Gear up with the best Instagram marketing tools for your business.
We’ve got some of the best tools ranging from free and paid options to help you achieve your social media marketing goals.
Below you’ll find handy tools for IG stories, Stories, hashtags, feed curation, photo editing tools, reposting, and more.
A solid social media presence is now a must-have for modern brands. It’s an essential part of digital marketing that lets brands grow awareness, generate leads, and connect with the audience. This is a great place to get feedback and provide further assistance with your existing customers as well.
There are three different kinds of tools when it comes to social media. Each type has a unique purpose for you to stay on top of your game. They are the following.
- Listening platforms - These are platforms for you to find out what people are saying about your brand online. It lets you in on relevant news and trends in your industry too.
- Publishing platforms - This type of tool lets you streamline posting and sharing your content on different social media platforms at once. You can also use this for scheduling.
- Competitive analysis platforms - This tool will let you track metrics from your profile and your competitors as well. The data you gather here is excellent for reports and strategy.
Familiarizing yourself with them gives you a chance to make sure you have your bases covered. Now that we’ve got that out of our way, we can start learning about the IG tools you shouldn’t miss.
Let’s get started.
VSCO
VSCO is an app developed by the Visual Supply Company, released in 2011. This app allows users to edit photos and videos before posting them on social media. It comes with free and paid presets that will let you transform your images and make them more creative. But it also has features that let people explore content from other users.
Social Status
Social Status is a dedicated social media analytics tool specializing in reports and dashboards. Full Instagram analytics are available in Social Status including posts, Reels, Instagram Stories, demographics, follower growth, and more. Social Status can also be used to track and benchmark against competitors on Instagram and even report on Instagram influencer campaigns. Reports can be white-labeled and exported to multiple formats.
Analytics tools like this can help in optimizing your social media strategy which can be used to generate leads.
SocialPilot
The social media marketing tool lets companies stay on top of their online presence. It also has features for analytics, scheduling, and publishing posts. Brands can connect their accounts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Google My Business, and other platforms.
SocialBee is a comprehensive social media marketing tool for managing Instagram accounts. Its features include an AI post generator, Canva, Unsplash, and Giphy integrations, as well as performance metrics tracking.
With SocialBee, you can create, schedule and share single images, carousels, videos, reels, and stories. With its unified inbox feature, the tool also enhances Instagram community management by enabling users to track and respond to all comments and mentions from a single location.
Buffer
Buffer is a tool that you can use on your phone and on the web. Its main feature centers on post engagement and post scheduling. Top brands like Microsoft, Business Insider, and Basecamp, among others, use this for their campaigns. It also offers 24/7 support on its email and social media platforms.
Iconosquare
The management tool is another platform for management, scheduling, and analytics. Iconosquare offers solutions for both small businesses and enterprises. You can pick the plan that best fits your goals and resources at the moment. The tool also comes with a competitor tracking feature to give you an idea of how they’re doing. It offers a 14-day free trial.
HashtagsforLikes
Get a methodological approach to finding hashtags to broaden the reach of your posts. This hashtag research tool lets you expand your audience quality tags. You can grow your reach by using HashtagsforLikes to discover relevant hashtags, suggestions and track your results. It’s a tool that you can use to further optimize your Instagram and TikTok posts.
Later
Later is a platform that you can use for different applications. It has features for planning, analyzing, and publishing posts. The tool started out as a dedicated tool for scheduling Instagram posts. Brands like Showtime, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company use this tool for their strategy.
Sked Social
Sked Social is a tool for brands that want to get the most out of Instagram. With leading Instagram scheduling features (like auto-scheduling for Stories and Carousels), as well as analytics, user-generated content sourcing, and the ability to cross-post to all social media platforms, the platform is designed to get your visual social content seen everywhere.
ShortStack
Shortstack has features for giveaways, contests, coupon codes, and other features. It’s a tool that you can use for events to engage more followers. Plus, the digital marketing platform lets you create mini websites and access its library of design templates that you can work with. The tool is designed for use by small businesses, enterprises, and agencies. It comes with both a free and paid version.
Awario
Awario is the tool that you can use to track real-time mentions. It’s one of the top social media listening tools today. The tool crawls 13 billion pages daily. You can use the tool for market research, sales, reach out, and more. Companies can monitor channels such as YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and news using the tool.
