023.

Which platform is best for social media marketing?

It depends on your marketing objectives and target audience, but platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and X tend to draw the most attention from marketers. Each of these platforms hosts a very large number of active monthly users.

Skill Development
Career
Digital Marketing

Share this article