Essential Social Media Campaign Tools

Use these Social Media Campaign Tools to run more effective Social Media Campaigns

Social Media campaign tools provide flexible campaign and advertising tools for running campaigns on all the major social media platforms. They provide a quick and easy method for setting up customer engagement campaigns, from templates for quizzes, surveys and sweepstakes to white label options with full CSS editing and iFrame functionality. These tools can focus on a number of campaigns goals (e.g. driving engagement or collecting leads) and have powerful social sharing features out the box but with custom options ensuring each campaign can be tailored accordingly.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

Whilst these tools provide a quick and easy option for many brands, ultimately these tools act as a third party between you and the customer limiting your control of the customer journey (vs. a custom build on your site, for example) and, potentially, your (free) access to remarketing data.
You will need some design resource to brand even the basic, template campaigns. In addition, CSS skills are needed for the fully customisable options. The companies offering these tools can provide these services at a cost.
Most are available on month by month pricing models with discounts for annual plans. Pricing can rise steeply and are typically based on entry volumes (of the campaigns you run) and brand community size. Be clear on the total costs up front of all likely scenarios. (Be careful - what starts as a quick and inexpensive campaign can quickly become costlier than planned).

So without further ado, here are five useful social media campaign tools, which we've placed in order of what we think most useful.

ShortStack

ShortStack is a self-service platform to build engaging campaigns for social, web and mobile such as sweepstakes or voting contests. Boost engagement and also use to capture leads. This tool helps businesses of all sizes build campaigns from the ground up, through templates and drag-and-drop functions, but can also build campaigns in-house for businesses. It presents a great tool for quickly and easily launching social media campaigns.

What makes it stand out?

The platform features more than 30+ widgets, 30+ themes, and 90+ templates to build contests and sweepstakes, special offers, landing pages, custom forms and host them. The tool integrates with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Key features:

Ready-made templates and themes
Easy to use editor
CSS editor to customise further
Custom URLs
White label options
Fan-gating

Spredfast

Spreadfast is a social media management system that enables companies to monitor, manage and measure cross-platform social media initiatives. This is a great tool for businesses that need to harness their social content and to use social media to both better understand an audience but also manage better their customer service via listening tools. It offers scheduling tools that can be used with reports that are very useful.

What makes it stand out?

Through an easy-to-use interface, this tool breaks tasks up into easily accessible tools; to start and store connections made, curate the best social content to republish, target audiences, create promotions and schedule content.

Key features:

Social media management
Social listening and analytics
Social content curation
Content marketing
Broadcast TV integration
Real-time marketing
Social care
Social commerce
Social sponsorship

WooBox

WooBox lets you easily create powerful contests, sweepstakes, coupons, and more to grow fanbase and amplify marketing. Like Shortstack, this tool is available for free and offers businesses the ability to create and launch social campaigns. For paid for plans, bigger businesses can remove the restrictions and also take advantage the inclusive Facebook advertising tools.

What makes it stand out?

This tool offers businesses the ability to create and launch social marketing campaigns, but also have functionality to streamline Facebook advertising with ad tools.

Key Features:

Create easy to use social campaigns
Paid for plans include the Facebook advertising tools
Easily integrate with selected 3rd party tools

Pagemodo

Pagemodo is a social marketing platform for small businesses to create a consistent and engaging visual social media presence. Modify Facebook pages by improving cover photos, adding custom tabs, creating contests and scheduling posts. This tool is best aimed at smaller businesses to help them to manage Facebook pages, but users can also easily share branded and coordinated content across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, print collateral, and other platforms.

What makes it stand out?

This tool offers businesses the ability to create and launch social marketing campaigns as other tools do, customise Facebook pages and schedule content, and also set up Facebook advertising.

Key Features:

Facebook advert designer and targeting
Cover photo creation
Contest designer
Custom tab builders
Post designer
Post scheduler
Twitter header designer

Tab Foundry

Tab Foundry lets you easily build quizzes, sweepstakes, games, photo contests or custom tabs for Facebook pages. Like other social marketing campaign tools, Tab Foundry is available for free and offers businesses the ability to create and launch social campaigns. This tool offers greater flexibility in terms of design, however, and therefore may be the most suited to use at agencies on behalf of clients.