In the past couple of years, Social Media has seen a vast expansion growing multifold. With its evolution, Social media has created a trend with more and more people making a transition to the online branding and marketing platforms. The main reason for this shift is the huge numbers of the reachable audience. As the technology and Internet spread through the world, more and more people are engaging in online activities, providing an opportunity to both big and small businesses to attract people and to brand themselves. But, with the increasing number of audience, comes a great responsibility to manage and analyze your online presence and to understand the trends based on which your growth relies. Hence, there is a dire need for social media tools to control and manage your online profiles. These tools can be divided into various categories as per their functionality and purpose. Let us have a look at these categories individually.

1. Social Media Analytics
Analytics tools as the name specify, helps in analyzing your social media presence including factors and numbers such as the total number of followers, likes and engagement activity of the audience. It gives an insight into the complete online activity in terms of the brand as well as its followers. These tools help the page owners understand their audience better and provide the brands with an opportunity to understand the results offering them a chance to improve their output based on those results. Some common examples of analytical tools include Google analytics and Pagelever.
Listening tools such as Radian 6, Brandwatch and Synthesio are online listening tools which extract and filter online conversations to understand the voice of the followers.
2. Content Curation
Content plays a major role in any Social Media platform because in the modern day, most people look for smart and simplified content. Based on the quality of content, you popularity levels vary on the online social media platforms. Hence, it is very important to have a well written, structured and organized content source online. Apart from creating, scheduling and publishing content online, content Curation also include finding the right content for your page which can be related to the audience. Engagement tools such as Spredfast and Conversocial help manage workflow and real time execution of plans. But specific content creation tools include Scribblelive and Buddymedia.
3. Social Media Management
These tools are more focused on combined working over multiple platforms for a single brand identity. Since every Social media platform needs to be updated simultaneously, it can become tiresome to manage Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus and all other platforms. Hence, social media management tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite simplify the task by scheduling your posts as per your requirement and publishing them online on each platform without the need to do it manually. These are a necessity considering the large number of platforms and the various types of content which needs to be regularly updated as per the brand requirement.
4. Social Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the newest strategies which have been adopted in the recent times. Approaching influential people with a large following to attract more customers helps reach out to a larger and wider audience and not necessarily the target audience. Several tools like Topsy, FollowerWonk and BuzzSumo are all based on a search algorithm to look for people from a specific field with the largest amount of followers. These tools can help you find influential people who might be able to find you the right set of people and spread out the word.
5. Social Advertising
While branding online on Social Media seems simplified, there are several things which need to be kept in mind. Getting to the target audience can be tough if it is not wide enough and finding the right set of people for your product can prove to be challenge. Hence, paid advertising on different platform needs to be availed to increase your outreach and get the word out into the right set of people. Sponsored updates on LinkedIn and Paid boosters on Facebook are common examples of this type of social advertising feature which promotes your post to a specified group of people who might be interested in your offerings.
6. Content Marketing
Marketing your online content is very important because no matter how good the content is, until and unless it reaches the target audience, you will not generate any results. Based on the online market, several platforms have been designed to help you market your content and get it delivered to the right set of audience. Tools like Curata CMP, Percolate, Newscred and Kapost allows marketers to collaborate, distribute and get an analysis of all the content within a single platform hence resulting in better lead generation and better output.
7. Social Commerce
While Social Media is a good platform to engage customers and promote the brand, it is also one of the leading platforms to generate commercial activities on Social Media. Facebook is the leader when it comes to social commerce with more and more number of brands rising through the platform. A lot of customized goods as well as clothing and Décor are being sold. Other examples of social commerce include Polyvore, Pinterest, Twitter and even Reddit.
8. Social Media Monitoring
While social media monitoring is similar to management, monitoring your social media platform is more specific and is focused on the current trends online as well as your current performance. These two are then compared to create a better working plan. Social Media Monitoring takes into account region wise analysis as well as several other factors including the age factor of the audience, activity time and content preference. These tools help get an insight and understand better the working of your brand page.

So, with the advancement in the Social Media platforms, it is necessary to start utilizing these apps to simplify your online experience and to optimize your results in a more efficient way!