The Top 17 Facebook Tools for Marketing Your Business

Most of us can agree on one thing about social media marketing: Facebook has the largest reach. That same reach also makes the platform harder to work in, for users and marketers alike. Finding the profiles of potential customers is difficult without the right tools, and users often struggle to find the “organic” pages of companies they care about. The tools below help you find your customers and engage with them as part of a wider Facebook marketing strategy.

My List of Recommended Facebook Tools

The first tool is the fundamental, free education that Facebook themselves offers that everyone reading this post should go to first to better understand how to use Facebook for marketing:

1. Facebook Blueprint

Facebook Blueprint is exactly what its name suggests: a blueprint to navigate the many different facets of the social media giant. From learning how to effectively use Facebook Messenger to using Facebook business tools, users can learn how to create content for a custom audience, effectively engage in content curation, and consistently use Facebook as a tool for businesses to grow their audience and continue to improve engagement rates. 

Facebook Blueprint is a free service offered by Facebook, and this is part of what makes it so reliable. Rather than serving as a third party with its own biases and suggestions, Facebook Blueprint offers information directly from the source and allows you to focus your efforts on your conversion rate, Facebook marketing tools, and other Facebook tools for businesses. 

Facebook Publishing Tools

I don’t think I need to go into a lot of details about these tools, because if you have been scheduling social media posts, you are probably using one of these popular options that many businesses use to publish content on Facebook:

2. SocialPilot

3. SocialBee

4. Agorapulse

5. SproutSocial

6. Sendible

Facebook Ads

Although they cost money, Facebook ads are one of the easiest ways to reach customers on the platform. Depending on the type of ad, they can be placed in a user’s feed or on one of the page sidebars. No matter what kind you choose, make sure that you deploy effective tools such as these for adequate management.  

Below is just a summary of some of the leading tools currently available. If you do a lot of Facebook advertising, you’ll want to check out my post on Facebook Ads tools.

7. Facebook Ad Library

The Facebook ad library is essentially a library of all of the ads running on Facebook. The ad library is a useful marketing tool, as it allows you to view your own ads, as well as those of your competitors. Being able to access competitors’ ads allows you to get a feel for the custom audience for whom the ad was created, and determine what constitutes an effective Facebook marketing strategy. 

The Facebook ad library is also valuable because it saves and archives ads from past advertising campaigns. From simple ads designed to effectively target new leads’ email addresses to infographic templates used to deliver information in an appealing and compelling format, the Facebook ad library is an invaluable resource for anyone looking to gather Facebook insights and secure the most effective Facebook marketing tools currently available. 

Although the Facebook ad library is not considered one of the Facebook tools for businesses, it can help businesses identify Facebook trends and utilize that information to leverage their own social content to drive audience engagement. 

8. Facebook Ads Manager

Facebook ads manager is designed to make creating a piece of code an easier process, and is one of the best and most straightforward Facebook marketing tools currently available. Facebook ads manager offers Facebook insights for all ads currently running, and allows you to create an ad from start to finish. Ads can be created via ads manager, whether those ads require simple coding or a more complex structure and contact form, and subsequently scheduled or arranged for implementation. 

Following the implementation of Facebook ads, ads manager then offers Facebook insights as to how your ad is doing. The “manager” portion of this tool’s title is an important component to focus on, as it truly is a robust management tool. Whether you want to send out a preliminary ad as a form of Facebook test to evaluate audience interest, or you are ready to publish your ads to your Facebook newsfeed, manager allows you to create, schedule, publish, and track your ads and their engagement rates and success during their run.

9. AdEspresso

Would you like to create and manage your Facebook, Instagram, and Google ads all in one place? AdEspresso lets you do that with their comprehensive ad management service. On your AdEspresso dashboard, you can leverage advanced analytics to determine what’s working, and what isn’t. You’re also able to do A/B testing, and optimize for each platform you plan on using to increase app engagement. Want to order the ad space for your campaigns in one place? AdEspresso has you covered there, too. Users love the fact that this program is intuitive, and allows agencies to easily add clients to their agency account.

