Jan 25 2024
What Is Social Media Automation? Top Tools and Tips

Table of Contents

If you’re like us, you prefer fun jobs over tedious tasks. (Actually, if you were into tedium, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place.) That’s why you’re going to love social media automation tools.

Social media automation tools allow you to automate boring, time-consuming tasks so you can get back to the fun stuff, like creating stunning content.

In this blog, you’ll learn how to automate tasks on social media with tools that help you improve response time, reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks, and give you the insights you need to create more engaging content.

Bonus: Get a free social media strategy template to quickly and easily plan your own strategy. Also use it to track results and present the plan to your boss, teammates, and clients.

What is social media automation?

Social media automation is the process of using tools or software to manage repetitive tasks on social media platforms, like posting content or producing reports, without manual labor.

Tools that automate post-scheduling, basic customer service, and analytics reports can save social media managers valuable time for higher-priority tasks.

What can you automate in social media marketing?

You can automate many (but not all!) tedious social media marketing tasks. And don’t worry—we’ll get to the software tools that can take care of these tasks for you at the bottom of this post.

Some aspects of content creation

Let’s face it: we can’t always be the Vincent Van Gogh-esque creative geniuses we often are. Sometimes, we’re more like Vincent Van No. But, if you need a hand brainstorming content ideas, you can always turn to a generative AI tool to help you out.

Look, you can (and should) automate text-based content, visuals, and videos using generative AI. But you absolutely need to review and edit AI-generated results. AI isn’t perfect (none of us are), but it’ll give you that get-up-and-Gogh boost you need.

ChatGPT prompt brainstorm a social media campaign for December

Source: ChatGPT

Social scheduling and publishing

Switching between different social accounts to publish multiple times per day can take up a lot of time. Especially because the best time to post and content best practices vary by platform.

Automatic social media posting saves time and increases efficiency without reducing content quality. Once your content is locked and loaded, you can use automated social media posting to schedule the appropriate pieces and post times on each network. Then sit back, relax, and let the robots take your posts over the finish line.

Basic customer service

The Hootsuite 2023 social trends report saw a massive dip in online customer satisfaction rates. But why are people so unhappy? Once the world officially reopened (bye-bye COVID), business owners stopped paying attention to online customer service.

So, what does this mean for your business? There’s a gaping hole in the ecommerce market, one you can fill with better customer service. And one way to do that is to use customer interaction automation.

You don’t need a human team member to answer common questions like “What are your hours?” and “Do you have any coupons available?” Likewise, you can automate service requests related to package tracking, refund status, and other issues tied to your CRM.

Conversational AI tools can handle more basic work without drastically affecting your business’s bottom line.

WestJet virtual assistant answers to upcoming flight and travel related questions

Data collecting

Automated data collection makes analytical reporting and decision-making a lot easier. Luckily, social media marketing automation was practically built to take care of the tedious number crunching you truly hate.

Automated data collection can include things like:

  • Platform-specific social data, like the best time to post on Instagram vs. TikTok
  • Post engagement stats, like likes, comments, shares, and more
  • Keyword or hashtag tracking, which allows you to see exactly what people are saying about your brand, themes related to your industry, and your competitors

If you find the right tool, you can even automate your reporting, generating client-ready dashboards and reports with just a few clicks.

Hootsuite Facebook pages Best times and days to publish graph

Source: Hootsuite

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Common mistakes when automating social media marketing

DON’T put all of your faith in your tools

A poor builder blames his hammer when the house falls down. When you publish a “Don’t worry, be happy” post the same day as a global tragedy, the same goes for you.

tl;dr? Don’t set it and forget it unless you want your house to topple. Automating social media marketing doesn’t mean you flip a switch and walk away.

It’s important to monitor any automated outputs, including your publishing schedule. That way, you can make any adjustments required in real time.

World-changing crises happen all the time on social media. A poorly timed post can make your brand look out of touch or tactless.

DON’T use spammy bots

Just because some tools exist doesn’t mean you should use them. Remember: use bots for good, not evil. Embrace bots that help improve customers’ lives and your own.

AI tools that speed up customer service response times? Great. An inbox to manage DMs, comments, and tags from multiple networks in one place? Excellent.

But bots that automatically comment on or like social posts? Not such a good idea. They can cause lasting damage to your relationships with your audience. They can also land you in hot water with the social networks themselves.

DON’T cross-post without customizing

Cross-posting the same content to multiple social media accounts might seem like the easiest option. But it’s certainly not the most effective.

Some tools (including social media platforms) allow you to automatically cross-post to other platforms. Don’t be tempted.

Social platforms have different image display ratios, character count limits, and social features. Audiences on those platforms have different expectations, demographics, and word preferences. It’s highly unlikely that your link-heavy Facebook post, for example, will perform as well on linkless Instagram.

Instead, take the time to adjust your message for each platform’s audience. At the bare minimum, you’ll want to review:

  • User handles, which can vary between platforms
  • Image specs, like file type, size, cropping, etc.
  • Text, including platform character count and platform-specific language
  • Hashtags, including number and usage

Instead of cross-posting, use automated social media publishing at set times to use your time most efficiently.

4 top social media automation tools

1. Hootsuite

Number one on our list is Hootsuite (what, are you surprised?). Hootsuite provides a comprehensive social media management platform that offers a wide range of automation features. We’ve got so many features, in fact, that we broke them out one by one below.

Hootsuite streamlines your social media marketing efforts, making it easier for you to manage all of your social accounts from one place. In our humble opinion, it’s the best social media automation tool.

Price: Free trial, followed by a tiered paid subscription starting at $99/month.

This tool is best for: Medium-to-large teams, social media marketers, and content creators.

Here’s a breakdown of Hootsuite’s key automation tools and why you should care about them.

OwlyWriter AI

OwlyWriter AI is Hootsuite’s AI-driven, social-media-specific content-generating tool. Use it to save major time generating and testing social media captions.

OwlyWriter AI Instagram caption generator

Key features:

  • Rapid content generation. Create engaging and relevant social media posts in seconds, saving you time and creative energy.
  • Instant insights. Automatically identify and repurpose your top-performing posts—without manually reviewing your past content.

Best Time to Publish

Timing is crucial; you want to post when your audience is happily browsing. Hootsuite’s Best Time to Publish feature analyzes, optimizes, and automates your posting schedule.

Best Time to Publish feature on Hootsuite

Key features:

  • Data analysis. Analyzes your audience’s online behavior to determine the ideal times for posting.
  • Improved visibility. Automatically schedule content for maximum reach and engagement. Increases the chances of your content being seen by your target audience.

Analytics

Most social platforms offer native analytics tools. But it can be a huge drain on your time to analyze each platform separately and compile manual reports.

Hootsuite Analytics makes this process a lot simpler. Create custom boards that show you an at-a-glance view of the metrics you want to track. Then, use automated reporting to export and send data to clients, managers, or yourself without lifting a finger.

Once you’ve set up your reports, you can measure your content performance as often as you like. You’ll get real-time updates and high-level overviews for quarterly or annual reviews.

Hootsuite Analytics brand awareness page impressions and reach

Key features:

Social Advertising

Hootsuite Social Advertising allows you to test hundreds of Facebook and Instagram ads and automatically reallocate your budget to the best-performing ones. It ensures you’re targeting the right audiences with the right metrics for maximum ROI.

You can automatically boost your budget or even start a new campaign based on pre-set triggers. This tool will even provide daily automatic ad performance recommendations.

