Social media marketing has the potential for exceptional results, and the right tools can help you get them.
SEMrush’s analytics and social posting platform is one of those tools, and many of our users have already discovered the value of our tracking and publishing solutions, which are available for 6 different networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.
Below you can learn about the Social Media Tool's unique features and benefits for each network:
- SEMrush for Facebook Business
- SEMrush for Twitter
- SEMrush for Instagram Business
- SEMrush for LinkedIn
- SEMrush for Pinterest
- SEMrush for Google My Business
Our Social Media Toolkit consists of a number of tools and reports for social publishing, social benchmarking, social analytics, and social advertising.
All the tools and reports are linked to each other, giving you full access to all the data and resources needed to create and manage a strong social media campaign.
We have discovered that a large number of our tool's benefits have remained largely unexplored by our subscribers. In addition to scheduling and posting functionality, we also have unique features tailor-made to help you excel on every social platform. These features were created with user behavior, marketing needs, and the specific restrictions on each individual platform.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to get the most out of our Social Media Toolkit on every social platform, starting with Facebook.
SEMrush Social Media Tool for Facebook Business
Facebook is still one of the most essential social media marketing platforms you can use, and we’ll show you how SEMrush can help you make the most of it.
Schedule and Post on Facebook
Our Social Media Poster will help you automate your scheduling and posting with the following features:
Diverse Scheduling and Publication Options
Sometimes you may want to schedule a single post once; in other cases, you may want to recycle the content, publishing evergreen content on a regular basis or upgrading and repurposing older content.
Schedule Videos
Our scheduling platform allows you to schedule and post video content on Facebook. You can upload any video in an MP4 or MOV format of up to 100 megabytes, and add your post to the queue, post it now, schedule it for later, or save it as a draft.
Create Drafts
Jot down post ideas, or even full-fledged posts that you want to circle back to later. You can save your content in drafts to edit and publish at a later date. This is an excellent asset for team collaboration, as it gives multiple team members a chance to review a post before it is scheduled.
Post Queues
Posting daily can help you maintain consistency and keep your audience engaged, and queues can help with this. Create a feed of “queued” content. This content can fill any empty slots in your schedule.
Short, Trackable Links
UTMs will help you better track where your online traffic is coming from, and knowing that they came to you from social is a huge advantage. Our UTM builder and link shortener allow you to create short, likely-to-be-clicked, highly-trackable links right in the social media posting wizard.
RSS Feeds
With this feature, you can share a variety of content quickly to ensure that your diverse audience members will find the content they love. Share a combination of video, photos, and Stories to keep your entire audience engaged.
Social Media Editorial Calendar
Our social content calendar has options for monthly, weekly views and a timeline (next 5 days) making it easier to create campaigns over a series of times.
Post Preview
See previews of how your post will appear on both desktop and mobile before it goes live so you can make sure everything looks great:
Image Editing Options
Our social media scheduler has a built-in image editor that contains filters, stickers, drawing tools, and more to keep things engaging. Quickly add the image effects of your choice, adjust the size of the image, and use it to create a Facebook profile pic, cover photo, ad picture, or post image.
While this feature is available for all platforms, it has Facebook-exclusive features to create Facebook profile pictures, cover photos, and ads images.
We have an article that will help you create attractive, high-quality images that will appeal to multiple audiences with SEMrush’s Image Editor.
Suggested Time for Scheduled Posts
When creating posts in our social media posting platform, you will see insights into when your fans are most active online, giving you an idea of the most impactful time to schedule your post.
Post Booster
This feature allows you to promote your existing posts, automatically bringing up an ad campaign by clicking the boost button.
All you need to do is enter the campaign goals, set a schedule and budget, and then define your audience. Once you submit the ad, it will be submitted to Facebook for approval, and you can monitor it through the SEMrush dashboard.
Online Content Curation
This is a feature for advanced users. Our Google Chrome extension allows you to quickly share any images, text, and content you find online:
Analyze Your Facebook Performance
In the Social Media Analytics report, you can discover valuable Facebook page insights, including information about your posts’ performance, audience, brand mentions, page likes, and engagement.
