Presently, significant number of businesses around the world is creating pages in social media platforms to gain recognition and to increase sales. Digital marketers, who are always loaded with multiple social and professional networks management responsibility, always hunt for the best and efficient top social media marketing tools that could outperform their competitors. As the social media has crossed more than 1.4 billion unique users, companies are focused to launch more and more interactive apps and social media marketing tools that could ease the job of multi-network marketers.
Here is the list of top 10 social media marketing tools of 2012 to help marketing on social media platforms and are very handy.
Export.ly:Â
Export.ly is one of the most popular apps for businesses on Facebook and one of the most prominent social media marketing tool.  It is a free app with buy option and to look out for the product’s features. This app provides an Excel sheet format for viable data of a page. This data can be downloaded and referred when needed. Free account can be created from which 2 week old data and up to 250 thousand like records can be created. However, a premium version has to be bought to extent this data.
 Paper.li:
It is a flexible option to increase customer engagement on Facebook and on Twitter too. Paper.li helps you create custom newspapers in minutes which can be auto updated and helps your visitors get many updates in image format. This kind of appearance helps users easily understand most out of the content and they also can subscribe to these newspapers. Though, this social media marketing tool doesn’t help to increase your social community but its quite useful to keep audience engage with your content on regular basis. Also, Various social media mareting tool could also be easily integrated with this for optimal performance of this social media marketing tool.
 Friends.Skyttle.com:
This is another free social media marketing tool specially designed for Facebook that can be used with pages, groups and even individuals. This allows you to monitor activities and conversations in a very effectual way. This helps in analysis of feelings of users. The data is represented in a graphical format for better understanding.
Pledge:
Many of us may not rate this as a social media marketing tool but its quite useful, indirectly, to earn respect and focus among social media users. If you are running a page for social cause or something similar, Pledge can be a useful tool to have. It allows you to design custom pledge depending upon the nature of cause. It works pretty much like the traditional pledges to motivate youngsters. Once you make pledges, users can take action and show their commitment for it. They can even share these pledges with the friends and motivate them to join the cause too. The pledges can be targeted to any section of the audience.
Crowdbooster:
This is one of the top rated social media marketing tool widely adopted by digital marketers. When many tools offer you the detailed analysis of the Facebook page, Crowdbooster gives a whole new definition to in-depth analysis. This app can help you measure and optimize the social media marketing campaigns through analysis of each update. The representation is in graphical form to help you get a clear picture of how visitors took a latest update. Click-through, replies, likes and other such parameters help work on effectiveness.
 HyperAlert:
 
HyperAlert is a slightly unique tool for those who get little time to study data on Facebook pages. If most of your time is spent on small gadgets and mobile phones, this app will generate email reports of posts, comments and updates to know what’s happening. It is a kind of slow app but you won’t consider that being busy and all.
HootSuite:
HootSuite is well known app that could be easily found on any Digital media marketer responsible to control multiple social media channels of a brand simultaneously. It not only allows to optimize your marketing performance but also help to post your content on multiple networks and groups by a single click – no matter how many you have. Besides, appreciable features like “Scheduling”, “Analytics”, “Monitoring”, “Streams” and few more make it much more adoptable for marketers.
After the recent induction of 2 new features – Auto Scheduling and Team Management – HootSuite has become the most lovable baby for corporate too. While “Auto Scheduling” allows to schedule your update for the time when your network gaze the optimum attention, Team Management feature is meant to create various teams in your organisation and allocate respective networks.
Availability of Mobile App on Android and iOS platform makes it much accessible and useful among marketers who always want to carry their marketing task on the go.
Wildfire:
Want to run a contest on Facebook? This is an application that easily enables marketers to create Facebook marketing campaigns like contests, coupon giveaways and user-generated content promotions. The marketer can build the contest using the Wildfire app, and the contest is then accessible through a tab on the marketer’s Facebook fan page. The free version of the app does not exist, pricing starts at just $5 per campaign (plus $.99 for each day the campaign runs) for the most basic package and increases depending on the features and functionality.
Networked Blogs:
Have a corporate blog and looking for an easy way to connect it to your Facebook page? Networked Blogs is a Facebook blog directory. By setting up an account, you have the option of automatically posting your blog articles to your Facebook business page. Additionally, you will be included in the Networked Blogs directory, which is another method for your blog content to be found online and its a free application.
Facebook Social Plugins:
Launched recently, Facebook’s own social plugins have managed to fly under the radar for many marketers. Facebook used its own API to give businesses and website owners a way to facilitate Facebook engagement from their own websites or blogs. Two of the most powerful social plugins are the Like Button and the Recommendations Plugin. Both of these free widgets allow a marketer to drive more traffic by sharing content through Facebook.
Social media marketing isn’t right for every business or situation. However, it is important to check social marketing efforts to ensure they are properly resourced and supported.