Hootsuite Social Advertising also syncs your CRM or email list to your Facebook ad account, so you always have up-to-date custom audiences.

Hootsuite Social Advertising amount spent and post organic impressionsKey features:

  • Campaign management. Create, launch, and manage social ad campaigns from one platform.
  • Targeting options. Reach your ideal audience through advanced targeting capabilities.
  • Budget control. Set and monitor ad budgets to optimize your ROI.

Inbox

Hootsuite Inbox allows you to manage conversations and mentions across all of your social platforms from one dashboard. You can also use the Saved Replies feature to address common interactions automatically.

Key features:

  • Unified inbox. View and respond to messages from multiple social media platforms in one place.
  • Workflow management. Assign tasks to team members and streamline your response process.
  • Real-time engagement. Enhance customer service by quickly addressing queries and feedback.
  • Customer feedback. Automatically trigger customer satisfaction surveys.

Hootsuite Inbox insert reply

2. Meta Business Suite

If you primarily use Meta platforms, Meta Business Suite provides some great tools to help you automate your social media posts, Stories, ads, and analytics.

Just a note: You can create and schedule posts in the Business Suite, but only for your Meta accounts. If you’re a content creator or marketer on LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, or Twitter, you may want to use third-party social media automation software.

Meta Business Suite is a good tool for smaller teams who are only on Instagram and Facebook. If you’re a larger team with needs like content approval workflows, then you should consider Hootsuite.

Meta Business Suite Manage Facebook page and Instagram for Wairco brand

Source: Meta Business Suite

Key features

  • Scheduling. Scheduling capabilities for Facebook and Instagram
  • Reporting. Analytics for Facebook and Instagram
  • Media. Free music library

Price: Free

This tool is best for: Smaller teams only on Facebook or Instagram

3. Brandwatch

This tool helps automate social listening by analyzing social conversations in real-time. It provides alerts of spikes in social conversation or sentiment. This automatically informs you of potential crises or viral hits before they happen.

As far as automation tools for social media go, Brandwatch is like your resident watchdog. You set up a few different listening streams, then watch it work for you.

Oh, and best of all, this tool can integrate with Hootsuite.

Brandwatch Insights total mentions and mention volume over time

Source: Brandwatch for Hootsuite

Key features:

  • Instant analysis. Real-time analysis of social conversations offers up-to-the-minute insights into what’s happening in your industry or among your audience.
  • Alerts. Receive alerts for spikes in social conversation or shifts in sentiment, allowing you to proactively address potential crises or capitalize on viral trends.
  • Integration with Hootsuite. Seamlessly integrate Brandwatch with Hootsuite, bettering your social media management capabilities.

Price: Brandwatch offers various pricing tiers to suit the needs of different businesses, from small startups to large enterprises.

This tool is best for: Brandwatch is ideal for businesses looking to automate social listening, monitor their online reputation, and stay ahead of trends and potential issues in real time.

4. ChatGPT

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can help with social automation in more ways than you think. Yes, this powerful tool will write captions for you, but it can also help you brainstorm content calendars, rewrite old content or strategies with a new lens, and kickstart your content ideation.

One small disclaimer: ChatGPT is a tool that needs to be trained. You’ll likely have to spend some time figuring out which prompts will work for your brand. It also doesn’t do much for big social pain points like automatic posting, changing formats, and understanding the algorithm. So, you’ll have to keep a keen eye on the outputs.

ChatGPT write a social media calendar for Hootsuite for the month of November

Source: ChatGPT

Key features:

  • Personalization. You can use it to tailor your content to your brand’s voice and style, ensuring consistency, but it does take some experimenting with different prompts.
  • Brainstorming. Receive fresh perspectives, new angles, and ideas for your social needs.
  • Instant output. Immediate results can save you time and effort.

Price: Free! Paid accounts start at $20/month.

This tool is best for: Content creators, social media marketers, and teams of all sizes.

Save time managing your social media and get your content seen using Hootsuite. Schedule and publish content, engage your audience, and measure the performance of all your accounts, across multiple networks—all from a single dashboard. Try it free today.

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With files from Christina Newberry.

Do it better with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay on top of things, grow, and beat the competition.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jan 23 2024
10 Best LinkedIn Marketing Tools for Faster Growth

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While many social networks saw business use decline in 2023, LinkedIn saw 5% business use growth. (Second only to the 16% business use growth of TikTok.)

Hootsuite’s Social Trends Report finds that change in usage is driven by a renewed focus on ROI. LinkedIn is the platform of choice for many businesses looking to make deals and recruit top talent. Especially those focused on B2B sales.

LinkedIn marketing tools make it easier to build an effective brand presence on the platform. They also help you understand the results of your efforts. That’s important for tracing everything back to that critical ROI.

Let’s take a look at how to incorporate LinkedIn marketing tools into your social strategy.


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What’s the purpose of LinkedIn marketing tools?

Before we dive into our list, let’s talk about why you might want to use LinkedIn marketing tools in the first place.

Scheduling content

Scheduling content on LinkedIn allows you to focus your energy on creating quality posts, articles, and job listings. This is a better use of your skills than the manual labor of creating posts on the fly.

Creating your content in batches allows you to:

  • Star focused on the themes central to your marketing strategy and goals,
  • streamline campaigns, and
  • get feedback on post drafts from team members and stakeholders.

When you choose a LinkedIn scheduling tool that also allows you to schedule content for other platforms, the benefits increase exponentially.

Hootsuite Planner calendar scheduled social posts

With a unified view, you can develop synergies throughout your content plan. This saves time switching between tabs. It also lets you check that you’re spacing your content appropriately for connections who follow you in more than one place.

Automated messaging

This is an area where you have to be careful, as most automated messaging tools are prohibited on LinkedIn. That’s because LinkedIn wants to encourage real connections between real people and companies. If you use blackhat strategies to game the system, you risk having your account restricted or even shut down. (Just don’t use them at all — that’s our strong recommendation.)

However, there are some legit tools you can use to automate messaging tasks on LinkedIn, completely risk-free. These are primarily tools that help you and your team manage, respond to, and streamline incoming messages. For example, tools that route incoming messages to the most appropriate person on your team, or that allow you to save templated responses to common inquiries.

To get into the finer details, check out our post on LinkedIn automation tools.

Performance insights

Measuring your performance on LinkedIn is critical to making that performance better. Improving your LinkedIn strategy involves studying both your best and your worst content. Learning from past performance shows what you should do more of, and which strategies you should leave behind.

LinkedIn brand awareness page impressions and reach

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Again, it’s helpful to analyze your results in the full context of your overall social strategy. Sure, LinkedIn will likely always be your prime social platform for recruiting — but it is also a valuable social marketing platform. Understanding how LinkedIn results compare to those on other platforms helps you understand how best to allocate your limited social marketing resources.

Generating more leads

As any good salesperson knows, you always need more leads to fill your funnel. And LinkedIn is the top platform for B2B marketers worldwide. So any tools that can connect you with more leads on LinkedIn and help your social selling efforts are worth your attention.

LinkedIn lead generation tools help ramp up your marketing efforts by ensuring you reach the right people (e.g. decision makers who can purchase your product or service) at the right time. This is the best way to maximize ROI over the long run.

Audience and competitor research

The best LinkedIn marketing tools help you improve your content marketing strategy. Detailed audience and competitor research are key here.

Odds are, your content is not going to go viral on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn algorithm is actually designed to stop content from going viral. That’s because LinkedIn is focused on connecting users with professional advice and expertise that is specifically relevant to them.

