What do you get when you combine news, microblogging, a public forum, and a bird? Ok, the bird is a thing of the past, but we're confident you knew we were talking about X. We may still find ourselves calling it Twitter (as in Twitter marketing tools) or saying "scheduling Tweets," but what is undeniable is the platform's continued influence.
X is a marketing powerhouse, and companies successfully conversing in its threads often find themselves surrounded by loyal followers willing to spend money. Of all the social media platforms, X tolerates chaos well and demands something remarkable in under 240 characters. We've put together the best X (ok, the best Twitter) marketing tools post to help you nail your digital marketing in the new X playground.
What are X (formerly Twitter) marketing tools?
Social media strategy never happens by accident. Instead, marketing tools facilitate a comprehensive plan, as well as the ability to look back over the data to see what worked and what didn't.
Benefits of using X marketing tools
Social media needs careful planning and tracking. Integrating good X tools into your social media workflow can help your team create more efficiently.
Time-saving and automation
The microblogging site moves quickly, and unlike other social media platforms, users tend to favor posting multiple times per day. X can be tough to manage manually, especially when there's an overarching brand message to get across. Users land all over the world, and the conversations continue 24/7.
An automation tool helps you schedule multiple posts and sometimes automate replies to certain comments, so your marketing team can handle higher-order tasks. This can be a lifesaver, especially when you're able to see your posts mocked up across a singular calendar.
Increased engagement
When you can create content and distribute it strategically as you post, you're more likely to see greater engagement and potentially new followers. Using a mix of interactive content such as polls gently encourages others to interact with the thread, while research tools provide helpful insights into trending topics and hashtags.
Marketing tools also enable you to optimize other parts of your content, such as creating better visuals, images, and graphics. Plus, you can easily repurpose old content for new posts on the X platform or cross-post popular posts on multiple platforms. Each time you create engaging content, you create an opportunity to improve your website traffic and or drive traffic to another location.
Improved analytics
X offers paid users some basic analytics, but marketing tools can provide deeper audience insights and more detailed analytics for organic and paid posts. These insights help future campaigns reach your target audience more efficiently and maximize engagement because you're ultimately creating what users want to see.
Marketing tools will often provide key metrics beyond what you can get with a free tool. You can listen to relevant conversations and segment your audience to target posts. You can track engagement and automate social media tasks based on actionable insights from your dashboard.
Better content strategy
What are this week's trending hashtags? Are there events or conversations happening where your company needs to participate? What's the temperature of your brand mentions? If you can get clear answers to questions like these, you can refine your marketing efforts to better match what your audience wants to see.
These tools offer more advanced features to manage one or multiple accounts efficiently. In some cases, you'll see your content on the calendar with a bird's-eye view of your X feed alongside other social media platforms. With communication happening within the same dashboard, you'll have versioning and approvals in an efficient workflow.
Top X marketing tools for your business
Let's take a look at your best X marketing tool lineup.
1. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an official partner of X, which provides you with a few distinct advantages. First, you'll gain access to the X Firehose, a treasure trove of past data that includes basically everything. You can search posts in real time, set up keyword parameters for analysis, and explore your audience based on things like social panels and affinities. An AI-powered sentiment analysis feature gives you a clearer idea of your brand's reputation on the platform.
Additionally, Brandwatch offers a full-suite publishing tool where you can design content and set it aside for approvals. Once everyone has signed off, you can schedule posts one at a time or set up a queue. Shared libraries and a unified calendar make it easier to see what content can be repurposed, and how it will all look on your feed. Once posts go live, a unified communications dashboard makes it easier to interact with and respond to audience replies and messages.
As your strategy matures, you can measure content effectiveness and benchmark yourself against competitors with the analytics dashboard. You'll understand how both paid and organic content performs and expand your efforts through a dedicated influencer portal.
2. X Analytics (native)
X Analytics provides robust analytics for the performance of your profile across multiple KPIs. You can measure content performance and conduct hashtag research to identify trends. You can customize the dashboard to show the KPIs you care about and perform time-based analysis to see how your metrics change over time.
X Analytics is available for premium users and provides valuable insights into X data, but doesn't contain any scheduling or creation features for your broader workflow.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers a dashboard with multiple tools to make planning, scheduling, and measuring easier. It includes a tool to organize and schedule posts to improve consistency and dashboards to measure important KPIs like impressions and reach. Social listening tools help you determine what others are saying about your brand on the platform.
Multiple team members can collaborate on this process through a single dashboard view that also includes a section to manage messages.
