Once you’ve mastered the basics of Social Media Marketing and your journey progresses, you come across a wealth of tools and resources designed to help you discover (and create) great content, focus it at the right people and grow your following.

How many times have you seen posts like “Best X Social Media Automation Tools” or “Top X Tools to Boost Your Productivity”? Hundreds, I bet. And yes, I see the irony, considering the title of this post!

Most tools fall broadly into these 4 categories:

• Content Discovery : Post, News and Blog Aggregators
• Productivity : Scheduling and Automation Tools
• Content Optimisation : Hashtag, Keyword and Content Analysers
• Growth Hacking : Audience and Traffic Builders

For your Marketing to be as effective as possible, you will need at least one tool from each category. Here ‘s a quick round-up of my favourite 6 at the moment that cover all the bases.

I stumbled across Crate during a recent hunt for new content sources and it has quickly become a favourite. Crate gives you tailored content suggestions based on your favourite Websites, Blogs and Twitter Users, as well as the more usual keywords and hashtags.

You can post straight to Twitter, either immediately or scheduled, and it also integrates beautifully with Buffer, pushing content direct to your queue. It even lets you view and manage your Buffer Queue directly. What more do you need?

If you haven’t tried Buffer yet, it’s covered further down. It’s really easy to build a queue of great content using Crate and Buffer together, so give it a try!

When I started the enqore Twitter account, I began by posting content to help other new businesses, frequently using the hashtags ‘#startups’ and ‘#entrepreneur’.More recently, I’ve been covering about a wider set of topics, including Marketing Strategies, SEO and Growth Hacking, so I needed to find appropriate hashtags to make sure I reached the right audiences.

Hashtagify.me is my go-to tool of choice for all things ‘hashtag’. If I’m posting about a new topic or want to test out different tags to vary the audience or see what gets most attention, it’s straight over to Hashtagify.me.

It’s really simple to use. Type in a hashtag and you see a beautiful representation of related hashtags and their relative popularity. It shows the main Influencers for each hashtag you select, usage information and historical trends, as well as a list of current ‘breaking’ hashtags.

Buffer comes up time and time again in these lists. If you don’t know, it’s an extremely popular and well-established productivity tool for scheduling and automating posts to multiple Social Media Accounts.

To be honest, I started off using HootSuite for scheduling my posts, but Buffer has finally won me over. I love that is it focused completely on the job of scheduling and does it extremely well. First you connect your accounts, set up a posting schedule for each of them and then start adding content. You build up a ‘queue’ of content for each account which gets trickled out one post at a time, according to the schedule set. I tend to add 10-20 posts at a time, which are posted out over the next couple of days. It’s a fantastic time saver and very easy to use.

You can also search through previous posts and add them back to the queue, perfect if you want to keep reposting important content.

If you’ve not tried Buffer yet, give it a go with Crate. You can thank me later 😉

Social Quant is a fantastic Growth Hacking tool. It’s trusted and professional, with high profile logos on its front page, including Forbes, Entrepreneur.com and HubSpot.

It’s Unique Selling Point is targeting real people genuinely interested in the type of content you post, who are more likely to actively engage. I’ve no idea how they do it, but it WORKS. It’s as close to ‘organic’ growth as you can get, just ‘hacked’ so it happens quicker.

I started off with a measly 200 followers and after 1 week of the free trial I was well over 400! That was a staggering 100% growth rate in only 7 days, with virtually no effort on my part. My wife got so annoyed with ‘new follower’ notifications constantly going off on my phone, she made me put it on silent! Of course, it’s not all about the numbers, the quality of followers is also important. Again, Social Quant does a fantastic job with this. Sure, there are a few exceptions, but overall the followers I’ve gained are either influential or genuinely engaged in the topics I post about.

So it works. How exactly? BIG DATA and clever techy stuff apparently. Will I be signing up for a premium account when my trial runs out? Probably…

Give the free 2-week trial a go. You won’t regret it. If nothing else, you’ll get a load more followers for free!

Sumo (Used to be called SumoMe) is an extremely popular set of tools you install on your website to monitor traffic and usage, build email lists,engage people and help them share your content.

To give you an idea of what it can do… Have you noticed how many websites use the following three techniques to encourage Visitors to share content or sign up with their email address?

Social Sharing Panels typically appear on the left for larger screens or at the bottom for mobile screens. They let Visitors share the current page to a number of different sources, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, PInterest, Buffer and many more too numerous to mention.

Subscriber Popups usually appear shortly after landing on a page, asking you to enter your details to join a Mailing List and often offering a ‘free gift’ as an incentive.

All three of these ‘techniques’ are actually Sumo apps that are simple to install on your website. As your site traffic increases, they build up your Marketing email list and help Visitors spread your content. Subscriber Popups (Actually called ‘List Builders’) and Welcome Mats also easily integrate with popular email marketing tools, such as MailChimp, allowing you to trigger automatic Welcome Emails or Newsletters for Subscribers.

Sumo also includes several Analytics apps for monitoring Visitor Counts and Page Bounce Rates, as well as Heat Maps showing where people have clicked to help you improve your site design. It’s basically built-in Google Analytics!

Head over to the Sumo site and try out these great apps for free.

Last, but not least, the final must-have tool is Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule. This helps you create engaging titles for your blog posts (or tweets!).

Simply enter a title you want to use and it assesses various aspects of it, such as the readability, the balance of words used (Common, Uncommon, Emotional or Power words) and a lot more besides. Beautifully presented, easy to understand and great for making sure your titles get people’s interest and make them want to read more.

For the best results, CoSchedule recommend a rating of 70 or more, so play around with your titles until you get a decent score with a reasonable balance of words.

CoSchedule also offer a free download of over 180 Power words that help boost the rating, if you can find a way to include them.

There are thousands of developers and startup companies out there creating great new tools all the time, so please post a comment if you know of any better alternatives. I’d love to hear about them!

In the meantime, I hope you’ve learned a little something at least and will find some of these tools useful. I wish you the very best of luck on your Marketing quest!