Put another way, the LinkedIn algorithm is designed to show people the content they are most likely to engage with. This differs from passive content consumption. That means early engagement signals are even more important on LinkedIn than on other social platforms.

The catch is that LinkedIn mainly values thoughtful comments from relevant people. These are worth far more than likes, shares, or ultra-brief comments. Audience and competitor research is the best way to understand what your target audience wants, and to learn what’s working best for others in your niche.

All of this can help to extend reach and engagement, which then reinforce each other in a virtuous circle.

10 best LinkedIn marketing tools for 2024

1. Hootsuite

We’re listing Hootsuite as a single LinkedIn marketing tool here. But in reality it’s a suite of social media management tools that help to enhance your entire LinkedIn marketing strategy. It can help with all the elements listed above — and a few more.

Hootsuite may be best known for its scheduling capabilities. And those are certainly helpful for saving time when sharing content on LinkedIn – either in isolation or as part of a larger social campaign. But perhaps the most useful feature of the Hootsuite scheduler for LinkedIn is its built-in recommendations for the best times to post based on your content goals.

Hootsuite graph best times and days to publish on LinkedIn

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In terms of messaging, Hootsuite Inbox helps you stay on top of both public and private LinkedIn messages by corralling everything in one social inbox. You can use automated filtering to assign messages to the right team members. This shows both followers and the algorithm that you’re active and engaged.


Reduce response time (and your workload)

Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.

Book a Demo

Audience and competitor research is another area where Hootsuite really shines. Using Hootsuite Analytics, you can build an audience profile with interests and behaviors from across your social profiles. Then use the built-in benchmarking tools to gain insights about your industry as a whole, or even specific competitors.

Map your findings back to your own specialist areas of knowledge to create LinkedIn marketing content and develop a brand voice that speaks directly to your most valuable followers. When organic content performs well, boost your best posts with just a couple of clicks. Take it all a step further by using Hootsuite’s built-in AI hashtag generator to find the growth-oriented hashtags that are most likely to maximize your LInkedIn audience.

new post on Hootsuite AI hashtag suggestions OwlyWriter

Or, use OwlyWriter AI to generate automatic captions when you share curated content on LinkedIn. Show both humans and robots that you are adding value and perspective to everything you post.

Finally, track your results and refine your strategy in real time with custom reports that come automatically to your inbox, or create easy-to-read reporting presentations for multiple stakeholder groups with a few clicks.

Pro tip: LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms on which to make use of an employee advocacy strategy. Hootsuite Amplify has you covered there.

2. Native LinkedIn marketing tools

LinkedIn Sales Navigator home page with profile and highlights

Source: LinkedIn

Several paid and free LinkedIn marketing tools are built right into the social network itself. Some of the most important native LinkedIn tools for marketing are:

  • LinkedIn’s native scheduler: Post up to 90 days in advance using your laptop or Android device. For full details, check out our blog on how to schedule posts on LinkedIn.
  • LinkedIn native Page and Profile analytics: Track visitors, followers, competitors, and content effectiveness. Premium LInkedIn users get additional profile analytics data. Read more about LinkedIn analytics tools.
  • Sponsored Messaging: This paid solution can help you reach new contacts and bring in leads.
  • Sales Navigator: Another paid LinkedIn tool to help sales professionals save leads, get relevant alerts, and reach an extended network.

3. Crystal

Crystal CRM enrichment dashboard

Source: Crystal

Crystal is an AI-powered tool that uses publicly available data on your prospects to collect information about their personality. It then extrapolates insights that help you understand their communication style and purchase motivations, as well as how they make decisions.

On the marketing side, Crystal integrates with your CRM to pull personality data that leads to better campaign and message targeting on LinkedIn.

All of this allows your sales and marketing teams to build stronger connections using LinkedIn. Accessed through a Chrome extension, you can use this tool with public LinkedIn profiles as well as LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

4. Zopto

Zopto campaigns actions overview

Source: Zopto

Zopto allows you to import lists from your CRM to create targeted campaigns on LInkedIn. You can also use Zopto to build new, advanced prospect lists and filter them using a wide range of factors. It includes a LinkedIn scheduler.

Zopto uses a dedicated IP address, messaging scale-up, and randomization to simulate natural behavior. They say, “our platform works seamlessly with LinkedIn’s policies, ensuring your outreach is both effective and ethical!”

5. Canva

Canva LinkedIn templates design

Source: Canva

You might not think about design as much for your LinkedIn posts as you do for your content on other social platforms. But great-looking images are key to stopping the scroll on LinkedIn, too. Canva has a collection of free Linkedin post templates to make sure your posts start off on the right foot.

You can also design your LinkedIn company page or profile banner with Canva, helping you look more professional. (Looking professional is what LinkedIn is all about, after all.)

Great news for Hootsuite users: You can access Canva directly within Hootsuite to add some flair to your LinkedIn posts without switching tabs.

6. 6sense

6sense add filters with criteria

Source: 6sense

6sense is a great solution for those looking for LinkedIn B2B marketing tools They use potential buyers’ “digital breadcrumb trails” to uncover buying signals. This helps you better understand your audience so you can create targeted LinkedIn campaigns that speak directly to your prospects’ pain points and reach them at the right point in the purchasing cycle.

6sense integrates with LinkedIn, so there’s no need to worry about running afoul of the LinkedIn user agreement. It’s all about adding insights to your existing LinkedIn relationships and campaigns so you can target the right people at the right time.

7. B2Linked

B2Linked platform specific campaigns related to Information Technology

Source: B2Linked

B2Linked is a certified LinkedIn partner focused on helping businesses with LinkedIn ad campaigns. LinkedIn is all they do, so they have platform-specific expertise. They use micro-segmentation, advanced ad bidding, and A/B testing, among other strategies, to maximize ROI. Their LinkedIn ad reporting is also top-notch.

Their tools for LinkedIn marketing are only accessible through an account management package, so this is not a cheap option. (Packages start at $2,000/month.) But for those who want to really focus on LinkedIn marketing and advertising, it may be worth the investment.

8. Terminus

Terminus campaign overview graph with top engagement by type

Source: Terminus

Terminus is another certified LinkedIn marketing partner focused on LinkedIn ads. Their tools can help with account matching, targeting, and reporting for all LinkedIn ad types. Terminus connects to your CRM and can be used to coordinate multi-channel ad campaigns. (It’s not exclusive to LinkedIn.)

9. Sprout Social

Sprout Social all messages

Source: Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another tool that integrates with LinkedIn and does not raise user agreement concerns.

Sprout allows you to schedule LinkedIn content and analyze performance. There are useful targeting filters and collaboration tools, too.

See how Sprout Social compares to Hootsuite.

10. Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup funnel flow all campaigns graph

Source: Dux-Soup

Dux-Soup connects your CRM with LinkedIn so you can grow your LInkedIn network while centralizing prospect data and generating more leads.

It helps you find relevant LInkedIn profiles, send connection requests, and then follow up automatically with InMails and messages. Building your LinkedIn network creates new leads for your sales team. Pairing this with an employee advocacy strategy can help build an even larger network that maximizes your LinkedIn marketing collateral.

A warning, though: Dux-Soup’s LinkedIn marketing automation tools may conflict with the LinkedIn user agreement. Make sure you understand how it works and what you’re getting into.

Easily manage your LinkedIn Page and all your other social channels using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can schedule and share content (including video), reply to comments, and engage your network. Try it free today.

