Social media is the best thing to happen to marketing and brand promotion since the invention of the celebrity endorsement. Whereas other methods of marketing simply broadcast a message out, social media gives your target audience the means to engage with your brand. From clicking links for your site, to leaving comments, to sharing your content with their own social circles, there are a variety of meaningful ways your audience can participate. 
Audience engagement on social media is an important aspect of digital marketing. But it can also be a difficult proposition. If you manage several different accounts across multiple platforms, it can be difficult even to post on them all regularly, much less keep track of the responses each post is getting. Fortunately, there are solutions. There are a number of online engagement tools available that can make social media management easier and more productive. Here are five of the top tools to measure content engagement.
Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a dashboard that lets you monitor all of your various social media accounts from a single location. It helps you pinpoint the best times to reach your target audience. It also lets you schedule content to be posted automatically, so that you can reach a wider selection of your followers, on different schedules or in different time zones, without having to stick by your computer 24/7. It helps you organize and respond to feedback from your various accounts, and monitor conversations about your brand, all from a single platform. And, it also lets you see the impact you’re having with each post: how many people are commenting, sharing, or otherwise engaging with it over time. So you can tell exactly how well each post is doing on each platform it’s posted.
Alerti. It’s important to know what people are saying about your brand online. If it’s good, you want to be able to share the message with your other followers. If it’s bad, you want to be able to respond to the situation and do damage control, before it harms your brand’s reputation. However, unless someone is directly tagging your account on Facebook or Twitter, it can be difficult to know what they’re saying about you. That’s where Alerti comes in. It continually monitors many different online sources, from social networks to blogs to online press and more, to detect any mentions of your brand. You can then use the platform to interact with your audience on social media, share content they’ve created with your followers, measure levels of engagement, and more. With Alerti, you can be instantly alerted whenever your brand is mentioned online and use it to improve overall engagement.
AddThis. An extremely simple tool, but nonetheless essential. AddThis allows you to add a small social media panel to any page or site, with ways to interact with all of the major social networks. You can add buttons that allow users to share your content to each of the listed networks, or buttons that let them follow you on those networks, with a click. AddThis also has tools that encourage people to sign up for your newsletter, register with your site and engage with your brand in other ways. These are the buttons that you see on every website you visit. If you don’t have them, you’re giving up a lot of potential engagement with your site and content.
Pablo. The simplest explanation of Pablo is that it helps you create memes to share on social media. It’s a slightly more complex tool than that, but in the end that’s what it creates: custom memes to represent your brand on social media. Images always have a higher engagement rate than text and, on networks like Facebook and Instagram, they’re a large part of the way people communicate. Pablo lets you upload an image of your own, or choose from over 50,000 royalty-free images on the site. You can then add text in various fonts, styles, and colors, to create a high quality, visual post that will catch your followers’ attention and facilitate engagement.
RiteTag. There are plenty of tools that can help you track your posts’ engagement. But how can you ensure a post is optimized before it goes live? That’s what RiteTag does. It scans each post you create before it goes up and automatically determines the topic. It then chooses the most popular and visible hashtags to add in order to increase discovery and engagement. RiteTag also offers a variety of other tools and features to help you create better, more engaging content, increase click-through rates, and generally get the most out of your posts.
These are just a few of the top engagement tools for social media management and content creation. Look around, try some of them out, and see which ones best suit your own social media engagement needs. By arming yourself with the right tools and learning the best ways to use them, you can engage with your followers in all sorts of ways.