Pricing: starts at $58 per month for a single user spending under $3,000 on ads per month, and increases based on ad spend and number of accounts tracked.

10. Qwaya

Need a good scheduling tool for Facebook and Instagram? Qwaya is a Facebook advertising partner that maximizes your ad spend. This program is full featured: you can schedule ads, do split testing, and take advantage of a comprehensive analytics program. One of the big advantages of Qwaya is that it lets you set rules on when to discontinue a campaign, and when to double down on more effective advertising. This way, your business can save money by only continuing ads that are successful. Another awesome feature is the dedicated links for each advertisement. This helps your outside analytics track which ads are driving the most traffic, taking the metrics beyond simple engagement numbers. Not convinced yet? Qwaya works with Google analytics, too.

Pricing: $149 monthly for a one-user license, with pricing increments based on users only. No limit on spend at any level.

Facebook Analytics

No matter how hard we might try to hide from the numbers, marketing on Facebook is all about the numbers. After all, creativity only goes so far when trying to sell products and services. For example, your message might not be received the right way, or may fail to get your point across. To counter those problems, you need Facebook tools for analytics. Many of these analytics work across all Facebook-owned socials and can even measure Instagram engagement. 

11. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a social engagement and creation tool that doubles as an analytics tool. BuzzSumo is a well-known campaign tool because it offers far more than insights into creating your content strategy. With different ways to find your content inspiration, from searching for specific authors or sources, to identifying what is going on in your brand’s niche or among your competitors, 

BuzzSumo is a valuable business tool from four different angles, including the discovery of content, the tools to adequately research content and trends, connections to identify the influencers most likely to positively impact your brand, and ongoing evaluation of posts to determine what does and does not work for your brand (and your competitors). 

Pricing: BuzzSumo does have a free limited service (10 searches per month), and goes up in tiers from there, ranging from the lowest tier ($99 per month) to the highest ($299 per month). 

12. FanPage Karma

FanPage Karma allows you to schedule posts, develop your content strategy, and track all of your progress in one platform. Like other social media management software, FanPage Karma is a third-party tool that allows you to manage several different platforms from a single interface. From video content to user-generated content and basic photo ads, FanPage Karma can help you develop and manage your marketing skill set. 

FanPage Karma sets itself apart from its competitors through its inbox management; to truly make working across different platforms simple and easy, FanPage Karma combines all of your platform’s inboxes, allowing entire teams to parse through and manage those inboxes. What it lacks in content tools, it makes up for in discovering shareable content, social media management tools, and ease of use. 

Pricing: A limited free option, followed by price points of $69, $199, $299, and $799.

Facebook Contests

Those of us who like to create buzz in a competitive way sometimes enjoy doing contests. After all, who doesn’t like prizes and free stuff? Doing this requires careful planning and a way of ensuring the contest is fair, however, which can prove difficult. Here are some tools to help conduct fair and effective giveaways and contests.

13. Heyo

Heyo is a contest tool dedicated entirely to different types of contests and sweepstakes. While many creative tools focus primarily on creating images or videos to sell a specific product, sweepstakes and contests are far more likely to be used to increase exposure, and allow for a different kind of creativity. Used by brands as varied as Victoria’s Secret and PetSmart, Heyo makes creating contests and sweepstakes easy by dividing the different types of contests available, and providing ready-made templates and guidelines to follow for each different content type.

 Part design tool and part organization tool, Heyo allows you to develop contests with photos, video content, quizzes and more, all of which may be used to grow email lists, increase the reach of a brand, and improve engagement. Adding contests and sweepstakes to your social media calendar can help expand your audience and is an excellent part of many successful social media strategies. 

Pricing: Heyo offers a free trial, followed by 4 tiers coming in at $25, $84, and $100 per month, as well as a custom tier. 