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Easily create, analyze, promote and schedule LinkedIn posts alongside your other social networks with Hootsuite. Get more followers and save time.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jan 10 2024
AI Marketing Tools To Help You Win in 2024

Top AI marketing tools by category

Forgive us for using a technical term, but it’s absolutely bananas how far AI has come in the past year. And while some people are worried that the robots are here to take our jobs, we’re convinced they’re here to help us do our jobs better—especially when it comes to AI marketing tools.

If you are a small team or solopreneur wanting to scale your reach and analytics capability, AI marketing tools can be a game-changer. With the right software, companies with minimal resources can compete with the big boys.

AI marketing software can help draft content, generate SEO-friendly social captions, repurpose a blog post into a video, suggest an ad strategy, and so much more. Seriously, just imagine what your marketing team could accomplish with a little (digital) helping hand.

Ready to step up your social media marketing with a little help from artificial intelligence? Read on for our master list of the best AI marketing tools for 2024.

Bonus: Download this free cheat sheet with 250 professionally engineered ChatGPT prompts that will help you be more productive at work and in your daily life. We’ve included specific prompts for over 25 industries and professions!

25 best AI marketing tools for 2024

A quick caveat before we dive into our list of the best AI marketing tools for 2024: the “best” software for you is going to be totally dependent on your social media goals.

So before you lean into the world of automation and adopt every tool here, take a minute to think about what parts of your current process could use scaling or streamlining.

AI marketing tools for social media

1. Hootsuite

Managing social media = 25 jobs. Creating content, posting to multiple networks, learning about your audience, providing customer support, reporting wins to your boss… It’s a lot.

Hootsuite's Compose screen with the auto publish feature highlighted

Hootsuite can help you do all of that (and more) from one user-friendly dashboard that works with Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.

With Hootsuite, you get:

  • An easy-to-use social media scheduler
  • Personalized recommendations for best times to post
  • Intuitive analytics for all your social accounts
  • One inbox for DMs and comments from every network
  • Industry benchmarks and competitor analytics
  • Simple social media monitoring tools
  • Integrations with all of your other tools, including Canva, Hubspot, Shopify, Mailchimp, Microsoft Dynamics, and 200+ more

But hey, this is a story about AI marketing tools… and Hootsuite absolutely delivers there, too.

OwlyWriter is built on ChatGPT’s pioneering language model, but it also includes all of our winning content formulas that took over 14 years of research to develop.


Craft perfect posts in seconds

OwlyWriter AI instantly generates captions and content ideas for every social media network. It’s seriously easy.

Start free 30-day trial

OwlyWriter can:

  • Write a new social media caption in a specific tone of voice
  • Write a post based on a link (e.g., a blog post or a product page)
  • Generate post ideas based on a keyword or topic (and then write posts expanding on the idea you like best)
  • Identify and repurpose your top-performing posts
  • Create relevant captions for upcoming holidays
OwlyWriter AI (an AI marketing tool) generating Instagram captions

Try OwlyWriter AI for free

If you’re fine with writing your own captions but need a little help generating relevant hashtags, Hootsuite’s AI hashtag suggestion tool is a game-changer.

We all know hashtags are kind of a secret weapon when it comes to expanding your reach, but coming up with the right hashtags on your own can be…tricky.

Hootsuite’s AI suggestion tool is built right into the Compose window, so it’s super easy to generate smart hashtags while you write and schedule your content. Our AI technology analyzes both your caption and the images you’ve uploaded to suggest the most relevant hashtags.

And if you’re handling customer service via social media, Hootsuite Inbox also features some powerful AI capabilities. With Hootsuite Inbox, you can bridge the gap between social media engagement and customer service — and manage all of your social media messages in one place.

Beyond collecting all your DMs into a handy package, Inbox also features:

  • Automated message routing
  • Auto-responses and saved replies
  • Automatically triggered customer satisfaction surveys
  • AI-powered chatbot features
Hootsuite Inbox is an AI marketing tool that auto-sorts and tags incoming messages

Take Hootsuite Inbox for a test drive

Price: Starts at $99 for professional plans
Who it’s best for: Social media managers, digital marketing professionals, small to large businesses, content creators


Reduce response time (and your workload)

Manage all your messages stress-free with easy routing, saved replies, and friendly chatbots. Try Hootsuite’s Inbox today.

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2. Hootsuite’s free AI tools

Subscription plans gettin’ you down? Not to fear, Hootsuite has free AI content creation tools you can use right now:

  • Caption generator. Curious about OwlyWriter AI or other AI writing tools? Try out caption generation for free. This generator isn’t as advanced as OwlyWriter. Still, unlike ChatGPT, it’s optimized for social media and custom-creates your caption for your chosen platform in one of five languages. Nice.
  • Username idea generator. Identity crisis? No problem! With Hootsuite’s username generator, you can reinvent yourself in a few seconds flat.
  • About/bio writer. We get it—it can feel awkward to write about yourself. Let Hootsuite sum up the special sauce of your life automatically.
  • AI hashtag generator. Not sure how to tag your latest Insta post for maximum exposure? Our hashtag tool is here to help. (And if you want suggestions based on an image or video? Sign up for Hootsuite for the full multimedia experience!)

Price: Free!

Who it’s best for: Content creators, small teams, businesses just beginning their social media journeys

AI tools for content marketing

3. ChatGPT

Does ChatGPT even need an introduction? It’s become the default name for “AI content creation.”

A natural language processing (NLP) chatbot, ChatGPT can comprehend and generate material that sounds like a real person wrote it, including blog posts, social media postings and more.

ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI marketing tools currently available

Price: Free! The “ChatGPT+” subscription costs $20 a month and offers faster response times and early access to new features

Who it’s best for: Developers, businesses with AI integration needs, content creators, customer support teams

4. Dall-E by Open.ai

Dall-E is the visual sibling of ChatGPT, an AI-powered solution for graphic design. Provide a text prompt detailing your visual concept, and Dall-E brings it to life.

Dall-E is great for crafting original graphics for blog posts or social media, prototyping designs, or developing web graphics.

It’s not the best for creating brand elements like logos or packaging designs, though. Brand identity, after all, calls for more than just aesthetics.

Dall-E can generate simple images from a text prompt.

Price: Dall-e charges by the image, with the pricing ranging between $0.016 an image to $0.040 depending on the scale and resolution.

Who it’s best for: Graphic designers, artists, creatives, marketing professionals

5. Copy.ai

Copy.ai streamlines the copywriting process by generating almost-ready-to-publish drafts requiring minimal human editing.

Just provide a topic and creative direction; you’ll get outlines, articles, social posts, and sales emails in a few seconds. Try this AI marketing tool out if you need to generate written content rapidly at scale.

CopyAI allows you to specify your brand voice to customize the copy you generate.

Price: The basic plan is free, with pro plans starting at $36 a month

Who it’s best for: Content writers, copywriters, marketers, small business owners

6. JasperAI

A major ChatGPT competitor, JasperAI’s specialty is its ability to account for tone. That makes it a great tool for generating on-brand articles, social media posts, and scripts that consistently reflect your voice.

JasperAI is another copy AI marketing tool

JasperAI also facilitates content translation into 30 languages and integrates with tons of different applications.

Try using JasperAI to generate content ideas and outlines or translate content for global audiences. (That being said, leave the big stories to human professionals.)

Price: From $39 a month

Who it’s best for: Individual content creators, collaborative marketing teams

7. Canva

Creating a brand from scratch? Work with a graphic design professional. Looking to repurpose existing content and maintain visual consistency using a library of graphic templates? Canva is a great tool to keep in your toolbox.