Facebook Audience
The ‘Audience’ tab of the Social Media Analytics report provides information about your Facebook audience, including their demographics, location, and social activity peaks.
The below graph will give a detailed picture of when your Facebook audience is most active so that you can adjust your posting schedule accordingly:
Brand Mentions
Scroll carefully through the ‘Mentions’ report to see the mentions of your brand, who mentioned it and what kind of reactions this mention has received:
If you spot positive reviews from authoritative sources, be sure to act upon them in situations where you see a potential partnership opportunity.
Page Likes
Under the ‘Page likes’ tab, you will be able to see which of your social media posts received the most likes, both from organic and paid search, and how this number compares with the previous month.
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You can also analyze where exactly you got those likes from (e.g. from your own page, ads, or page suggestions) and why you may be losing likes. Pay special attention to Unlikes from Page, Posts, or News Feed as these can indicate that your followers have lost interest in your social activities:
Social Engagement
The ‘Engagement’ and ‘Posts’ reports will help you thoroughly analyze your posts’ performance over a specific period of time.
Switch to the ‘Engagement’ tab, where you’ll find a report showing how much engagement your posts have received over the selected period:
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If you notice a spike in likes or engagement on a particular day, click on the red icon at the bottom of the report to see what exactly you posted on that day. You may consider reposting or repurposing content that performed exceptionally well.
In particular, you may be interested in the impressions and reach of your posts organically vs. from paid search. Based on this information, you can tweak your social media strategy accordingly:
Finally, visit the ‘Published Posts’ graph under the ‘Posts’ tab to analyze each post in more detail. Depending on your goals and metrics, you can analyze posts in terms of their engagement, impressions and reach, clicks, and negative actions:
This data is useful; not only can you see what worked in the past to shape your campaigns, but you can also identify high-performing posts to repurpose.
Track Competitors on Facebook
SEMrush’s Social Media Tracker gives you the option to not only analyze your posts and your social progress on Facebook but also to compare your performance directly against your competition.
You can examine data from the past 60 days and see how you measure up against your fiercest competitors in terms of followers, activity, and engagement.
If you want to review how specific posts performed, you can even search based on the hashtags, photo, video or text-only content within them.
As you are assessing the performance of your campaigns and your competitors’, you will be able to see what types of posts and campaigns your audience is most responsive to, allowing you to create more of it moving forward.
Be sure to check out our post on how to uncover your competitors’ social media strategies.
Create and Optimize Facebook Ads
Our recently launched Facebook ad management feature is a great addition to the SEMrush social media management platform. It complements the overall workflow of a social media manager, allowing to create, launch, and manage campaigns across the entire Facebook Ads family. This includes ads on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network.
Here's how the tool will help you save time on Facebook ad settings.
One-Page Campaign Settings
Click the “Create” button to create a new campaign. Set your campaign objective (reach, traffic, video views or conversions), budget level (campaign or ad set), budget (daily or lifetime), bidding strategy (lowest cost or bid cap) and schedule (by default the campaign will start right after it is set, but you can choose your own start and end dates of the campaign).
Use Saved Audiences on Facebook
If you are running a promotion across several campaigns targeting the same audience, you can use saved audiences to avoid creating a new audience from scratch each time you set up an ad campaign.
Our tool will automatically recognize the audiences you’ve saved in your Facebook Ads account and suggest them to you in the campaign’s settings. You can choose your desired audience in the drop-down list in the Targeting section:
Most social advertising professionals advise having several audiences at hand, made up of the people who are either already aware of your brand or may be interested in your offers (Facebook fans, website visitors, email lists, interest groups, and lookalike audiences for all of these groups.
Save Time with Autofill Settings
For each ad, you need to specify the Facebook and Instagram pages to which your ads will be attributed, the URL of the website they’ll point to, and add the text and the image or video.
All these sections will be filled automatically based on the data from your website’s URL. On the right, you’ll be able to see the preview of your ad.
Track Ads’ Success with Dynamic UTMs
Dynamic UTMs are there to help you track the success of each individual campaign in Google Analytics.