4. Buffer
Buffer is another scheduling tool with access to analytics for past performance and benchmarking against competitors. It also offers good advice for when to post based on historical data. These options are easily visualized through a range of times, and you can quickly choose the best time as you're scheduling posts to go live.
Team members can collaborate on not only X content but across other social media platforms. Customizable dashboards bring the most important metrics to the front and make it easier to communicate important details to everyone on the team.
5. Sprout Social
Sprout Social's unified inbox makes sure all messages appear in a single place, which helps improve response times. You can plan and schedule posts and track mentions, which puts performance data in context.
You can customize analytics for posts and audiences, and analyze campaigns based on a number of metrics. These capabilities also help put individual posts in the context of the overarching campaign and goals for the company.
6. Twitonomy
Twitonomy gives you in-depth insights into various KPIs, including post analytics and follower insights. You can research trending hashtags and measure their performance to help you determine the best strategy. Competitor monitoring helps you uncover gaps in their strategy and places where your own strategy needs to improve.
Additionally, an influencer identification feature allows you to identify potential partnerships that align with your business's mission and message. Plus, social media managers can use customizable reports to pass on insights to any relevant stakeholders and leaders.
7. Keyhole
Keyhole lets you monitor conversations happening about your brand and analyze them to provide actionable insights into your X strategy. This includes sentiment analysis and competitor benchmarking so you can see how your brand measures up within the context of a larger ecosystem.
It also provides real-time reporting on the metrics that matter to you through an easy-to-read dashboard. You can customize it to show the information that's most important to your immediate goals or overall campaign direction.
8. Agorapulse
Agorapulse enables bulk actions, which can be really helpful for companies managing multiple accounts. This includes bulk reposts and replies. Multiple team members can collaborate on content scheduling and management and generate advanced reports to demonstrate the performance of certain campaigns.
Social listening tools offer a clear view of what others are saying about your company online and can give you a heads-up about any problems that might be simmering.
9. Brand24
Brand24 is a comprehensive social listening tool. It performs sentiment analysis and tracks what people are saying about your brand, even across unlinked mentions. It can help you identify the most relevant hashtags to use and identify influencers already talking about you for potential collaborations.
You'll be able to generate various reports, set up monitoring for certain hashtags, or track specific campaigns.
10. SocialBee
SocialBee is a marketing tool designed to ease the process of creating and scheduling posts. You can create multiple versions of posts to test what works best and use SocialBee's AI features to help generate quality content quickly.
It will suggest the best posting times based on your audience's active hours and features a scheduling tool with a content calendar and hashtag suggestions.
11. Talkwalker
The real-time features of Talkwalker give users a chance to see how conversations and trends unfold. You can get real-time data to make decisions to pivot campaigns and see how others are responding to your brand and content. It also allows you to analyze images and videos to see how your brand is represented.
Additional tools include influencer identification, campaign tracking, and competitive analysis. These reports give you an opportunity to collaborate with others and develop campaigns that differentiate your brand from those in your industry.
12. RiteTag
RiteTag is a hashtag-specific tool designed to improve the way you tag your posts. It helps you identify relevant hashtags by suggesting options based on what's trending and what's relevant to your brand. It gives you performance insights into specific hashtags and uses a color-coded system to indicate potential reach and engagement.
You can set custom-branded hashtags and get real-time updates on how they're doing, or use the tool to suggest relevant options based on the content of your post.
13. SocialPilot
SocialPilot handles the entire X process, from creating to monitoring. You can bulk-schedule posts and visualize upcoming content through a central calendar. It includes features for social listening and tracking key metrics like impressions.
Multiple team members can collaborate on content through a single dashboard, with communication and approvals all in one place. Social listening features help you monitor conversations to understand how people perceive your brand on the platform and to help you mitigate any negative sentiment.
How to choose the right tool for your X marketing strategy
Choosing the right marketing tools can improve your marketing efforts on X and tell you more about what your audience really wants. Consider these factors to make the right decision.
Consider a wider social media marketing strategy
X is only part of a larger social media strategy. Since X can be a powerful marketing tool to send users to other media, such as a website or YouTube channel, you need a tool that'll let you manage multiple platforms from a single dashboard. This way, you can begin to see connections between these accounts and your activities on X.
A comprehensive tool will let you manage your marketing campaigns and content scheduling for several platforms at once. This gives your marketing greater depth and cohesion.
Know your budget
In a perfect world, you'd have an unlimited budget to try out all the features you didn't know you needed. However, marketing budgets are rarely unlimited. The first thing to do is make a list of nonnegotiable features you need to make your X marketing easier. Then, consider your budget against the potential return on investment to determine if it's a sound decision.
