Mention: Better than Google Alerts

1Simple, user-friendly, and results-driven, Mention offers a more effective alternative to Google Alerts — a service many users have experienced issues with because of inconsistent results. Mention does what Google Alerts are supposed to, only better.

This platform scours the Internet, including social media networks, for your chosen keywords and sends the results to you in real time, alerting you instantly whenever your topics are mentioned so you can leverage the conversation. You can integrate Mention with your social media accounts to react without leaving the application. The platform also provides extensive analytics and the ability to export data.

Mention offers a 14-day free trial and a free basic plan, which includes one user and one alert — perfect for tracking results on your business name. There are also paid versions starting at $29 a month for 3 mentions and up to three users.

Zapier: Create a social ecosystem

2A powerful integration tool that ties all of your digital marketing together, Zapier lets you automate just about everything your company does online. The platform lets you connect and integrate popular apps, from Facebook and Twitter to MailChimp, Google Docs, SalesForce, and Dropbox — more than 300 services work with Zapier, creating a social ecosystem that interacts with all of your marketing components.

In addition, you can use Zapier to automate blog and Facebook posts, generate a spreadsheet that tracks keywords on Twitter, input form entries automatically into Salesforce as new leads, and more. The free version of this platform gives you five “Zaps” per month, and priced plans start at $10 a month for 20 Zaps.

Swayy: Share across multiple platforms

3Anyone who’s been active in social media marketing for a while knows that one of the biggest challenges is coming up with great content to share on a regular basis. Swayy can help you out with that.

This content aggregator and sharing platform is designed to find the best content based on the interests and engagement behavior of your audience. You can share across multiple platforms, schedule your sharing times, and more. Swayy also helps you share better with relevant hashtags and Twitter handle generation, and analytics that show you the most effective content.

The Swayy app is free for one user, and subscription plans start at $9.99 a month for two users.

Compfight: Find free royalty-free images

4On blogs and social media, images drive engagement — but the cost of posting lots of stock images on a regular basis can add up fast. Compfight is a free image search engine that makes it easy to find royalty-free, quality images for whatever subject you need.

Compfight searches the vast Flickr repository and returns images with the appropriate Creative Commons license that allow for free commercial use. The search engine also gives you the HTML code to use for attribution, saving you a few steps in hunting down links.

ManageFlitter: Cut through the noise on Twitter

5Twitter can be a powerful platform for business — but operating at an average volume of 6,000 tweets per second, it can also get noisy and confusing. ManageFlitter helps you cut through the noise, offering a full suite of tools that give you a better handle on your business Twitter account.

With this tool, you can:

• Search Twitter bios, keywords, and locations to find relevant people to connect with and follow
• Schedule your tweets for optimal times, when your followers are most likely to see them
• Monitor hashtags, keywords, websites, and usernames on Twitter
• Automatically unfollow inactive accounts, spam accounts, and accounts without profile images — and force these accounts to unfollow you

ManageFlitter also provides Twitter analytics. The platform offers three plan levels: a free Basic level, a Pro level for $12/month, and a Business level for $49/month.

Komfo: A better Facebook analytics tool

6Facebook is a staple for most social media marketing strategies. As with all campaigns, detailed analytics are the key to using Facebook effectively, but many analytic tools for this platform leave something to be desired — including Facebook’s own built-in analytics.

The free Facebook analytics tool from Komfo provides you with meaningful insight that’s easy to understand and apply to your Facebook campaigns. Features of this tool include analytics for fan penetration, viral amplification, CTR (click through rates), and a spam score. There’s also a score for “People Talking About This” and measurements for overall reach.

Post Planner: More than scheduling posts

7Another Facebook-specific tool, Post Planner, gives you content management as a Facebook application. As the name suggests, you can use it to schedule posts — but the app offers many more features that help you save time, plan, and manage your Facebook account.

With Post Planner, you can search for general topics or trending content, and automatically source and add content to your posting queue. The app also lets you add Facebook pages, blogs, and Twitter accounts to a feed and schedule posts from those sources. In addition, you get real-time post analytics to measure engagement, click-throughs, and more.

The Pro app is free, and plans start at $29 a month for the Guru level.

Socialbakers: What’s working with your content?

8A social media marketing company providing a range of business products, Socialbakers offers a tool, Analytics Pro, that delivers valuable insights on channel growth, engagement rates, social relationship building, and more. The interface shows you which of your content, campaigns, and interviewers are most effective at driving conversations, and illustrates how you stack up against competitors on social media — specifically YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

Analytics Pro from Socialbakers offers a 14-day free trial, and pricing plans starting at $120 per month, which monitors up to three channels.

Rignite: Enhance your team’s collaboration

9This social media dashboard is designed with teamwork in mind. Rignite allows you to monitor multiple social media platforms, schedule posts, and receive campaign level reporting and analytics. The collaboration features are what sets this tool apart — you can assign tasks to individual team members, chat through instant message, and create forums within the tool.

Rignite offers a 14-day trial and has plans starting at $19 a month.

Tagboard: Free multi-platform tool

10This free, highly useful, multi-platform tool offers an easy way to monitor social conversations and act on them quickly. With Tagboard, you can search for specific hashtags on several platforms at once, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Vine, and Instagram, and generate custom boards that display the relevant content.

Tagboard makes brand monitoring and content curation easy, and can also deliver real-time leads by showing the most recent relevant hashtags, so you can respond right away to customers who are looking for what you have to offer.