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Nov 22, 2024
Managing one LinkedIn profile can be a lot of work, let alone several. LinkedIn tools make your job easier and help you boost your brand’s visibility and lead generation efforts, as well as establish stronger relationships within your niche. These tools can also enhance the decision-making process.
In this article, I’ll show you some of the best tools that will help you streamline your LinkedIn marketing strategy across all fronts. Let’s get to it.
A LinkedIn tool involves applications and features designed specifically to enhance user experience on LinkedIn. These features can include automatic connection requests and follow-ups, account performance analytics, and automated content scheduling. In other words, a LinkedIn tool provides the functionalities necessary to automate specific tasks and provide the data needed to enhance your LinkedIn presence.
Here’s a brief rundown of how you can use LinkedIn tools for marketing:
Ensure your content reaches the right consumer segments by using a specialized tool to target LinkedIn users based on their industry, company size, and seniority levels.
Use a LinkedIn automation tool to schedule numerous posts simultaneously at the right time for maximum engagement. Generate Linkedin hashtags to boost content visibility and use an AI-powered assistant to help with content ideation.
Use a LinkedIn tool to track your account’s follower growth, profile visits, and content performance to gauge your LinkedIn marketing efforts.
These are just some of the ways a LinkedIn tool can help streamline your marketing strategy. Now let’s go through the best LinkedIn tools currently available.
I’ve compiled a list covering tools across various categories to ensure you have all the LinkedIn marketing essentials covered by the time you reach the end of this post.
The B2B space is logic-driven. You’ll need lots of meticulously thought-through content to establish yourself as a thought leader and boost your lead generation strategy. For that, proper content planning is a must, while content collaboration tools are ideal.
Here are my top tools covering just that:
Social media calendar view in Planable
Planable focuses on content collaboration and planning. You can seamlessly craft and schedule posts for LinkedIn and other popular social networks through a straightforward calendar, with the option to organize your content via color-coded labels.
On top of that, you can work on any type of written content you want through its Universal Content feature, like ad copy, email newsletters, blogs, video scripts, and so on.
Planable’s collaboration and customizable approval workflow tools are some of its most notable stand-outs. You can collaborate through direct comments, annotations, and mentions, while the option to set up internal notes and posts is perfect for keeping work away from clients until it’s ready.
Collaboration on a LinkedIn post in Planable
As for workflow types, the platforms offer four of them, with multi-level approvals being the highlight. You can set up multiple approval layers, each containing multiple team members. Your LinkedIn posts won’t get published unless they pass through all the approval levels — ideal for in-depth review processes involving multiple departments.
Key features
Schedule a LinkedIn post with the first comment or publish the same content across multiple networks with Planable’s Sync Content feature. Set up recurring posts and approve content directly in the platform’s calendar view.
Stand out in your audience’s feeds by turning multi-image posts into PDF files with just one click and post LinkedIn carousels directly within Planable.
Make sure your posts reach the right prospects with Planable’s organic targeting feature — select between various filters like industry, company size, seniority level, job function, and more.
Track LinkedIn data (and metrics for other social networks) like follower growth, impressions, page views, and engagement.
Connect personal LinkedIn profiles with your company page to gain complete control over who posts what, when, and where.
Multiple approval levels settings in Planable
Have internal stakeholders or clients approve content so you publish with complete confidence. Choose the type of setting that matches your workflow.
Pricing: Planable starts at $33 per workspace per month (billed annually) with a free plan that allows you to schedule up to 50 posts.
Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform with strong scheduling and analytics capabilities. However, the platform stands out through its built-in social inbox management functionalities.
Sprout Social collects comments from all your social media posts (LinkedIn included) and organizes them into a single straightforward dashboard. The platform also leverages AI-powered sentiment analysis tools to prioritize customer messages based on their tone of voice, while its social CRM makes managing leads a breeze.
Key features
Easily schedule posts to one or more LinkedIn company pages. If you’re looking for a free LinkedIn post maker, consider tools that allow you to craft and schedule posts efficiently. Use audience targeting so your posts reach specific audience segments. Maximize reach and engagement through ideal posting time suggestions.
View all your LinkedIn messages, leave notes, and assign them to team members to quickly address any potential customer issues. Set up inbox alerts to get notified whenever you experience a surge in incoming messages.
Analyze your follower base’s demographics based on job positions and seniority levels. Compare Sponsored Content performance against organic posts and see which content type brings the best results. Track your LinkedIn profile performance as well as your competitors’.
Pricing: Sprout Social starts at $199 per user per month (billed annually), with a 30-day free trial available.
Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media management tool with excellent social advertising functionalities. You can use it to create, deploy, and manage both advertising and boosted post campaigns across multiple social media platforms.
Most notably, the platform identifies high-performing organic posts and automatically turns them into boosted content to put your company on the map.
Key features
Easily deploy paid LinkedIn campaigns and manage multiple accounts directly within the platform. Specify your target audience, set your budget, upload your ad creatives, and you’re done. Set tags on each campaign to monitor its performance in real time.