You will be able to compare the results of ads from different placements (Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Google ads, etc.) in one place, and analyze their overall efficiency with metrics like time on page and bounce rate, as well as cost efficiency (the number of purchases).
Would you like to see Google Analytics integrated into the Social Media Ads tool to give you an idea of how your ads perform right in the tool’s interface? If yes, please let us know in the comments below.
The Quick UTM option in the Social Media Ads tool will automatically generate UTMs with the campaign name, source, medium, content, and term, based on the campaign info you entered:
Any changes to the UTM parameters can be made by clicking the "Edit UTM" button.
Optimize Creatives for Different Placements
The Social Media Ads tool allows you to insert multiple images into one ad and choose the most appropriate one for each placement. If you want your creatives to look good on different placements, this feature is a real time-saver.
Identify Facebook Ads with Issues
Spot Rejected Ads
Due to Facebook’s strict rules and guidelines around its ad system, your ads are likely to get rejected if they fail to meet Facebook’s quality standards.
If you use Facebook Ads, you know that the only real way to find out that your ad has been rejected is by checking your email for a notification. It may, therefore, be difficult for you to spot such ads quickly and take immediate action.
To quickly find your rejected ads, use the in-built filter in the Social Media Ads tool:
Optimize Facebook Ads
As well as flagging ads that have been rejected by Facebook, our tool will also identify those of your ads that are not performing as expected and tell you exactly which potential issues need your attention.
A small, orange, triangular warning sign next to the ad signals that the ad is underperforming. By hovering over the warning sign, you will be able to see what exactly is wrong with your ad:
It may be that one of your ads had low or decreasing reach over the past few days, or that people see the same ad too often.
There are six common Facebook ad issues that the Social Media Ads tool will identify:
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Your ad hasn't had any results for the past three days.
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Fewer than 1,000 people saw your ad the day before.
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The cost per result increased over the past seven days.
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People see the same ad too often.
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You spent less than 70% of your daily budget.
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Your reach decreased by X% over the last 7 days.
Depending on what kind of issue you are facing, be sure to take immediate action, which may include fine-tuning your target audience, increasing or reducing your daily ad budget, or optimizing your creatives. Check out this article to get professional tips on how to fix common Facebook Ads issues with the Social Media Ads tool.
What You Can Get with the Free Subscription
We have both paid and free subscriptions for our Social Media Poster, Social Media Tracker, and Social Media Ads tools. Facebook is available with the free versions of all three but limits you to 5 profiles for tracking, 2 for posting (with a limit of 10 scheduled posts between the two accounts), and 1 Facebook Ads account to connect in the Social Media Ads tool.
SEMrush Social Media Tool for Twitter
Twitter is an excellent platform to share and discuss the latest news and information with your audience, and the expansion from 140 characters to 280 is a huge asset for businesses.
Let’s take a look at how our social media toolkit can help you reach and engage with your target audience on the platform.
Schedule and Post Content on Twitter
Twitter-Friendly Scheduling Options
With our Social Media Poster, you can schedule and publish posts, create drafts, and set up queued content on Twitter, just as you would on Facebook.
The posting tool takes Twitter’s posting requirements into account and won’t let you post the same tweet to several different accounts; this can help you avoid a misstep that could result in penalties.
Content Queues
According to Twitter’s own best practices, there is no right or wrong number of times you should tweet, but it is preferable to create a consistent and regular social schedule. Queued content allows you to do this, creating a library of content that will fill empty slots on your posting schedule.
Post and Draft Management
Our social posting platform allows you to review all published, scheduled, and draft posts and edit or reschedule them at any point. You can do this under the ‘Posts’ tab, along with assessing your post’s performance in terms of likes, retweets, and replies.
Twitter Word Count
Shorter content is preferred on Twitter, and the word count tool in our posting wizard will help you stay on target, showing you how many characters you have left for your Tweet.
Post Preview
The Page preview allows you to see how your Tweets will appear on both the mobile app and desktop sites, ensuring that your content looks great and nothing essential is cropped out.
Image Editor
You can only post up to four images and one GIF on Twitter, and you want them to be great. Our built-in image editor allows you to add text overlay, stickers, and frames onto the images of your choice, along with adjusting image characteristics like brightness or saturation.
