1.Neil Patel: Entrepreneur and influencer, NeilPatel.com
“With BuzzSumo you can see what is hot in your space on social media and what isn’t. From there you can craft ideas on the type of blog posts you should write to generate traffic and leads. The best part about BuzzSumo is it also shows you who has shared the content so you can reach out to those influencers and ask them to share your content as well.”
2. Joe Pulizzi: Founder, Content Marketing Institute
“Right now in my career, I use social media as almost a pure response vehicle. And I won’t start any new social media apps, platforms, or tools until I’m 100% committed to it. My goal with Twitter (my favorite) is to keep in touch and communicate my appreciation to those people that support me. Once I built an audience on those platforms, my goals and execution changed.”
3. Ann Handley: Chief content officer, MarketingProfs
“Instagram is my favorite social network because of its social storytelling simplicity. From fun personal accounts – like Small Chalk and Adam Padilla – to corporate brands, it connects more immediately and deeply with people than any other platform. I still haven’t forgiven them for introducing an algorithm. But I can’t quit you, Insta.”
4. Jeff Bullas: CEO, JeffBullas.com
“SumoMe is a hybrid tool that’s a bit like a Swiss Army knife. It’s helped me thrive and survive in the wilds of the digital world by creating social-sharing buttons – onsite, SMS, Flipboard, and WhatsApp – and tracking my social counts on blog posts. The feature I really love is its Welcome Mat: a pop-up that captures emails. In less than 12 months, it’s collected over 40,000 email subscribers.”
5. Sujan Patel: Founder and CEO, Web Profits
“Social media is becoming more personal and customers are actually talking to companies. I’m not talking about comments or high-level conversations. I’m talking about customers ready to make a transaction. That’s why I love Facebook Messenger, Facebook has done a great job empowering business owners to communicate directly with their customers and with the introduction of bots, Messenger is going to have a big impact in the coming years.”
6. Matthew Toren: Owner, iSmallBusiness
“Canva is a very handy browser-based design tool that makes it super straightforward for non-designers like me to create impressive images. Visual content has become so important for social media posts to help tell the story of your post and content. I’ve noticed that my visual content gets about 23% more clicks vs. non-visual. I love the fact that I can optimize the size for whatever social platform I need to use the design for.”
7. Shayla Price: B2B content marketer
“Bit.ly is a must-have tool for your social media stack. The platform does more than just shorten links. You can use it to track links, measure performance from your campaigns, and learn which channels bring in the most traffic. I use Bit.ly to monitor the daily activity of all my marketing and growth efforts along with most of my clients so I can attribute and track my efforts.”
8. Benji Hyam: Co-founder, Grow and Convert
“LinkedIn is great for prospecting. Before I do cold outreach, I look at the person’s profile and do as much research about them as possible. Simple touches like including common contacts, their job title, and past projects they’ve shared dramatically increase your chances of getting a response. Customize your messages and relate to them based on the information gathered. Above all, be personal not robotic.”
9. Daniel Knowlton: Founder, KPS Digital Marketing
“I’ve been a big Buffer fan for the last two plus years. But Sendible has converted me because it incorporates more than five other tools I was using into one: from social scheduling (on steroids), to social-listening alerts, automated posting from an RSS feed, a built-in CRM, automatically recycling your chosen posts so that your content never runs out and loads more.”
10. Jon Morrow: Founder, SmartBlogger
“Being completely honest, our teams don’t do a lot on social media. Most of our traffic comes from search, so that’s where we put our time and energy. We use BuzzSumo, Canva, and Yoast. However, given that my goal with social is simply to stay active – and to get the most out of the investment – Buffer is my go-to tool for scheduling updates. It’s easy to use, time efficient, and covers all my social-media bases.”
11. William Harris: Founder, Elumynt
“The thing I love about Narrow is that it lets me scale my Twitter account intelligently. Rather than sitting at my computer, manually following everyone that tweets with a hashtag that I find relevant, Narrow is programmed to interact with hashtags, audiences of influencers, keywords and more, which allows me to stay focused on providing relevant content for my audience.”
12. Glen Gilmore: Founder, Gilmore Business Network
“At the risk of following Joe Puluzzi, Twitter is also my favorite tool. However, I use it a bit differently than most by creating niche accounts to share and hone my evolving passions while creating community and influence. Then I build Twitter lists to track key opinion leaders and the competition.”
13. Brian Dean: Founder, Backlinko
“Click to Tweet gives your readers an immediate and easy way to share your content by creating one-click boxes of preloaded Tweets, hashtags, and mentions. Blog integration is super non-technical and they even have a Click to Tweet generator you can use to add links to emails and PDFs. More opportunities to share equals more shares. It’s that simple. I recently used it on this post and got 20% more tweets than my average.”
14. Joanna Wiebe: Creator, Copy Hackers
“Buffer! Three reasons.
(1) You can install a browser widget that lets you Buffer any page or image you come across to be sent out immediately or at a later time.
(2) The Content Inbox: I can enter the URL of a favorite blog and Buffer instantly creates a huge list of tweets from that blog.
3) The company is so transparent. I don’t expect every company to publish what they earn vs. what they pay people the way Buffer does, but it’s a warm-and-fuzzy sort of approach to helping disconnected folks like moi see the humans behind a software company.
15. Ann Smarty: Founder, SEO Smarty
“Viral Content Bee is my most efficient social media promotion tool. I use it to promote every article I write. It works by putting my content in front of social media influencers who share it on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon. The result is a huge boost in social media interactions and higher traffic for my content.”
16. Johnathan Dane: Founder, KlientBoost
“We’ve started using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to reach out to decision-makers at companies that could be ideal clients. Once we’re able to pique their interest, then we ask them for a quick meeting … For lead generation, it’s phenomenal.”
17. Jay Baer: Founder, Convince & Convert
“Rival IQ is a terrific tool to compare your own social media engagement rate and top-performing content versus your competitors’. Insightful and easy to use, it includes automated, custom reporting. One click and BAM – you have a PDF or PowerPoint deck with all the information you need to make better social media decisions. We use it daily.”
You find them useful?
Those are 17 favorite social media tools that influential online marketers often use to generate their traffic and lead. I bet you all are familiar with some of them. What's your favorite one? Why don’t you try others to strengthen your business like professional marketers do?