Plan your content through a drag-and-drop calendar. Get ideal posting time suggestions and leverage Hootsuite’s AI-powered tools to generate hashtags and automatically repurpose posts.
Generate side-by-side reports that compare organic and boosted content performance. Gauge social media performance across all channels simultaneously and set up competitive or industry benchmarks to see how you stack up against others within your niche.
Pricing: Hootsuite starts at $99 per user per month (billed annually) with a 30-day free trial available.
Later is a social media management platform that makes the content production process effortless. You can use its AI-powered assistant to generate content ideas and pillars — a series of sub-topics related to a specific niche — to help creative teams stay on brand and pave the way toward establishing thought leadership.
Later’s AI also generates captions and hashtags, while the platform’s scheduling tool lets you plan LinkedIn video, image, and text-based posts.
Key features
Easily schedule content through a highly intuitive interface — complete with posting time and hashtag suggestions. Add images and videos by dragging and dropping them from the platform’s built-in media library directly onto the calendar.
Use Later’s built-in media editor to tweak images and videos. Trim and resize media as well as add filters and texts directly within the scheduling dashboards — no back-and-forth between menus needed.
Find LinkedIn creators to collaborate with and reach new audiences via Later’s Creator & Brand Collabs program.
Pricing: Later starts at $16.67 per user per month (billed annually), with a 14-day free trial available.
Even with the right scheduling tools, high-quality LinkedIn content can still take a long time to create, which can eventually lead to bottlenecks and delays. So, let’s have a look at some of the best tools that help you speed up content production.
Rewrite with AI feature in Planable
Planable AI is a handy assistant perfect for generating LinkedIn captions. Just specify the content format the AI should create and the ideas you want it to share and that’s it.
Planable AI can also rewrite existing posts to either make them more concise or engaging or expand on specific ideas, which is perfect for streamlining the editing process. Speaking of which, Planable also includes built-in image and video editors. Let’s get into more details.
Key features
Use Planable AI to generate fully-fledged LinkedIn captions or edit existing texts with just a few prompts. Automatically shorten or lengthen texts to streamline content repurposing.
Pick between 13 different video filters, trim, crop, and merge multiple clips. Adjust saturation, brightness, vignetting, exposure, and more to make your videos on-brand. Add texts and other shapes and leave comments via annotations for precise feedback.
Get the same fine-tuning and collaboration capabilities as the platform’s video editor, with the extra option to resize your images and blur specific elements. Easily backtrack through edits via the Undo button or restore the original version with just a click.
Upload creative assets by dragging and dropping them from your computer to Planable’s media library. Browse between used, unused, or deleted media via the platform’s filtering options to find specific files more easily.
Pricing: Planable’s AI and media editing capabilities are available in all of its pricing packages — including the free plan that includes 50 posts.
Canva is a graphics design platform that allows you to create any type of visuals — from prints to logos and social media imagery. As for LinkedIn, Canva streamlines the design process through ample template libraries dedicated to LinkedIn video ads, banners, and regular posts.
Canva also offers numerous AI tools to take most of the grunt work off your hands and the option to collaborate with team members through comments.
Key features
Use the platform’s AI to turn simple prompts into ready-made LinkedIn images and videos. Automatically remove or add specific objects within an image and leverage the platform’s AI assistant to generate on-brand LinkedIn captions.
Create top-notch visuals through a drag-and-drop interface. Streamline the design process through Canva’s extensive library of free stock photos, videos, graphics, and audio. Export files as JPG, PNG, or PDF to format your visuals for the appropriate use cases.
Add visuals to your PDF files to make them more engaging and easy to read through — perfect for sharing case studies or whitepapers on LinkedIn.
Pricing: You can use Canva for free. Paid plans start at $14.99 per user per month (billed monthly).
Adobe Creative Cloud Express is rather similar to Canva. Both platforms offer extensive template libraries for numerous use cases, ample stock media assets, and similar AI-powered tools.
However, Adobe’s free plan offers more features than Canva’s and also covers a few unique functionalities. Some of Adobe’s capabilities include a built-in font library with automated font suggestions, template recommendations, and a free social media scheduler.
Key features
Add animated effects and tweak your photo’s saturation, brightness, and shadows. Resize images in bulk and export them as PNG, PDF, JPEG, and GIF files.
Quickly create videos via a drag-and-drop interface. Record voiceovers directly within the platform and create animated characters via Adobe’s Animate from audio feature. Add transitions and animated texts or imagery to boost video engagement.
Schedule content for LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram through a highly visual interface.
Pricing: There’s a free version available, while paid plans start at $9.99 per user per month (billed monthly).
Thought leadership on LinkedIn requires many ongoing adjustments. You must ensure you’re reaching the right audience segments, the information you share is relevant and helpful, and you don’t fall behind your competition. That involves a lot of data, but the following tools I’ll cover will have your back.