Social Posting Calendar
See your entire editorial calendar on a monthly, weekly, or timeline view. Having a big picture look at how your content is spaced out will help you see any gaps along with making it easier to create cohesive, impactful campaigns.
Automated Link Sharing
Our trackable UTMs and short links are particularly valuable on Twitter, where character counts are so limited and so crucial. Use our on-platform link shortener to save yourself time, and incorporate UTMs for ultra-reliable tracking.
Retweets Scheduler in Chrome
This is a feature for advanced users. Our Сhrome extension allows you to schedule any content, including posts, images, or even selected text with one click from anywhere online. You can also schedule retweets.
Benchmarking and Competitor Analysis
Our Social Media Tracker for Twitter will provide you with valuable analytics and benchmarks for you and your competitors, helping you to assess where you stand in relation to them in terms of post-performance and audience information. You can switch between the following tabs to analyze all aspects of your accounts.
The 'Mentioners' and 'Mentions' reports are exclusive to Twitter, allowing you to easily monitor your reputation, see what is being said about you online, and find influencers who are talking about you. This information could help you identify potential brand advocates or influencers to partner with.
The hashtags report is also particularly valuable on Twitter; the right hashtag can expand your reach and boost engagement significantly. Find your top-performing hashtags, and see who else is using them.
What You Can Get with the Free Subscription
Twitter features are available with the free version of our Social Media Toolkit and will allow you to have access to up to 5 profiles for the Social Media Tracker and 2 in our Social Media Poster. There is a limit of 10 scheduled posts between the two connected profiles. Please note our image editor is only available on paid plans.
Social media is an integral part of digital marketing in 2019. It’s a tool used by businesses all over the world to portray clear brand messages, engage with users and, ultimately, promote what you do. However, the fight for your brand’s message to be heard is getting more competitive by the day. The good news is that you can start...
Get Free PDFSocial Media Toolkit for Instagram Business
SEMrush has social scheduling and analytics features that will help you create, schedule, manage and understand the impact of posts that will resonate with your audience.
Schedule Content on Instagram Business
There are multiple scheduling and publishing features that will benefit business and social media managers when it comes to Instagram posting. These include:
Streamlined Publications
You can create your content ahead of time with our scheduler, and then get a notification when it is time to post your content live on Instagram.
Multiple Scheduling Options
While there is no “Post Now” option like other platforms have, the ability to create and schedule content far in advance with scheduled, drafted, and queued posts will ensure you never miss an opportunity to reach your audience.
Suggested Time for Scheduled Posts
You can see when your fans are most active online right from the posting wizard.
Image Editor
Visuals are exceedingly important on Instagram, and you can use our built-in image editor to help your content stand out. Consider focusing on sharing experiences instead of exclusively on products to maximize engagement, and use high color saturation for maximum engagement.
Post Preview
Make sure that your posts look great; you can save them into a draft so they can be reviewed by a team member, and you can use our page preview to see how the image will appear on mobile and desktop. If you are unhappy with how the image is cropped, take it back to our image editor.
Content Calendar
Get a full monthly, weekly, or timeline view of all the content you have published and have scheduled all at once; this will give you that "big-picture view" that can be so beneficial in creating effective campaigns.
Curate Content Online
This is a feature for advanced users. Use our Chrome extension to share images or text from anywhere online, converting it quickly into an Instagram post your followers will love.
Edit and Reschedule Existing Posts
In the ‘Posts’ tab, you can view all of your published, scheduled, and draft posts. You can reschedule or edit them, and even add them back into the queue depending on how well they performed. If you want to review specific content, you can filter posts by keyword and post type.
Analyze Your Instagram Audience
The Analytics’ tab in our Social Media Poster will provide reports on your audience’s demographics, when they are online, and how exactly they are interacting with your posts.
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Track Competitors on Instagram
In the Social Media Tracker, you can compare your Instagram Business performance against your competitors’.
You can see who is gaining followers at faster rates, who is getting more engagement, and even how your posting schedule compares to theirs.