Canva isn’t just for social graphics; it covers document design, presentations, and more.

Plus, with the introduction of Magic Design, Canva utilizes AI-powered content creation to generate matching templates based on uploaded media, making it efficient to repurpose content across various platforms.

Price: A basic account is free, but to access premium content and new tools (like Magic Design), prices start at $18.99 a month

Who it’s best for: Designers, small business owners, social media managers, students

8. Midjourney

Similar to Dall-E, Midjourney creates graphics using AI prompts. It operates as a Discord bot, which means it’s very user-friendly, and you can enable art creation from anywhere—even your phone.

Midjourney is a more advanced AI marketing tool than Dall-E

While anyone can learn to create prompts in Midjourney, getting the results you want takes a bit of practice—check out our AI art prompting guide.

Advanced Midjourney options include specifying features like a transparent background, aspect ratio, and art style.

Price: From $10 a month

Who it’s best for: Advanced AI image users, graphic designers

9. Synthesia

Synthesia enhances video production, even if you’re the most camera-shy marketing person on the planet. It uses AI avatars to quickly transform video scripts into finished videos.

Synthesia's AI avatars allow you to create videos quickly

The platform offers industry-specific templates that facilitate quick script creation. Plus, users can review and edit the video before publishing, all within the software.

Use it to create quick how-to tutorials at scale or generate clips for Reels and TikTok.

Price: Starting from $22 a month

Who it’s best for: Video editors, marketing professionals

10. Murf

Murf specializes in generating real, human-sounding voices for reading scripts. The platform’s AI voices are created from real people, allowing you to produce studio-quality audio in 20 languages.

Murf is an AI marketing tool that generates realistic human voices for voiceover

You can even clone your own voice for authenticity and time savings. It’s a great tool for recording voiceovers for social videos, podcasts, or brand presentations (though, as with many AI tools, it’s not the best for long-term branding).

Price: The entry level plan is free, with more advanced tools available starting from $19 a month

Who it’s best for: Teams interested in multimedia production

11. Podcastle

Looking into video or audio podcasts? Podcastle might be for you. This AI-powered podcast recording and editing app allows you to record video and audio streams, including virtual interviews with up to 10 participants.

Podcastle uses AI-powered editing to automate simple tasks

Podcastle’s AI-powered editing automates tasks like cutting out silence, suggesting clip trims, and minimizing noise while maintaining consistent volume levels.

In other words, this is a great option if you’re starting a new podcast and need easy audio and video editing tools (and a fancy voice-cloning feature). If you’re more experienced in the podcast world, though, this might be too basic for your needs.

Price: Basic plans are free, with more advanced functionality available from $12.99 a month

Who it’s best for: Beginning podcasters

12. Quillbot

QuillBot differentiates itself by helping you rephrase existing content creatively. It goes beyond basic synonym changes—QuillBot can simplify or expand content for brevity or detail.

It also offers unique extensions, including a web research AI search tool, a citation generator, and a “co-writing” sentence completer.

Use Quillbot to repurpose content or generate multiple versions of the same story.

Quillbot is an AI marketing tool that allows you to rephrase existing content

Price: Some functions available for free, but to access all the tools, plans start at $8.33 a month

Who it’s best for: Social media managers looking to repurpose existing content

13. Magic Studio

Wanna level up your product pics? Magic Studio is your new go-to. This AI tool caters to brands aiming to elevate their visual presence.

Magic Studio is an AI-powered tool that allows you to rapidly generate product images, etc

Magic Studio helps instantly place your best-sellers on sleek backgrounds, remove unwanted objects, and generate photos based on text prompts. It’s also a great tool for creating all-star profile pics.

Price: Some functions are free, but pro plans start from $7.49 a month

Who it’s best for: Ecommerce brands

14. DeepBrain AI Studios

DeepBrain AI Studios offers a user-friendly platform for AI video creation, converting text to video seamlessly. (It’s honestly a little spooky.)

Thanks to customizable photo-realistic AI avatars, the intuitive tool empowers beginners to create high-quality videos without actors, filming teams, or expensive equipment.

DeepBrain AI can generate video and audio from text

Price: From $29 a month

Who it’s best for: Video editors, brands with YouTube channels

15. Acrolinx

Acrolinx goes beyond just churning out content for blog posts. It serves as a brand watchdog, ensuring content aligns with brand guidelines. Set your style, tone, grammar, and specific language, and Acrolinx will help you generate content that never deviates from the brand vision.

Its AI Video Generator converts text to video, and photo-realistic AI avatars can be tailored to suit your brand.

Price: Price available upon request

Who it’s best for: Enterprise brands, marketing professionals

AI tools for SEO

16. Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights is a robust SEO tool that features an advanced AI writing assistant specifically tailored for contemporary content creators.

The integrated platform seamlessly combines content research, writing and search optimization. The writing assistant within Keyword Insights offers AI functionality while fostering a touch of human-AI collaboration.

Price: Access to some SEO tools are free, with a basic plan starting at $58 a month

Who it’s best for: SEO professionals, content marketers

17. Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is a tool designed to enhance the content quality of web pages, ensuring higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Surfer SEO is an AI marketing tool used by content marketers

It meticulously analyzes SERPs for relevant search terms and compares your content against the insights gleaned from top-ranking pages. Surfer SEO evaluates keywords and various ranking metrics, providing you with valuable suggestions to optimize your content for search engine optimization. It also offers an outline generator and keyword research tools to help you create SEO-friendly content from the outset.

Price: Starting from $96.39 a month

Who it’s best for: Agencies, brands ready to scale

18. GrowthBar

GrowthBar employs GPT-3 AI technology to automate content generation and offers suggestions for keywords, precise word count, links, images, and more.

GrowthBar employs GPT-3 AI marketing technology to automate content generation

This tool excels in providing comprehensive backlinking strategies and creating outlines for blog post content. Bonus: Growthbar offers a Chrome extension for added convenience.

Price: From $36 a month

Who it’s best for: Content marketers, bloggers

19. Frase.io

Frase.io is a handy tool for creating SEO-optimized content efficiently.

Just enter a topic, and Frase automatically compares and extracts data from top sites using the same keyword. The AI-driven marketing tool then generates an SEO-friendly outline, allowing you to create content that’s more likely to rank in the SERPs.

Price: From $15 a month

Who it’s best for: Editors, content strategists, SEO experts

AI tools for advertising

20. Albert.ai

Albert positions itself as your “self-learning digital marketing ally,” with features that help it process and analyze audience info and tactical data at scale.

Albert is adept at optimizing and generating budgets. But it’s also designed to help with strategy and structure, so you can get more reach for less.

Price: Contact for a customized pricing plan
Who it’s best for: Digital marketers

21. Skai

If you’re in marketing in 2024, chances are you’re delivering to a bunch of different outlets and platforms. Skai is all about optimizing for an omnichannel strategy.

Skai is an AI-powered analytics platform

The tool uses AI-powered tech to collect and classify unstructured data points to gather insights about your unique market. Skai’s Creative Intelligence AI will even review your ad creative to offer feedback and tactics.

Price: Price on request

Who it’s best for: Omnichannel advertisers

22. Wordstream

Wordstream is another AI-based program dedicated to elevating your advertising game. It uses machine learning (ML) to optimize ad campaigns across a variety of social media networks.