14. Shortstack

Shortstack is a broad social media marketer’s tool that includes sweepstakes and contests within its offerings. Using Shortstack, you can create social posts (including sweepstakes) and develop campaigns to extend your reach across all of your social media channels. Shortstack has a plethora of options for publishing, offering numerous different types of pop-ups to either encourage visitors to remain on the page and enter the contest, or to provide more information about the contest rules in order to effectively inform visitors and potential customers about rules and guidelines. 

Shortstack allows you to customize everything about your contest, from the number of winners to be selected to the precise format in which it is displayed and marketed, Shortstack provides a highly customizable interface from which to plan and execute contests and sweepstakes across social media platforms. 

Pricing: There is a limited free trial, followed by $99, $249, and $499 per month, as well as a customized plan.

Facebook Content

As the old saying goes, if you’re going to do it, then do it the right way. Creating organic content is the perfect example of this, because it’s the content that provides a draw for customers. Ineffective content is just words on a page, and often wastes valuable resources. Here are some tools to help make the perfect content, whether that content is designed for an email list in an email marketing campaign or a standard Facebook or other social platform ad.

Note that if you are looking to convert content into video for Facebook, you should check out my recommended video marketing tools. Also, you might want to check out this post on how to write a post on Facebook that gets engagement.

15. Adobe Express

Adobe Express offers superlative tools to create content to fit your particular brand’s marketing strategy. As is the case with most Adobe suite products, Express has been tried, true, and tested for quality for years, and is one of the Adobe suite’s most powerful products to create high-quality visual content. From a library of fonts to create something wholly your own, to intuitive creation tools, to a thorough library of high-quality images, Adobe Express is an ideal tool to create evergreen content to share across a variety of social platforms, including Facebook and all of its products. 

Adobe Express is often preferred by those who have experience working with other Adobe products, as its user interface is easy to use and is extremely intuitive for those familiar with the suite. It is also frequently preferred by people who want a tool with a long history of use, and with plenty of use from graphics professionals. 

Pricing: Express does have a limited free option, and prices begin at $9.99 per month. 

16. Canva

Canva is a commonly used social media tool, because it offers a plethora of ready-made templates users can plug their own information, color preferences, and images into. Canva is preferred, too, because it provides high-quality results for those who are wholly experienced with graphic design and art. Whether those results come as a product of using the ready-made template or comes from using the basic design tools provided by Canva, this tool is beloved by many, but is perhaps most frequently lauded by amateur designers. 

Canva allows you to customize your colors, and saves all of your creations, with both the paid and free versions, allowing you to maintain consistency throughout all of your designs, in terms of color, font, and more. 

Pricing: Canva offers a free version, though many of the images offered through the free version are watermarked. Font options are also significantly limited on the free version. A premium version may be purchased for $119.99 per year for one person, or $149.90 per year for a team.

17. Post Planner

Those of us who need to supplement our own content with proven posts love Post Planner. This is a social media application that helps you get inspired by the success of others, and even adapt pre-published content to meet your own goals. You’ll never run out of ideas, and you’ll have an idea about how well something will perform before it’s published by easily making company knowledge discoverable.

Pricing: As little as $3 per month.

Frequently Asked Questions About Facebook Tools

How to Choose the Right Facebook Tools for Your Business

Do not buy all seventeen of these. Pick the one tool that fixes whatever is slowing you down right now, and give it a full month before you add another.

If publishing is the bottleneck, start with the scheduler you already pay for, and only look at SocialPilot, SocialBee, Agorapulse, SproutSocial, or Sendible when it genuinely cannot do the job. If content is the bottleneck, start with Adobe Express. If you are spending on ads and guessing, spend a week inside the Ad Library studying competitors before you pay for AdEspresso or Qwaya.

Then measure. A tool earns its subscription when you can point at what changed after you bought it, whether that is reach, engagement, or leads in your pipeline.

Facebook also works best as one thread in a wider strategy rather than a channel you run on its own. That is the whole premise of my book Digital Threads, which covers how search, email, and social compound once you connect them. If you would rather have help building that plan for your business, take a look at my Fractional CMO services.