Facebook has changed a lot since we published our top ten Facebook apps back in 2013. Facebook has also expanded its suite of marketing tools exponentially.
As such, marketers need to assemble a toolkit that helps them better leverage the platform’s best features.
In this post, we share the best apps to use for any business or marketer on Facebook.
What You’ll Learn:
- Why Facebook’s free tools are not enough
- Top 10 Facebook Apps you should be using:
- Fanpage Karma
- Sprinklr
- ManyChat
- Driftrock
- Adobe Spark
- ShortStack
- SocialPilot
- Qwaya
- Animoto
- Social Bakers
Why the Facebook Suite Isn’t Enough
Before I dig into Facebook’s top ten apps, I’d like to quickly mention why Facebook’s massive collection of free tools might not be enough for most marketers.
For better or worse, Facebook lives up to its reputation for knowing a TON about its users. For marketers, that means free access to some pretty specific targeting features including custom audiences, lookalikes, and more.
More recently, Facebook has improved its reporting features, allowing marketers to work through various attribution models, track conversion sources, and uncover super-specific demographic insights about your audience.
Facebook’s conversion breakdown:
Source: Facebook attribution modeling
What’s missing? At least within the realm of Facebook and Instagram, your bases are pretty well-covered.
The platform offers comprehensive analytics and makes it easy to create goal-oriented campaigns–then prove their value.
The main issue with relying on Facebook’s internal apps alone is that it creates a gap between your Facebook campaigns and the rest of your marketing strategy.
So, you’ll want to find a solution that allows you to monitor and manage data from several channels to ensure consistency across all touchpoints.
You might also want to look at social listening apps or customer experience platforms. These types of tools allow you to manage communications, collect feedback, and learn more about the “why” behind Facebook’s Audience Insights.
And finally, you’ll also want to look for tools that allow you to create appealing visual content, videos, and campaign support materials like landing pages with minimal effort.
While Facebook apps are a diverse category, you’ll want to assemble a toolkit that allows you to:
- Capture detailed information about your audience.
- Quickly analyze and act on opportunities or issues.
- Offer a seamless experience that aligns with your entire marketing strategy.
- Generate visuals that support your message.
- Connect Facebook data to other marketing efforts–paid search, other socials, SEO, guest posts, etc.
Now, let’s look at some Facebook apps that fill in those gaps.
1. Fanpage Karma
Price: Free, Professional: $69/month, Business: $199/month, Enterprise: $299/month.
Fanpage Karma is a social media tool designed to help marketers quickly analyze an unlimited number of profiles, publish content, communicate with audiences, and conduct marketing research.
The main benefit of this platform is its reporting tools, which gives users multiple ways to analyze how their audience interacts with their content.
Additionally, Fanpage Karma offers a content discovery platform that helps users find trending posts from all over the globe.
2. Sprinklr
Price: Contact Sprinklr for a quote.
Sprinklr is a customer engagement platform (CXM) that handles a lot more than just Facebook marketing campaigns and analytics.
According to the platform’s website, key features include:
- Audience profiling
- Lead identification and tracking
- Spam detection
- Content & hashtag suggestions
- Brand compliance tools
Sprinklr is unique in that its feature lineup covers so many bases. Approval paths and response compliance checks ensure that all communications meet brand guidelines.
There’s a bot feature that allows brands to outsource low-level service tasks and a whole host of triaging tools that make it easy to maintain your sparkling reputation.
Source: Sprinklr triage workflow
There’s even a kill-switch function that immediately halts publishing on all channels in the event of a crisis.
Using Sprinklr to manage Facebook communities and campaigns allows marketers to get a lot more from the social platform, which doesn’t offer CX or brand management features.
In today’s omnichannel marketing landscape, Sprinklr’s AI-driven brand protections make it easy to maintain a consistent voice across all channels, campaigns, and even one-off responses.
3. ManyChat
Price: Limited Starter Plan: Free, Pro Plan: $10/month.
ManyChat is a platform that allows users to quickly build chatbots for Facebook Messenger using their library of pre-built bot templates. ManyChat’s key selling point is that it’s built for conversions–think selling products, booking appointments, or capturing leads.
While the platform does offer a free plan, it’s clear that the main use case is to give new users a chance to try the platform before they subscribe.
It’s worth noting that ManyChat bots can only be used on Facebook Messenger, making this a great option if Facebook is one of your top-performing marketing channels or your customers use the platform to submit service requests.
It’s not so great if you’re planning on adding a chatbot to your website, though you can find a tool for that purpose here.
That said, ManyChat is more affordable and easy to use, compared to other platforms that might offer a more robust suite of features. It also integrates with tools like Shopify,
4. Driftrock
Pricing: Contact Driftrock for a quote.
According to the official website, Driftrock provides its users with an “unfair advantage” when it comes to generating the best leads.
The platform is very much designed for the B2B sales team, offering a single customer view, automatic lead validation, detailed attribution across multiple touchpoints.
Driftrock integrates all lead generation sources (Google Form Ads, Facebook Lead Ads, & LinkedIn Lead Gen Ads) with your CRM. Users can segment leads and set rules for what happens next–with the option to route them to over 250 tools.
The main benefit of Driftrock is that it connects data from all of your various sources and applies AI to help you create a connected buyer’s journey and really sophisticated lead management system.