The hashtag report will also show you if any of your competitors are using your top hashtags, so you can see if you are on the right track.
What You Can Get with the Free Subscription
Instagram scheduling and tracking is available with the free version of the tool. You can connect up to two profiles, and schedule up to 10 posts between the two accounts. Please note our image editor is only available on paid plans.
SEMrush Social Media Tool for LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a must-use platform for B2B businesses, and it is the only truly professional social media marketing site. The platform has evolved in the past few years, offering new features to keep users engaged, and it is a great way to establish brand awareness alongside finding new partners, clients, and even employees.
Create, Share and Curate Content on LinkedIn
SEMrush’s Social Media Tool will help you create, share, and curate your most engaging content on this professional social media marketing site and compare your performance to that of your competitors.
LinkedIn tools are not available in the free version of our toolkit.
These are the features you can benefit from on LinkedIn:
Diverse Scheduling Options
The Social Media Poster has scheduling and posting functionality, with features tailored to this specific platform.
If you want to post immediately, schedule content, save content into a draft for a team member to review it, or even have specific posts go live multiple times on different dates, you can do that. Recurrent posting of evergreen content is welcome here, especially if you are sharing information like career opportunities that people may be actively looking for.
Our scheduling options, including our queued content, can ensure that you are maintaining a consistent posting schedule that will look professional and help you attract the right kind of engagement.
Link Shortener
Shorter links can fit into posts without seeming overwhelming, therefore potentially giving them a higher chance of being clicked. Use our link shortener in the posting wizard to keep your content LinkedIn-friendly and primed for clicks.
Curate Industry-Relevant News
It is essential to stay on top of your industry’s news, and it is perhaps even more important to show that you are doing so. Use our RSS feeds feature to automatically curate content from your chosen thought leaders, and let us automatically create content to share with your audience.
Image Editor
Our built-in image editor gives you the option to add in effects like frames, stickers, and text overlay while adjusting the image’s appearance before it goes live. You can skip out on the expensive photo editing software, and use our native tool when creating the content itself — double-check how it looks on mobile and desktop with our page preview.
Online Content Curation
Found a great article somewhere online and want to share it right away? Use our posting Chrome extension to share images, posts, and texts as a LinkedIn post that your followers will be excited to discuss.
Analyze Your LinkedIn Audience and Post Performance
The Analytics tab of the Social Media Poster will give you in-depth analytics of your LinkedIn account, including follower count, engagement rate, types of engagement, the impressions of your content, unique visitors to your profile, and the exact performance on your specific posts.
Use this information to ensure that you are on the right track, both in growing your followers and increasing engagement rates while you are consistently posting content your audience wants to see.
You are also going to want to take a look at where your followers are coming from; this will help you see how far your reach is really taking you, but it can also give you a clue as to which competitors to look at. You can check out competitors in countries where you already have followers, or look at companies in the locations you haven’t tapped but would like to:
Evaluate your current followers, looking at demographic information like their job function, company size, and industry. Once you assess who is currently following you, you can create content that is tailored more towards them while also trying to find ways to connect with who you’re missing.
You also want to evaluate the current reach that you’re getting (which shows you how many individual users you’re reaching) and how many impressions your content is receiving (which shows the total number of views). You need both reach and impressions to grow, but reach is particularly crucial when you are looking to grow your followers. The more people who see it individually, after all, are more people who may become followers.
Monitor Your Competitors' Following
As you’re going through the analytics, you’ll also want to use our Social Media Tracker to assess your competitors’ follower counts and compare them to yours.
Start by identifying your top competitors, looking at both their total followers and their recent growth rate. You want to look at both, but don’t count out newer accounts with slightly smaller follower counts if they also have more aggressive growth rates.
Those with the quickest growth rates and the largest numbers of followers are those you’ll want to watch most carefully, taking a look at their strategies by checking out their profiles and reviewing their posting topics and schedules.
You’ll be able to spot significant gains (or losses) in their follower count:
If you notice that there is follower growth or a spike in the follower's trend, look and see when it occurred. Then check out their profile manually to see what happened on the days when their accounts saw a big increase. This strategy will give you an accurate and inside look at how they are getting their results and how you could replicate them.
