As a social media marketer, communication is your stock-in-trade. From weaving just the right words to make an irresistible post to crafting the perfect images that your audience can’t turn away from, capturing your audience’s attention is the mission.

But visualization isn’t just a technique to generate clicks. As a social media marketer, you can also unleash the power of visualization to plan and execute marketing campaigns that get results. 

Here we show you the top 8 visualization tools that every social media marketer needs.

What Is Data Visualization and Why Does It Matter?

Let’s face it, our world today runs on data. Good data is critical to informed decision-making. It helps businesses remain lean, efficient, and competitive in an increasingly crowded operating environment. 

However data comes in many shapes and forms. Not all data are useful and even the data which are beneficial aren’t always easy to decipher. This is especially true in our great information age, where literally billions of data points are being generated every second of every day around the world.

If you’re not careful, you can drown in an endless sea of data. Data overload isn’t just common, it’s also paralyzing, rendering all that wealth of potentially powerful information useless. 

But the right visualization tools will help you cut through the noise by deploying only the data that is relevant for your particular needs and purposes and rendering it in accessible visual form. 

Thus, rather than plow through tens, hundreds, or even thousands of pages of numbers to glean the insights you need to make an informed marketing decision, you can use a graph instead. From charts to trend lines to scatter plots, data visualizations can pack a lot of critical information into a single image. And that means that your social media campaigns will be rooted in a solid foundation of relevant, substantive, well-visualized, and actionable data.

1. Venngage

Venngage is an all-purpose infographics design tool that makes brainstorming and online collaboration a breeze. Use Venngage, for instance, to create a quick and easy infographic of your company’s social media branding guidelines, such as defining how logos will be created for and appear on social media. Then share it instantly and securely with your remote team.

2. Whatagraph

You can’t truly hope to craft a successful social media campaign if you don’t first understand what “success” looks like and what content metrics you will need to measure it. Whatagraph is a powerful data visualization tool that fits the bill perfectly. It allows you to generate relevant data from multiple sources and translate it into visual form in order to more quickly and effectively ascertain the efficacy of your campaigns.

3. Hootsuite

When it comes to effective social media marketing, timing truly is everything and Hootsuite is just the app for that. Hootsuite is a robust social media scheduling tool with an agile calendar function that enables you to schedule your multiple social media campaigns across a myriad of platforms. It’s your one-stop shop for timing and executing all your campaigns.

4. Lucidspark

Lucidspark is the quintessential collaboration tool for remote teams. Its online, interactive whiteboard function is perfect for brainstorming and mind mapping. Use it to chart the customer journey or to assess how multiple simultaneous campaigns may complement, or confound, one another.

5. Tableau

When it comes to versatility, Tableau can’t be beat. The many manifestations of Tableau, including its desktop, server, and mobile versions, mean that Tableau has a data visualization tool for every need and platform. Its intuitive design means that even newbies to the world of data analytics can collect the information they need to make informed decisions about their social media strategy.

6. TimelineJS

TimelineJS is a user-friendly app to chart relevant changes over time, and that means it’s a powerful asset if you want to visualize the impact your campaigns have had. The tool can also be used to compare multiple datasets at once. 

That means you can instantly see, for example, which campaigns are outperforming, which are lagging behind, and when positive or negative changes began to occur. This can be especially useful if you’re having trouble timing your campaigns to generate the greatest number of responses.

7. Plotly

If you’re looking for an affordable, user-friendly data visualization tool for beginning and intermediate users, Plotly is the app for you. Many of its most popular features are available for free on your web browser. And that’s a whole lot of versatility in this app, allowing you to quickly and easily create simple charts or more complex graphs. 

Some Plotly visualization tools, such as box plots, histograms, and satellite maps, however, do require a subscription.

8. RAW

RAW is a powerhouse open-access tool that allows you to create stunning, and often highly complex, data visualizations for free on your browser. Best of all, no coding experience is required. Just plug in your data, specify the kind of visualization you want, and let it work its magic.  

The Takeaway

Not every data visualization tool is created equal. But with the powerful, agile, and intuitive technologies described above, you have everything you need to make your social media campaigns a resounding success.

Author: Amanda Winstead