Social Media Tools that Marketers Love

A recent Forrester report by Nate Elliot indicated that 73% of social relationship marketers wouldn’t recommend the primary vendor or tool they use to manage their branded social profiles. In August, we launched SocialPiq (as a part of our innovation lab, Pointless Corp.) as a simple way to solve this issue and help marketers find social media tools based on their individual preferences.

SocialPiq pairs a user’s needs with the most appropriate tool to meet those needs and prevents the frustration of randomly choosing a tool that ends up being a poor fit. Query options include capabilities, supported social media networks, business scale, and more. After logging thousands of user searches in the past few months, we’re excited to share our findings so far!

Scheduling and publishing were the most frequently searched capabilities

Of all capabilities searched for, scheduling and publishing posts were certainly the most popular choices. Data suggests that frequent social media posting has been shown to lead to more engagement, so it’s not surprising that marketers are looking for ways to easily distribute content in an increasingly fragmented social media environment. However, all available capabilities were selected to some degree, which tells us that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for digital marketers in the social media space.

Nearly all searches included multiple social media networks

Nearly all tool capability searches selected multiple social media networks, and most searches included two or more. At this point there are more social media platforms than you can shake a stick at, and SocialPiq supports searches of eight major ones: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Foursquare.

Of these platforms, marketers requested support for Twitter or Facebook most often. These two primary social media networks were present in more than half of all searches.  Requests for ‘secondary’ social media networks were represented in 25%-35% all searches —  these included LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, and YouTube. Finally, the ‘tertiary’ social media networks, which were present in fewer than 25% of searches, might surprise you: Pinterest and Foursquare

Small and medium-sized businesses represent the largest audience segment searching for social media tools

Close to half of marketers are searching for social media tools on behalf of small and medium-sized businesses. Those searching for ‘personal’ use was also high at 28%. Small and medium-sized business are generally categorized as firms with fewer than 500 employees. Combined with ‘solopreneurs,’ these two groups represent half of all U.S. workers based on the most recent census. The other half?: Enterprise Businesses.

Interestingly, requests for Enterprise support made up only 14% of searches on SocialPiq, which means that Enterprise-level marketers are a highly underrepresented group when it comes to looking for social media tools.

Top Tools:

We also track when a visitor navigates to a specific tool. Curious? After thousands of searches, the ten most popular tools by links clicked are:

Want to find the social tool that’s right for you? Try a search on SocialPiq.com!

A BIG thanks to Joseph Le for the above charts and infographic!