In this post we are going to round up 10 of the best tools to automate your business and grow your audience.  Facebook gives us some nice features like audience insights and reports so we can diagnose our advertising, but there are other tools above and beyond what Facebook provides that will give even more information and more insights on how to grow your business and audience faster…and even legally spy on your competition. This will give you the upper hand when it comes to your competition and will also put you leaps and bounds ahead of them.

We will cover:

• Tools that give you better reporting than Facebook
• Tools that automate every day tasks like posting to Facebook
• Tools that give you inside information about your competition
• Tools that tell you what posts will give you the best exposure
• and much more…

So let’s dive in.

Tool #1 – Sprout Social

Facebook metrics go beyond measuring Likes, Shares, Comments, and Reach. These analytics are easily obtainable via Facebook. If people view your posts and ads, they might not click Like, Share or even comment on your post; however, they might be taking other kinds of action that Facebook analytics will never tell you about. For instance, people might click on the time stamp link that opens up the post into another window signifying that they are expanding the post to get a closer look. People might also be clicking on commenter’s names in the post.

Other analytics that Facebook doesn’t show you is how many people are unliking your page as well as clicking the unfollow button. These additional analytics will help you see what kind of content you are posting that are not resonating with your fans.

Sprout Social will give you these additional analytics. Click here to see more features and start a free trial.

Tool #2 – Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma provides valuable insights on posting strategies and performance of social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Users can monitor an unlimited number of pages and profiles. They can check who their most active fans are, where they are coming from and which other interests they have. They can get helpful analysis, including best posting times, and best performing post types.

The analytics part is great but my favorite feature of Fanpage Karma is the competitor analysis. You can literally spy on your competitor’s pages as the tool allows you to analyze engagement, see the best times to post, the best topics, and the best types of posts. This will give you amazing insight into your market.

Another awesome analytic is it shows you who the influencers are for a specific page (and you don’t even have to own the page to view this information). By clicking on influencers and then the influencer name, you will see the power of these analytics:

 

Here is a detailed overview of the features of Fanpage Karma:

Click here for more information about Fanpage Karma.

Tool #3 – Zapier

Zapier is a tool that connects and automates different apps together. It works on triggers and basically if/then statements. If this happens over here, do this over there. There are hundreds of apps connected to Zapier and there are so many automations you can create.

Here’s how Zapier explains it: Triggers and actions are simply events. They can be things like a “new email” or a “new contact”. A Zap combines triggers and actions — whenever the trigger event occurs, Zapier automatically completes the action for you!

Here is a list of just some apps that Zapier is connected to:

It’s like having your own personal assistant who you don’t have to pay! It’s pretty remarkable. Click here to find out more about Zapier.

Tool #4 – Edgar

Get more mileage out of every update.

Edgar is a social media scheduling tool. Instead of publishing your updates just once and throwing them away like yesterday’s rubbish, Edgar carefully catalogues them in a limitless library that you build over time. Many posts get left unseen by a large audience and Edgar allows you to reach more people with posts you’ve already made.

All of your updates are sorted into categories that you create and published on a schedule that you choose, so Edgar publishes what you want, when you want it.

After Edgar publishes every update in a category, he simply pulls more from your library. You never run out of messages in your queue, and your handcrafted updates get the chance to be seen, shared, and loved by brand new people.

– See more at: http://meetedgar.com

Tool #5 – Social Kickstart

Social Kickstart provides marketers with the tools needed to conduct market research, gather insights and create endless share-worthy content, to help maximize fans and total reach.

Users are able to:

• Manage All Fan Page Posts/Updates
• Discover Engaging Content
• Gain Rich Insights
• Schedule Posts
• Manage Content Queue
• User Management
• Teespring Research
• Facebook Ad Maker
• Retargeting

You can check out more at http://socialkickstart.co/

Tool #6 – AdEspresso

One of the most time consuming ad tasks is split testing. AdEspresso makes split testing ads so much easier.

It allows you to:

• Create thousands of variants of your Facebook Ads with only 3 clicks.
• Have multiple target audiences? Easily test all the versions of your creatives across all your target audiences, building powerful Ads that convert.
• Save your preferences, for audience demographics instantly to be reused for any campaign.
• Store all your media so you don’t have to keep uploading that same picture.

AdEspresso gives you really nice looking reports. The reports that Facebook provides are pretty atrocious compared to this:

AdEspresso allows you to find the winning combination of your ads with minimal effort. Start a free trial here.

Tool #7 – Fanpage Curator

Fanpage Curator was developed by our friend Bill Guthrie and it is an awesome tool. Your account comes with unlimited amount of Facebook pages that you can manage and what you do is put in a keyword and the tool populates articles, images and videos….the perfect content for your fanpage. I love this tool. My favorite part is that you can schedule posts out for the entire month in like 15 minutes!

Check out the demo here:

Here’s more information on Fanpage Curator.

Tool #8 – Cool Tabs

This Facebook app has a lot of cool functions. The free feature allows page admins to analyze and monitor how their pages stack up when compared with those with similar like totals.

Compare your pages to those of your competitors with Cool Tabs. See more here: http://www.cool-tabs.com/en

Tool #9 – Post Planner

Post Planner is a very nifty Facebook app. It allows you to

• Reach More People
• Post Viral Content Effortlessly
• Save Time
• Get the latest Features

Post Planner has many case studies on how their analytics helped folks get massive exposure to their fanpages.

See more about Post Planner here.

Tool #10 – You

Tool number 10 is not an actual tool, but it’s more of a reminder that marketing is not all about using tools. You need to use yourself and your own brain to notice what’s going on around you. Take notice of what other marketers are doing when it comes to advertising. Where are they sending people to? What do their ads look like? What kinds of ads are you seeing over and over?

Hint – if you keep seeing certain ads it means something is working for that marketer. Smart marketers spend money on what’s working! Pay attention to what’s around you!

Sure you can use fancy tools to give you all kinds of results and reports and figures, but at the end of the day, it’s what you’ve got in between your ears that makes decisions, determinations, and conclusions. Don’t forget that.

=> Are we leaving anything out? Let us know your favorite social media tools!