Social marketing is a beast to tame. From understanding the audience to keeping them engaged and benchmarking the results, the entire road is filled with pitfalls and landmines. Social is one marketing domain where smart work clearly trumps hard work.

Marketing campaigns are all about trial and error. Failing fast is always alright. However, you’ll need a bunch of metrics to benchmark and the right set of tools to track them to know if you are on the right track or not.  

After rounding up a list of web apps to measure and make sense of web traffic, we thought a list of apps for Social Media analytics and management would be of great help to small and medium businesses. Here we ago:

SocialBro

SocialBro is among one of the very few social apps that can be called as a standalone Twitter marketing platform. They don’t leave any stone unturned when it comes to Twitter analytics and actionable insights.

The clarity in their user experience and the workflow is clearly lacking when it comes to pricing. You’ll be charged on the basis of how many users you follow and how many people are following you.

If you are tracking competitors, then their follower and friends count will also be taken into account when it comes to pricing!

There is a free desktop version of the app for you to give it a try. I can’t help but notice how identical their logo is when compared to Buffer’s!

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is an app from the house of Moz. It’s focuses on only one thing - helping you understand your audience. The app digs deeper into Twitter analytics and finds the common thread that connects your audience.

If you want to know who are your followers are, where are they located, the time at which they tweet among other such questions, then Followerwonk is the app to go with.

There is a basic free plan which gives decent analytics. If you buy a Moz app, you can get access to the pro version of Followerwonk.

Social Rank

Social Rank analyzes how valuable your followers are. It has a clean layout and the way they present the reports are amazing. The app essentially gives brands an opportunity to reward followers who are influential and engage with the brand often, constructively.

The free version of Social Rank is limited to list of 10 most valued followers and the most engaged followers. And, this report can be generated once a month. To get rid of these limitations you’ll have to subscribe to their $25 a month premium plan.

Tweepi

Are you very particular about unfollowing people who stop following you? Try Tweepi and you’ll know which accounts have to be kicked off from your list of friends. That’s not just the app is capable of.

It gives a list of people who need follow back love and is a great tool to unfollow accounts that have not been active or haven’t been engaging in productive conversation for a while.

The app has a free tier, but for extreme Twitter cleanup, you might have to go with the $7.49 monthly plan.

Tweet4me

Buffer is the reigning king of the social media scheduling landscape. Tweet4me is an interesting take on tweet scheduling. You can schedule Tweets from any Twitter client! Isn’t that great?

Sign up for an account and send a direct message with a prefix that tells the app when you want to schedule the Tweet. Tweet4me will schedule the tweet and when the time comes, they’ll post it and send you a push notification. Tweet4me is free to use!

Need Tagger

Search isn’t one of the strong suits of Twitter. Even with hashtags, the search results that Twitter delivers are chaotic and all over the place. Need Tagger capitalizes on this shortcoming and is pitching itself as a tool for you to find the right people.

Using powerful natural language filters in combination with the keywords that you supply, Need Tagger identifies people on Twitter that need your products, services, content and advice. Pro plans start at $19.95.

Favstar

Favorite tweets are the Twitter equivalent of dark horses. They are a compromise between retweeting and not giving a tweet that’s good, but not retweet worthy its due. The problem is, by design it’s hard to see how many people have favorited a tweet.

Favstar solves that problem. It is the leaderboard - literally and figuratively - for favorite tweets. It’s a great place to discover popular new tweets. There are quite a few creative filters available to locate the tweets that are making waves in Twitterverse.

Twtrland

Twtrland  visualizes social footprints to help you discover new people, understand their impact and find better ways to connect and increase your network. Their heavily visual interface with a generous dose of colorful charts breaks down insights in an easy to consume format.

Despite its misleading name, Twtrland is an app that gives you advanced insights on how your brand can improve on multiple social networks - Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

They have a free personal plan, but, to avail the business dashboard you’ll to choose a plan that starts from $19.95.

Topsy

Frankly speaking, it usually takes a good few minutes to understand what a social app does. The descriptions and the copy are usually filled with ambitious and ambiguous jargon. Well, it wasn’t the case with Topsy.

It’s Google inspired design clearly establishes that Topsy is a social search engine. The search results are pretty decent and the ability filter tweets that images and videos attached to them is an impressive addition.

RivalIQ

Manually tracking and analyzing the social marketing activity of your competition is not time well spent. The sheer volume of tweets and the real time nature of the conversation makes manual data collection obsolete.

RivalIQ tries to bridge that gap. It constantly monitors your competition, gathers and analyzes data so key insights like how often they tweet, what topics their cover, how wide their reach is are laid bare in a single click. Starting at $99 a month, RivalIQ’s paid plans are on the pricier side!

Tweetreach

The USP of Tweetreach is the way it presents the reach of your tweets in a crisp and concise format. All the vital insights that you need to know about the effectiveness of a Twitter marketing campaign is presented in one, neatly laid out page.

The estimated reach and exposure count might not be extremely helpful in real world scenarios. However, top contributors, most retweeted tweets etc. and the option to export them in popular file formats should be really helpful. At $84 a month, the pro plans are on the costlier side though!

Klout

A list of social media apps is never complete without adding Klout to the list. It started out as a Twitter reach measurement tool and is still doing a great job at that. To make things more interesting, Klout has expanded into the content curation and suggestion game as well.

Their content suggestion engine is extremely useful and the content filters do a great job digging up interesting pieces of content for your audience. Taking things one step further, the app lets you schedule the content to be tweeted at a time of your choice!

Agora Pulse

To balance a Twitter heavy list to some extent, we have Agora Pulse. The app offers a number tools to make your Facebook presence far more engaging than it currently is. With Agora Pulse, you can attract more fans to your page and engage them with fully customizable viral applications.

A real time dashboard tracks the engagement levels and compares them with your competitors side by side. The built in moderation capability should help your community management efforts as well.

Twitfox

The functionality of Twitfox might fall in a gray area if you go by Twitter API guidelines. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting effort that has cornered a niche of its own.

By auto favoriting tweets from topics that you specify, the app plays a key role in facilitating people to engage in a conversation. Their free plan allows you to favorite 5 tweets a day. Beyond that, you’ll have to pay up!

Respondly

Respondly is an interesting hybrid between a helpdesk and Twitter management app. The app makes it possible for teams to share a single inbox. It doesn’t matter if it’s an email inbox or a Twitter timeline, your team can access and respond to customers from a single account.

Unfortunately, their website is extremely secretive about the featureset. The demo video offers a sneak peek though. If you are interested, plans start at $9 per month!