Wordstream’s key features include ML-driven ad performances, cross-channel assessment of PPC ads, and comprehensive campaign analysis. It’s helpful whether you’re fine-tuning existing social media ads or crafting a new campaign from the ground up.

Price: Price on request

Who it’s best for: Small businesses, agencies

AI tools for market research

23. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is notable for its extensive reservoir of customer intelligence, specifically designed for analyzing data at scale.

Its AI capabilities generate valuable insights, statistics, and aggregated data. This streamlined approach allows users to spend less time deciphering data and more time implementing high-level takeaways.

One noteworthy feature: It can integrate with tools like ChatGPT, facilitating the production of natural language summaries for data sets.

Hootsuite users can take advantage of Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch directly within the app, integrating Brandwatch’s search capabilities for a strategic advantage over competitors.

Price: Available with Hootsuite’s Enterprise accounts (request a demo now!)

Who it’s best for: Digital strategists, brand managers

24. Brand 24

Brand24’s AI social media monitoring tool allows brands to stay on top of real-time feedback, both positive and negative.

It conducts a comprehensive analysis of conversations spanning the web regarding the brand, products, and competitors so you can be as informed as humanly possible about the state of your reputation.

Brand24 is an AI marketing tool that helps with reputation management

Beyond reputation management, Brand24 helps you assess ongoing marketing campaigns and resolve emerging issues before they escalate.

Price: From $99 a month
Who it’s best for: Brand managers, social media managers

25. Optimove

Optimove is a comprehensive customer data platform offering a unified view of customer behavior and insights.

Optimove features include campaign performance evaluation, hyper-segmentation, A/B testing, and multi-channel tracking. The tool can provide valuable insights, aiding in decisions about campaign optimization and managing customer exposure to marketing emails.

Price: Determined on the number of customers you have; get in touch for a quote

Who it’s best for: Customer relationship management professionals

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage the audience, measure results, and more. Try it free today.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Jan 3 2024
3 Tools to Use Instead of LinkedIn Elevate (Now That It’s Gone)

Table of Contents

LinkedIn Elevate shut down as a standalone tool back in December 2020. Ever since, some of its features have been integrated into LinkedIn Company Pages. Some — but not all.

Three years later, employee advocacy is as important as ever – both within LinkedIn and across other social platforms. LinkedIn’s advocacy options built into Company Pages are a great place to start, but they offer limited functionality compared to dedicated employee advocacy tools.

Here’s everything you need to know if your organization is looking for an alternative to LinkedIn Elevate to manage employee advocacy and extend the social reach of your brand.

Bonus: Download a free employee advocacy toolkit that shows you how to plan, launch, and grow a successful employee advocacy program for your organization.

What was LinkedIn Elevate?

LinkedIn Elevate was an employee advocacy product provided by LinkedIn. It was a paid product with robust content curation and analytics features. Page admins could use it to hand-pick content for employees to reshare and easily track the success of their employee advocacy programs with detailed analytics.

And it was working well for the companies that used it. LinkedIn reported that LinkedIn Elevate users shared 5x more content than previously. This allowed them to influence 3x more Company Page views, 2x more Page followers, and 4x more job views.

However, LinkedIn Elevate was sunsetted as a standalone product in 2020. Many of the features were migrated over to Company Pages, where they became free to use. That means many LinkedIn Company Pages now have some basic employee advocacy functionality available at no cost. But the truth is that this embedded free version is not a complete employee advocacy solution.


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What is employee advocacy?

Before we go any further, let’s define employee advocacy. In the social marketing context, employee advocacy means that employees share your social content with their own networks to extend the reach of your messaging.

It intuitively makes sense that you would want your employees to be brand evangelists. You want them to love the company they work for and share those positive feelings with their social contacts.

Why do you need employee advocacy?

There are hard numbers to back up the importance of employee advocacy.

First up is trust. Edelman’s annual Trust Barometer consistently finds that people are more likely to trust regular people than CEOs. In the 2023 edition, Edelman found that 63% of people trust their neighbors. And 61% trust people in their local community.

Compare that to the 48% who trust CEOs and the 47% who trust journalists. It’s clear that your message is much more likely to be taken at face value when it comes from a familiar face (or someone in your existing social network).

Institutional Leaders Dashboard Percentage Trust

Source: Edelman

Here’s an interesting twist on those stats. While only 48% of people trust CEOs in general, 64% trust “my CEO.” That is, people are much more likely to trust the CEO of the company where they work. A CEO message crafted for employees and then shared on to the broader public gets an extra layer of trust built in.

But the most important way that employee advocacy contributes to brand marketing is the sheer reach of your employees’ networks and the power of their social actions.

For example, Hootsuite’s benchmarking data shows that in December 2023, the average retail brand had:

  • 8K followers on Twitter
  • 17K followers on Instagram
  • 23K fans on Facebook, and
  • 3.3K followers on LinkedIn

Of course, there’s some overlap, since most people follow brands on multiple platforms. But you also know that organic content no longer reaches all of your followers. The number of people who actually see your content might be much larger than your number of followers. Then again, it might also be much lower. (It all depends on the algorithms.)

When your employees share your content with their personal networks, it increases the potential audience pool in two ways.

First, some of your employees’ followers will see their posts about your brand. This is the most obvious reach extender.

But second, the social action of sharing itself shows the algorithm a connection between your brand and your employee. Over time, this makes algorithms more likely to suggest your content to your employees’ extended networks. This can extend the reach of all your posts, even those your employees don’t share directly.

Think about the potential reach if each of your employees has only a couple hundred followers per platform.

The even better news? You can create content for employees to share on platforms where you don’t have much of a brand presence. Or even platforms where you have no brand account at all.

Lacking the time or budget to maintain a presence on multiple social platforms emerged as the top concern in Hootsuite’s 2024 Social Trends Report. Employee advocacy can get the message out without your social team having to be everywhere.

All of this leads to more brand awareness, more web visits, and more inbound leads. And, guess what? It also helps your employees advance in their careers. How? By helping to establish their own credibility and expertise.

Phew: That was a lot.

The TL;DR version is this. When employees share brand-approved content on their social networks, they exponentially extend the reach of your social content. For more on setting up an employee advocacy program, check out our six-step strategy guide.

Why do you need an employee advocacy platform?

If your employees love their jobs, they’ll likely talk about your company. That’s true whether or not you have an employee advocacy program in place.

But using the right tools has a couple of key advantages:

  1. First, you can create brand-approved social content for your employees to share. You ensure it aligns with your campaign messaging. Once you post it in your advocacy tool, it’s ready for employees to customize and share with just a couple of clicks.

    Consistent brand messaging is important for all brands. But this is particularly crucial for organizations working in regulated industries. An employee advocacy tool that integrates with your compliance process is a must!

  2. You can customize content for different employee groups. For example, your salespeople probably want to share different content than your developers — even if they’re talking about the same products.
  3. You can access analytics related to your employee advocacy program. That means you can test, track, plan, and understand what works. You can also create contests or leaderboards. These interactive tools encourage your employees to share more.

3 LinkedIn Elevate alternatives

Whether you’re a previous LinkedIn Elevate customer or you’re new to employee advocacy, here are the best tools for 2024.

1. Hootsuite Amplify

Hootsuite Amplify makes it extremely easy for employees to share pre-approved content. They can become simple brand advocates, or personalize content for thought leadership pieces. Amplify caters to all digital skill levels. It’s easy to onboard employees across the organization.