You can use Planable’s analytics for LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The platform’s analytics tool stands out through its easy-to-digest, yet comprehensive insights. You get access to highly visual dashboards covering all the metrics necessary — be it profile visits, engagement rates, impressions, or follower growth.
Planable also delivers an overview of your top-performing content in terms of engagement and impressions. From there, you can zoom in on the details to reveal the type or reactions, number of shares, comments, and clicks each specific post generated.
Key features
Easily monitor metrics like page views and profile follower growth, as well as your LinkedIn boosted and organic posts’ impressions and engagement rates.
Select custom time frames and quickly generate intuitive PDF reports containing graphs, charts, and statistics with just a click. Share reports to external stakeholders directly from the platform.
Get a birds-eye view of all of your posted content along with key metrics like views, comments, or reactions within a single dashboard. Filter between your content via your desired metrics to see which posts need further improvement.
Pricing: Planable’s analytics tool is an extra add-on — it costs $9 per workspace per month (billed monthly).
Keyhole is an all-in-one social media analytics platform that covers social monitoring, influencer tracking, and profile analytics.
However, the platform stands out through its competitor analysis capabilities. You can compare your LinkedIn performance against your competitors’ side-by-side through metrics like engagement or reach.
You can also leverage the platform’s social listening tool to collect all posts containing their brand mentions and take a sneak peek at what your competitors are up to. You can use it to see how their audience engages with the company, the type of influencers they collaborate with, and more.
Key features
Gather in-depth actionable insights about your followers. See which industries they’re active in and their companies’ sizes. You can then adjust your content accordingly and boost your lead generation efforts.
Generate side-by-side comparisons of your social media presence across multiple networks. See which accounts attract the most followers, views, and clicks.
See which LinkedIn hashtags generate the most engagement and how often you should use them via an intuitive dashboard. Leverage Keyhole’s hashtag tracker and machine-learning capabilities to predict whether you’ll achieve your LinkedIn campaign’s goals.
Pricing: Keyhole enables LinkedIn analytics in its Team plan, which costs $141.75 per month (billed annually) for three users. There’s a 14-day free trial for all pricing plans.
Brand24 is a brand reputation management tool that pulls information from LinkedIn as well as other social networks, online forums, and review sites. It can help you determine exactly what your audience thinks about your brand and what factors influence their opinions.
Brand24 is ideal for getting precise insights into how followers perceive your company and whether your thought leadership efforts are paying off, allowing you to quickly address any complaints and questions.
Key features
Identify and filter brand mentions by sentiment (positive, negative, and neutral). Reply to comments directly within the platform. Set up alerts to quickly get notified whenever you receive a surge of negative mentions.
See how much engagement and exposure your company gains from your LinkedIn posts. Stack yourself up against competitors to see which content topics attract the most attention.
Use the platform’s Influence Score to identify brand mentions from users with high authority.
Pricing: Brand24 starts at $79 per month (billed annually) for one user, with a 14-day free trial available across all pricing plans.
A solid LinkedIn automation tool will spare you lots of time you would otherwise spend on manually searching for relevant popular hashtags, monitoring messages and comments across multiple profiles, or figuring out ideal posting times.
In other words, having a LinkedIn automation tool in your arsenal is a must.
SocialPilot is a social media management platform that covers some of the best LinkedIn automation tools currently available. You can use it to schedule up to 500 posts simultaneously by uploading a single CSV file. You can also save lists of popular hashtags and SocialPilot will automatically add these hashtags once you schedule your posts.
Other notable features include the option to publish PDF documents for carousels, automatically schedule posts for maximized engagement, and manage your LinkedIn inbox.
Key features
Leverage SocialPilot’s AI LinkedIn automation tool to create captions by describing your post’s content and tone of voice. Receive hashtag recommendations and generate relevant content ideas — perfect for brainstorming.
Bring comments and mentions from multiple LinkedIn pages into a single dashboard and reply to them directly from the platform.
Plan posts across multiple networks via a straightforward calendar. Reschedule posts by simply dragging and dropping them across the calendar. Free up the interface by filtering between content based on social network, client, team, or account.
Pricing: SocialPilot starts at $25.5 per month (billed annually) for one user, with a 14-day free trial available.
An effective LinkedIn lead generation strategy involves striking the sweet spot between posting high-quality content consistently through LinkedIn automation tools and adding a personal touch to make that content leave its mark and put your brand on the map.
LinkedIn tools like Planable help you do just that. Planable’s AI-powered assistant coupled with its powerful social media scheduler makes content planning a picnic, while the platform’s in-depth collaboration, approval, audience targeting, and editing tools ensure your posts are highly polished, roll out in the best possible shape, and reach the right prospects.
Last but not least, Planable’s analytics tools give you the insights necessary to skyrocket your LinkedIn profile. And the cherry on top, you can start off with 50 free posts. Try it here!
Digital marketing enthusiast, language nerd, and content writer. Horea loves writing about SaaS and anything that involves boosting online presence – from SEO to social media, web design, and more. His content is allergic to fluff and eats research for breakfast.
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