Driftrock is one of the top Facebook apps for organizations with complex sales cycles. It comes with several unique features that help lock down more conversions, like weather-triggered ads, smart lead forms, and the ability to sync lead and customer data to Facebook Custom Audiences.
5. Adobe Spark
Price: Free version available. Paid plans start at $9.79/month.
Adobe Spark is much easier to master than PhotoShop or InDesign, as well, it doesn’t require any existing design skills.
Instead, Spark is designed with social content in mind, ditching the more complex tools and customization options offered in their other tools for accessibility.
Users can choose from a range of templates and customize them with filters, text, and imagery to match their brand. Spark’s templates cover three main categories: social posts, video, and webpages.
There’s also a mobile app, so you can create social posts from anywhere–making this a really easy way to incorporate more “authentic” moments into your feed as they happen.
6. ShortStack
Source: ShortStack Facebook Contest App
Price: Business Plan: $99/month, Agency Plan: $199/month, Brand Plan: $499/month.
A veteran in the social marketing niche, ShortStack is one of the few holdovers from our last list of top Facebook apps. The app allows users to create unique landing pages, Facebook & Instagram contests, as well as automatically select winners, and distribute prizes.
What makes ShortStack one of the best Facebook apps out there is, they really go deep when it comes to engagement and giveaways, offering incredibly specific templates such as:
- Giveaways
- Photo contests
- Hashtag contests
- Refer-a-friend contests
- Comment-to-enter contests
- UGC contests
- Coupon codes
- Winner selection
- Contest rules
Additionally, brands can easily track campaign performance using the platform’s built-in analytics. Here, you can track traffic spikes, unique views, contest entries, clicks, shares, and device types.
ShortStack’s Facebook Contest Analytics
What’s more, because ShortStack also offers email marketing tools, users can see how many autoresponders were sent to those who entered a contest. The benefit there is, marketers can connect contests to their actual impact on conversions and revenue.
7. SocialPilot
Price: Starts at $30/month.
What I like about SocialPilot is, unlike many of the social media management platforms in today’s market, this one handles both paid and organic Facebook campaigns.
At $30/month, it’s also more affordable than some of the other platforms in this category, which typically start around $99/per month.
Many of the features you’ll find in SocialPilot aren’t groundbreaking. You won’t find AI-based tools or advanced analytics, but you will get a solid suite of features that make it easy to manage multiple channels in one place.
8. Qwaya
Price: Starts at $149/month.
Qwaya is one of the more “specialized” entries on this list, but it’s one of the top Facebook apps for anyone managing large scale FB and Instagram campaigns.
The core value prop here is, users can streamline their ad creation and management process with automated A/B testing, custom campaign rules, and URL tracking.
The platform allows you to save target audiences and ads as templates for faster setup in future campaigns and makes it easy to keep content organized with a system of folders.
While Qwaya might not be the flashiest tool, it’s really effective at optimizing Facebook campaigns beyond what you’ll get from the social platform for free.
9. Animoto
Price: Free, Professional: $33/month, Team: $49/month.
There are countless video editing apps that allow marketers to create high-end content with minimal effort (I share my top picks here).
The reason I opted to include Animoto over other top Facebook apps is it’s a user-friendly solution that can be used for a variety of content types–product tutorials, personal messages, Facebook ads, organic posts, etc.
- Professional templates
- Drag-and-drop-editor
- Stock photos
- Customization options
Where I included Spark because it allows users to create assets almost instantly, Animoto is a better solution for Facebook content that demands higher production value.
Keep in mind, you’ll probably want to invest in one of the paid plans as anything created in the free version will include Animoto branding. Consider this more of a “trial” than solution.
10. Social Bakers
Price: $200+ per month, custom plans available for brands with complex requirements.
Finally, one of the top Facebook followers apps around is Social Bakers, another long-time provider in the social marketing space.
Like other social media management tools, Social Bakers offers scheduling and reporting across multiple accounts, as well as research tools that can be used to find influencers or inform your content strategy.
However, the platform’s built-in AI takes things to the next level, particularly when it comes to audience intelligence. Users can connect to Facebook, their website, and other socials, and instantly receive a detailed audience analysis.
You can then use those insights to create marketing personas within a couple of clicks–and the AI will continuously keep them updated with the latest insights.
Social Bakers also leverages AI to analyze customer sentiment, create content and ads based on precise audience insights, and get a full breakdown of which pages your audience follows.
There’s also a community management feature that makes it easy to organize communications and easily respond to customers. What’s nice about this is, you can analyze customer experience metrics like sentiment and satisfaction in the same place you respond to real customers.
Additionally, Social Bakers offers several free tools that offer valuable insights, including:
- Persona Mapping Tool
- Facebook Quadrant Report
- Facebook Benchmarking Tool
- Facebook Ads Calculator
Wrapping Up
These tools help brands put a more professional face forward; be it through easy design, all-in-one campaign management, or social listening that captures every little thing.
That said, no matter how great your software stack is, polish will only go so far if you’re building on a shaky foundation.
Before investing in any tools, make sure you develop a Facebook marketing strategy that aligns with your business objectives, brand voice, and fits seamlessly with the rest of your channel mix.
From there, determine your needs and look closely at which platforms offer the best tools to address them.