Hootsuite Amplify weekly share goals

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Hootsuite Amplify is available for both mobile and web users. It helps employees share your message on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Based on the settings you choose, they can even share to other platforms, like WhatsApp and SMS.

The easy-to-use admin tools allow you to customize permissions and tags. Employees can stay connected to the stories and news they care about most, resonating across different departments, divisions and regions.

Publish to Amplify Regular Post and select shareable social networks

Within Amplify, you can also create an internal communications feed. This can be used to:

  • reinforce your culture
  • highlight thought leadership
  • reward your most passionate employee advocates
  • share company announcements

You can also integrate Amplify with the internal communications tools you already use, like Microsoft Teams and Slack.

For organizations in regulated industries, Amplify removes barriers to social sharing by integrating with ProofPoint, a leading social compliance tool. When risk is mediated, employees feel empowered to share their work (and work life) on social.

Since it’s integrated into Hootsuite, Amplify also gives admins and employees access to Hootsuite’s built-in AI tools for generating content ideas and adapting captions. And, of course, Amplify includes expensive analytics, so you can monitor the top stories and content shared by your organization and track the ROI of your advocacy program.

Link Settings Owl.y shortener and Google Analytics tracking

2. LinkedIn’s My Company tab

Golden Phase My Company Tab and recommendations

Source: LinkedIn

The components of LinkedIn Elevate that were folded into Company Pages now live on your organization’s My Company tab. It’s an internal communications space for employees only.

Within the My Company tab, admins can post organic and curated content for employees to share with their own networks. This is two-way amplification: Employees can share recommended company content, and company admins can recommend employees’ content for others to share.

There’s also a section for trending coworker content, where employees can interact with content from all their coworkers, whether or not they are directly connected on LinkedIn.

However, there are no built-in advocacy tools here for Facebook or Instagram, so content can only be shared within LinkedIn or to X (formerly Twitter). This is a significant limitation, especially for B2C brands.

Note The My Company tab is only available for Pages with 200 employees or more, as listed under company size.

3. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP Share on LinkedIn Employee Advocacy Tool

Source: GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is a standalone employee advocacy tool. Your employees connect their social channels directly to GoogleAMP, rather than to your existing social media management platform.

When your company admin posts new content, employees can get a push notification on the mobile app, or they can get an email digest of new content. It has built-in leaderboards and content functionality to encourage sharing. Employees can also be rewarded for liking or otherwise engaging with brand content.

Tap into the power of employee advocacy with Hootsuite Amplify. Increase reach, keep employees engaged, and measure results—safely and securely. Learn how Amplify can help grow your organization today.

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Hootsuite Amplify makes it easy for your employees to safely share your content with their followers—boosting your reach on social media. Book a personalized, no-pressure demo to see it in action.

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Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Nov 30 2023
10 Content Marketing Tools That Will Make Your Job Easier

Table of Contents

Good salespeople know that it’s not a great idea to try the hard sell on prospects the very first time you connect. First, you need to build a relationship and establish your credibility.

Marketers need to take the same approach. That’s where content marketing comes in. By creating valuable resources, information, tools, and other forms of content for your audience, you make sure you’re top of mind when it comes time to make a purchase.

Content marketing is a big job. Content marketing tools make that job significantly easier. They also allow for better collaboration, tracking, analysis, and communication. All of this can help bridge the sometimes difficult gap between marketing and sales, making both teams more effective.

Bonus: Download our free, customizable social media calendar template to easily plan and schedule all your content in advance.

What is a content marketing tool?

A content marketing tool is any tool that allows content teams to improve, simplify, or better manage their marketing work. This includes a wide assortment of tool categories to help with the many aspects of marketing content creation.

From spurring ideas to implementing designs to automating social media posts, there are many great content marketing tools to make a content marketer’s day more productive and less stressful.

Let’s take a look at some of the best.

10 best content marketing tools for 2024

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite Planner social calendar overview

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Rather than a single content marketing tool, Hootsuite is actually a suite of content marketing tools built with the unique needs of social marketers in mind. It can benefit content marketers at every stage of the content creation and management process.

So, let’s start at the beginning – with the spark of an idea. Or maybe you don’t have one? Either way, OwlyWriter AI can help. This AI tool that’s built into the Hootsuite dashboard just needs a simple prompt to create captions and post ideas that are appropriate for your brand.

Whether your content comes from AI or from the sharp minds of your team, you can then use Hootsuite’s composer to set up your social media posts. Add existing image and video assets, or choose royalty-free images from the built-in image library. There are built-in workflows and approval processes, too. These keep your team working collaboratively during this process.

You can create new custom visuals within Hootsuite through the integration with Canva. Or, fine-tune your text directly in the composer through the integration with Grammarly.

Canva in Hootsuite Planner LinkedIn post

Once your post is ready to go, it’s time to schedule it with the Hootsuite calendar, a drag-and-drop tool that allows you to plan out your social content across multiple platforms. It even includes recommended times to post for maximum engagement.

If you want to dive deeper into the best times to post for each platform, check out the heat maps in Hootsuite Analytics to see a detailed chart of when your audience is online for each platform.

Of course, reviewing your analytics is also an important part of your content marketing work, since understanding what works well (and what doesn’t) helps you improve your efforts over time.

Finally, to make sure you effectively drive traffic to your longer content pieces from platforms that don’t allow links (*ahem* Instagram *ahem*), you can create an easy-to-manage link in bio page using Hootbio.

2. Canva

CanvaSource: Canva

Canva is an incredibly useful design tool for content marketers. From social media posts to email newsletters to videos and websites, Canva has more than 600,000 templates in their premium collection as well as thousands that are free to use.

It’s an intuitive and easy-to-use tool that allows even non-designers to create visually appealing content marketing assets.

Hootsuite users can access Canva directly through the Hootsuite Composer, so you can use their templates to enhance your content creation without having to switch between content marketing tools.

3. Google Workspace

Google Workspace My Drive and Shared Drives

Source: Google Workspace

Formerly known as G Suite, Google Workspace is the business-oriented version of Google’s suite of tools. The tools are particularly useful for distributed teams, as the cloud-based tools ensure team members can collaborate effectively online. They’re also useful for ensuring multiple stakeholders can provide feedback without creating version control issues.

Google Docs is the primary tool for getting your content into a file and sharing it among colleagues, while Google Keep is an effective notes tool for jotting down content ideas. Google Meet, Google Calendar, and Google Chat allow teams to communicate both in real time and asynchronously.

4. Lumen5

Lumen video library grow your brand and drive demand

Source: Lumen5

Lumen5 is a drag-and-drop tool for creating video content. One important feature for content marketers: It uses AI to create videos directly from a blog post. You can then fine-tune the video using the detailed editing tools.

The built-in media library includes valuable content marketing resources like licensed photos, stock videos, and music to make your video content creation easier.

5. WordPress

WordPress dashboard with themes

Source: WordPress

WordPress is an especially useful content marketing tool for small businesses. It’s a content management system (CMS) that makes it easy to create, update, and manage content for your blog or website, even with no design skills.

WordPress architecture is SEO-friendly, and plug-ins can help you maximize the SEO impact of your content. WordPress sites look great on both desktop and mobile, too.

6. Brafton Content Marketing Platform

Brafton platform with dashboard overview

Source: Brafton

This content marketing platform is designed to track and manage your content from ideation through to publication. All your content projects are in one place so the relevant team members and stakeholders can find them and see where they are at in the creation process at any time.

Project dashboards include timelines, image assets, content briefs, deliverables, and messaging, so you never have to go digging through your email for project details.