SEMrush Social Media Tool for Pinterest
Pinterest is an exceptional platform for B2C businesses, providing a site where users are excited to save the content that you are creating. It is a highly visual site, so like Instagram, the extra added focus must be placed on the images and videos you share here.
Pinterest is not available with the free version of our Toolkit; paid subscribers have access to publishing, scheduling, and analytics tools for Pinterest accounts.
Schedule and Manage Your Pins
Our Social Media Toolkit will help you map out an ideal editorial calendar, plan engaging boards, and start to drive sales from your pins.
Here are the features that you need to be using:
Automatically Access Your Boards
As soon as you connect your Pinterest account to SEMrush’s Social Media Poster, you will be able to see all of your boards as they currently exist; this will make it easier to post to them, organize future pins, and even generate new ideas.
Diverse Scheduling Options
You can prioritize your own content over curated content, staying consistent in creating and publishing new pins that your audience will be excited to see. You can post immediately, or schedule content in advance. You can use queued content to automate regular publishing.
The ability to schedule your pins days, weeks, or months in advance gives you a chance to get ahead of seasonal trends, having everything lined up.
Pinterest recommends that you start saving seasonal content 30-45 days in advance to ensure that you get the maximum traffic. Users won’t wait until December 24th to start browsing Christmas decoration ideas, after all.
Add URLs to Pins
There is a designated area in our scheduler for pins that allows you to place the link you want to send users to.
This option will create a rich pin that can be clicked and send traffic to your site, instead of just featuring the URL in the pin’s description. If you don’t want a pin to take users to a landing page, you can skip out on the URL altogether.
Because Pinterest doesn’t like to see shortened links, you won’t see a link shortener for this platform. You can still do this manually off-platform, but it is best to use the full URL here in most cases.
Image Editor
Text overlay is a copy that you can apply directly to your Pins, adding valuable context, and telling users why they should click while helping it to stand out. Our built-in image editor will not only allow you to adjust brightness and saturation to help your pin pop but will also add that text overlay.
Curate Content With RSS Feeds
Curate and share third-party content that is relevant to your followers. All you have to do is connect to your favorite media, and the tool will pull images from those links and convert them into pins.
Online Content Curation
An important part of Pinterest is the ability to send users from the platform to the site of your choice where they can learn more, read more, and purchase. Use our Chrome extension to create incredible pins from anywhere online without ever having to head to the platform.
Looking to better optimize your content for Pinterest? This article shares the best practices for Pinterest optimization in 2019.
Analyze and Benchmark Your Pinterest Performance
The Social Media Tracker will give you analytics of your Pinterest account alongside those of your competitors.
Assess the performance and engagement on your individual pins, including total engagement, engagement rate, saves, and the number of comments:
Get information on your audience, including follower growth trends:
See overall account activity, like posting frequency:
View overall engagement on your account:
Evaluate your list of boards to identify top-performing boards in terms of followers, the number of pins, and engagement:
SEMrush for Google My Business
Google My Business posts are a great way to improve your customer experience with timely information about your business. Not only does it aid your visibility and help to boost traffic to your website, but it also helps your customers make better decisions as they browse.
Google My Business is only available on our Guru and Business plans.
Post and Schedule on Google My Business
Start by choosing the locations you want to post to and connect them in the Social Media Poster. Please be aware that some restrictions apply to the posting locations: you won’t be able to choose a location in a country where posting to Google My Business is not supported.
At the moment, the tool supports only one type of GMB post -- ‘What’s New’. You can add a CTA for more interactions and a link to your post: by monitoring the number of clicks to this link, you will be able to measure the success of your publication.
When adding the image, make sure its size exceeds 250 x 250 pixels.
Conclusion
We hope that this article will help you better understand our Social Media Tool, how it can be best used to help you excel on every social media platform, and which features are available with the free version of the tool.
The table below is a summary of all the features listed throughout this article: hopefully, it will add even more clarity to our tool’s functionality and accessibility.
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Social Network | Social Media Tool's Features |
What you get with the free subscription |
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| Google My Business |
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