Research user-friendliness and key features
If you've got a marketing team, you'll need to consider what happens when someone changes positions or leaves the company. If you're a team of one, as many new businesses are, think about how easy it would be for you to expand. Tools with a user-friendly interface help minimize the strain of changes in the department because you'll hopefully reduce the training time for new members.
Additionally, the tool should have features that cover the gaps in your current workflow. Some key features to think about are:
- Post scheduling and automation: One of the biggest struggles social media teams have is staying on top of consistent posting. The sheer volume of posts can overwhelm even a multi-team agency, so scheduling, especially in bulk, smooths out the chaos. Ideally, the tool would also tell you the best times to post for the most engagement.
- Analytics and reporting: You cannot make decisions without understanding your past performance. Period. Make sure that the tool provides you with detailed insights into the KPIs that matter most to your team, whether that's engagement rates, follower growth, or content performance. Customizable reporting capabilities can help you track key metrics that are most important for your company, and not what the tool thinks you care about.
- Engagement tools: Many marketers have noted that good personalization results in better customer experiences and retention. One of the most effective ways to personalize social media for your audience is by responding to messages and comments 1) as if everyone is a real person and 2) with contextually appropriate responses. An engagement tool will put all your interactions into one dashboard, so your team can see who has responded and understand the hierarchy of importance.
- Content management: Some tools offer content libraries or integration with media storage solutions, making it easier to organize and retrieve media files. Look for features that support collaboration, such as content approval workflows or team activity tracking.
- Campaign management: If you run multiple marketing campaigns, look for features that let you segment them to deploy and monitor separately. This might include tracking specific hashtags, managing ad spend, or looking at audience reactions. An overall view is great, but having the chance to analyze different campaigns separately can keep the success of one from masking the underperformance of another.
- Audience targeting: Granular audience data and segmentation enable better personalization (remember when we mentioned that above?) and give you the chance to target based on different factors like behavior tracking or use predictive analytics to forecast trends. If you operate across borders, this can also give you the opportunity to fine-tune campaigns based on those demographics.
- Compliance and security: You need to check the regulations for any tool you're using, but in social media, data privacy is a high priority. Your chosen tool needs to abide by all of the policies of X itself, as well as regional and federal regulations. The terms of service should outline all these specifically, and they must be easy to find.
- Integration capabilities: The tool's ability to integrate with other software in your marketing tech stack (like CRM systems, email marketing platforms, or customer support tools) can significantly streamline workflows and data consistency across platforms.
- Scalability and reliability: The tool should be able to handle an increase in workload and users as your company grows. Look for platforms known for consistent performance and reliability, as any downtime can impact your marketing activities.
Conclusion
Choosing a great marketing tool can reduce the silos and confusion of managing multiple social media accounts. X moves quickly and produces a lot of interactions, but a comprehensive marketing tool can help teams determine the hierarchy of tasks and make decisions that improve outcomes in the future.
Frequently asked questions
How can enterprises leverage X marketing tools?
Enterprises can leverage these to improve how consistent they are in publishing content, maintaining brand voice, and reaching potential customers. Great tools include in-depth analytics to ensure decisions come from a logical place instead of using guesswork. They also centralize communications between team members.
Both of these features reduce a lot of the struggle in implementing social media campaigns because members can collaborate and make better decisions.
Can you use multiple X marketing tools together?
Yes, as long as tools integrate well, you can use several tools together. However, it's better to have a single tool that covers everything you need across your entire social media marketing ecosystem so that you can reduce complexity. Using a single tool also minimizes the risk of paying for duplicate features.
Are these tools compliant with X's terms of service?
Reputable marketing tools will comply with X's terms of service, but it's always a good idea for businesses to review compliance and any updates in X's terms of service regularly. Tool developers often work closely with X to ensure their software respects user privacy and platform rules.
Can X marketing tools help with audience growth?
Yes, marketing tools centralize communications onto a single dashboard and make it easier to track which conversations and content have the biggest priority. When companies respond quickly to user comments and messages, this can help strengthen the relationship. Additionally, tools with good analytics help companies determine what content works best for their audience's needs.
Do you need technical skills to use a social media management tool?
Social media management tools should be easy to integrate, use, and update. Otherwise, they're only hindering your social media efforts. The right tool reduces the complexity required to run campaigns across social media platforms and measure the outcomes.
The best choices often come with intuitive interfaces, drag-and-drop features, and extensive support resources such as tutorials, live training, and customer support teams to ease the burden of adopting the tool.