7. Vidyard

Vidyard create a record new video

Source: Vidyard

Vidyard is a video creation and hosting platform that allows content marketers to integrate videos into email as well as web and social content. The interactive playback features mean you can incorporate video calls-to-action as well as in-video forms.

When developing your video content, you can record your screen or use your webcam to record yourself. Or, you can record both at the same time. The built-in analytics and SEO optimization help ensure your videos make the most impact on your content marketing strategy.

8. Ahrefs

Ahrefs healthy juices keyword search volume

Source: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a content marketing tool that helps you build content addressing topics your customers are already looking for online. The keywords explorer helps you find new keyword ideas, then analyzes each option to determine how hard it will be to rank for that term. You can also use the tool to track and analyze existing keyword sets.

For video content marketers, take note that Ahrefs allows you to measure the popularity of search queries in YouTube as well as the major search engines.

There’s also a content search engine to help you analyze content that’s already working in your niche, especially on low-competition topics.

9. SEMRush

SEMRush topic research and SEO writing assistant

Source: SEMRush

SEMRush is another keyword and SEO tool to help ensure your content marketing assets connect with your audience. In addition to extensive keyword discovery and analysis tools, SEMRush helps you find popular topics and questions to address in your content marketing.

Once you get started creating, there’s an SEO content template to help you rank and an SEO writing assistant to check your SEO score and improve readability.

10. Hemingway App

Hemingway App highlighted text and readability score

Source: Hemingway App

The Hemingway App is a powerful free content marketing tool. You can just copy and paste your content into the Hemingway Editor, and you’ll get a reading level score. (Hint: aim for a grade 8 reading level to get the most impact from your content.)

You’ll also get tips on how to improve the readability score, with problem areas highlighted for your attention. The reading level updates in real time, so you can keep going until you reach your target level.

Free content marketing tools

Looking for some free content marketing tools you can use right now, without even having to create an account? We’ve got you. You can use all of these content tools directly from your web browser, no credit card or sign-in required.

AI caption generator

This is one of Hootsuite’s free content creation tools for social media. Need to create content for Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, or Pinterest? You can do it here with just a few quick inputs. Choose your network, select a style and language, and enter a short description and keywords. This tool will create the caption you need for your social post.

The style options range from cheeky to grumpy, from casual to formal, and even include specific tone options like makeup influencer or true crime podcast host.

Since I’ve got the Yule Log playing on my TV as I write this and I’m sipping a cup of tea, I thought I’d ask the tool to create a relevant caption in the voice of an 18th-century poet. And did it ever deliver.

Hootsuite AI caption generator warmth and wonder cozy fireside

If you need content creation tools for other social media platforms, check out our Instagram Threads generator as well as our generators for YouTube video descriptions and titles.

AI blog ideas generator

For longer content pieces, this blog ideas generator is incredibly helpful. Choose your language, then enter up to five nouns and your primary keyword. The tool will suggest a few blog titles along with subtitles or short content descriptions.

After once again using prompts about writing by the fire, I like this blog suggestion best:Igniting Inspiration How Fire Can Fuel Your Writing Passion post

AI content ideas generator

Need ideas for a content platform other than a blog or social media? This is your tool. Using the same process as above, you can generate content ideas for white papers, videos, podcasts, infographics, and more.

Let’s say I’m so motivated by this fireside writing thing that I want to start a podcast:

Podcast overview Fireside Chats Igniting Your Writing Passion

Keep in mind that while all of these content tools are powered by the same chatbot AI behind OwlywriterAI, they are essentially “lite” versions of the tool. For instance, OwlyWriterAI allows content marketers to choose from post types such as “problem, agitate, solution” and “attention, interest, desire, action” posts.

Social media dictionary

Here’s one last free content marketing tool for you. This one’s not powered by AI, but it is powered by the social media experts at Hootsuite.

It’s technically called a social media dictionary, but really it’s a good place to look up any term that’s entered the zeitgeist but may not yet be fully understood in corporate environments. Use it to explain to your boss why that reply guy gives you the ick.


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6 tips for making the most of your content marketing tool

1. Develop a strategy

Less than half of B2B or B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Thinking strategically about your content marketing plan gives you an automatic head start. Digging into how your content marketing tools can support that strategy and open up new possibilities gives you even more advantage.

Strategic planning should be involved in every aspect of your content marketing, and the tools listed above are all designed to help.

2. Focus on relationships

Content marketing gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience so you can gain their trust and loyalty over time, rather than jumping in and trying to make a sale right off the bat.

The best content marketing tools offer detailed insights into your audience that help you understand how best to connect. Social media content marketing dashboards with advanced analytics tools (like Hootsuite) can help you understand the demographics of your audience, as well as where and when they spend their time online.

You can also learn what subject areas they’re most interested in, and what content types are most effective for sharing the content you create.

This all feeds back into the strategic planning we talked about in the tip above. When you have tools that help you understand your audience, you can better hone your strategy for effective content marketing.

3. Plan ahead

Once you have a strategy and your audience research in place, it becomes much easier to plan ahead.

Sure, every content person is always thinking about marketing campaigns for the big annual events like back to school and the winter holidays. But what about all the smaller events throughout the year that could spark content creation ideas? Planning in advance gives you the opportunity to peg your content to events that resonate with your audience, increasing the chances they’ll be reshared.

Hootsuite’s calendar has holidays and events built in, so you’ll never miss an event like International Tea Day. And if you have no idea what on earth to say about an event like International Tea Day, you can just click on the name of the holiday and OwlyWriterAI will create appropriate social media posts for you. The posts might even spark ideas for larger content pieces.

Planning ahead also ensures your content marketing strategy is aligned across platforms, from email to your blog to your social channels.

4. Work in batches

Creating your content in batches allows you to stay focussed on one task at a time, then move on to the next. This is much more effective than constantly worrying in the back of your mind about the TikTok you absolutely must create at 12:05 p.m.

Working in batches also allows you to make the most of keyword research and content themes. As you uncover interesting new information relative to your next content marketing project, you can weave it into blog posts, email newsletters, and social media posts.

A content marketing tool allows you to frontload your effort by creating multiple pieces of content in one work session, then loading into the appropriate time slots on your content calendar. Social media content management tools will post the social content at the pre-set times without any further input from you, so you can focus on getting out your blogs and drip campaigns.

5. Set up team processes

When you’ve got multiple people creating content, things can get … complicated. Great content creation tools have built-in workflows that allow your team to create and collaborate more effectively.

Workflows that include appropriate approval systems mean that even the most junior team members can create content directly in the tool from which it will eventually be posted. Senior team members can review, provide feedback, and sign off when the post is ready. Everyone gets to do their best work without any copy-and-pasting, version control issues, or concerns about content going live before it’s approved.

This makes life easier for all content marketing teams, but it’s especially important for teams working in the regulated industries. Content marketing tools like Hootsuite (which is FedRAMP-certified) allow you to build specific compliance requirements and principal approval into your workflow so everything is always done by the books.

6. Centralize your brand assets

Content marketing tools can help ensure your team is always using the latest brand assets. For example, Hootsuite’s content library is a good repository for approved product and editorial images, logos, templates, and videos.

Once your content goes live, you can give employees access to the full approved posts through Hootsuite Amplify so they can share with their own networks in just a couple of clicks. This ensures that your content marketing efforts have an extended reach and your team is always on brand when they share about the brand on social.

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard, you can publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversions, engage the audience, measure results, and more. Try it free today.

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