Socialinsider
Sociainsider is a tool that brands can use to discover insights and generate reports. It comes with a 14-day free trial. This social media tool can also be used for content analysis, ad analytics, and competitor research. Companies can use this tool for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Unfold
Unfold is the toolkit for storytellers. It’s a handy tool that you can use to craft Instagram Stories. The website has over 300 templates that you can use for the content format. Your designs can be shared to other platforms, such as TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Facebook. The tool offers a premium membership plan with perks such as added templates, more extensive font libraries, and early access to collections.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse was founded in 2011. It is a social media management software for publishing, listening, analytics, and unifying your inbox. You can access its features in a dashboard. Plus, the platform has plans for small businesses and agencies. It offers a 30-day free trial.
Kicksta
Kicksta is an Instagram follower tool. You can use it to get more followers and bring more awareness to your company. It lets you generate real followers and auto-engage with their posts. The platform also has other features such as a hashtag generator and engagement calculator to help boost your account.
Picodash
Get into influencer marketing with this tool. Picodash is an IG search engine with social media management features. You can get data to help you create an improved IG strategy. It also lets you download followers and filter them using the document the tool will send to your email. You can classify followers by hashtags, location, and other factors to create specific content.
Smartly.io
Founded in Finland, the platform has been available to the market since 2013. It is used by established companies such as Uber and eBay. The tool allows users to automate ads. It offers managed services and creative services for your needs. The platform will enable you to post content across various platforms like Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and more.
Repost for Instagram
Repost for Instagram is a reposting tool that you can use to share user-generated content without watermarks. This is a free app for reposting both images and videos. You can also use this to download content straight from Instagram. The pro version of the app also has features for scheduling posts.
Vista Social
Vista Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that lets you do more for less. Brands and agencies have saved 70% on their SMM tool budget using their platform over others. With Vista Social, you can schedule social media posts, measure performance, customize reports, manage online reviews, moderate comments and messages, and monitor conversations with social listening.
Birdeye Social AI
Birdeye Social AI is a social media platform built for local and multi-location businesses. With BirdAI, you can generate engaging, brand-aligned content, schedule posts at optimal times, and track performance across Instagram and other channels — all from a single dashboard. Personalize content for each location, manage approvals, and respond to DMs and comments from a unified inbox. With Instagram analytics, competitor benchmarking, and performance reporting by location, Birdeye makes it easy to grow and manage your Instagram presence at scale.
Capsulink
If you’re serious about sending your Instagram followers to the right place at the right time, Capsulink’s Smart Links might just be your new best friend. Unlike basic shorteners, Capsulink lets you route each user to a personalized landing page based on their country, language, device, or even time of day, perfect for geo-targeted product drops or language-specific promotions.
You can also generate QR codes for video content, making your Reels and Stories instantly shoppable. Want to create a clean, branded link-in-bio page? Capsulink covers that too, with the added bonus of being able to personalize every link it hosts. Whether you're a creator, a marketer, or managing multiple brands, this tool brings serious flexibility to your Instagram strategy.
Conclusion
The websites and apps in this list make for great additions to your arsenal of social media tools.
You can use them to improve your presence in this app with over 1 billion monthly active users, a significant fraction of which follows at least one brand.
This list of tools will allow you to work efficiently and produce more remarkable results. Additionally, you can partner with Instagram marketing agencies. These agencies specialize in growing brand awareness, generating leads, and connecting with your audience effectively on Instagram. There’s another thing that you can do to become a more iconic account on social media. You can pair your content with stunning graphic design and wow your followers.
Here’s how you can do that.
Crowdsource designs on DesignCrowd. It’s a platform that you can use to start a design contest. Post your brief and wait for its community of freelance graphic designers to submit design bids into your inbox. You can use this for T-shirt design, flyer design, and other graphic design projects.
The BrandCrowd maker has a great tool to help you create social media posts in minutes. Its library has different designs that you can customize to match your brand’s message. There are templates for events, product launches, sales, and more. You can also explore its other tools like the logo maker and business card maker. Try it right here.
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Written by DesignCrowd on Tuesday, July 13, 2021
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.
