In this day and age, social media is an integral part of marketing your business. It’s one of the most powerful communication channels and can help your business achieve some incredible success.
Navigating the social media landscape, however, can be tricky. With the number of businesses hopping on the social media bandwagon, it’s important that you differentiate your business with a solid social media strategy. With the right tools, you’ll be able to save time, improve your campaign’s performance, and reach your goals.
With the number of tools available on the internet however, it can be quite overwhelming and hard to pinpoint and figure out what exact tools you would need to invest in. To help get you started, we’ve curated some of the essential tools you’d need to successfully promote your business via social media. These tools range from curating content and design to scheduling – depending on what suits your business needs best.
Biteable
With social media, content is key. If you’re using Twitter, for example, visual content gets much more engagement than just utilizing plain text. By creating some appealing visual content, you’ll be able to take your social media engagement to the next level.
Biteable is a tool that you can use to help create content that’s both entertaining and engaging. Using Biteable, you can easily create videos that can be shared on social media with the click of a button. There’s plenty of free music, video templates, and even animated scenes to get you going.
Video production can cost a fortune, and Biteable will allow you to create high-quality videos easily. It’s an inexpensive option especially if you don’t have the funds to rent equipment and hire studios.
What is Biteable best for?
- Creating stunning videos for social media
- The budget-conscious
- Those short on time and need a video created quickly
Buffer
To achieve the right results for your business, you need to ensure that there’s consistency with your posting. Posting sporadically on social media could result in a drop in engagement and a decrease in followers.
Buffer is a scheduling tool that currently supports all major social media platforms. With Buffer, you can not only share content on the go, but it also helps to automatically shorten your links, and track your content’s performance.
Best of all? Buffer helps to create a posting schedule so your content is spread evenly throughout the day. You can also respond to posts with Buffer and won’t have to toggle through the different social media platforms.
What is Buffer best for?
- Scheduling content on major social media platforms
- Tracking your content’s performance
BuzzSumo
Knowing what’s trending in the social media space and what’s not is key. By knowing what everyone’s currently talking about on social media, you can create content that resonates with your audience to generate both traffic and leads.
With BuzzSumo, it helps you identify what content is trending amongst industries. If you’re posting something related to travel, for example, you can add in a few keywords and take a look at what’s performing the best.
If you’re looking to work with influencers, BuzzSumo also identifies who has been sharing the content so you can potentially reach out to these individuals and collaborate with them and ask them to share your content as well. While these features are free, you may want to get BuzzSumo Pro as it’ll help you gain further insight into what your competitors are doing, and help set you apart.
What is BuzzSumo best for?
- Identify what content is trending amongst your industry
- Identifying which influencers to reach out to
Planoly
Similar to Buffer, Planoly helps in scheduling posts and ensuring that you’re getting the most engagement. What’s different about Planoly however, is that the posts will be auto-shared while you’re asleep. These days, Instagram followers are from all parts of the world. With Planoly, you’ll be able to engage with followers that may not be from your time zone.
Either than helping to auto-post and schedule content, Planoly also helps in discovering content by searching for both usernames and hashtags. There’re even functions that help you with adding your own content and plan it in a way that your feed looks both appealing and structured.
What is Planoly best for?
- Auto-sharing content
- Discovers content through usernames and hashtags
- Functions that help in making your feed more appealing
Facebook Audience Insights
If you’re promoting your business via social media, there’s a high chance that you’re using Facebook. Figuring out what makes your audience tick is extremely beneficial to your business, and can be discovered through Facebook Audience Insights. By taking a closer look at the data, you’ll be able to figure out what the demographics, behaviors and even interests of your target customers are.
Facebook Audience Insights can even pinpoint specific information such as their job titles, household information, location and more. By having such detailed information on your target audience, you’ll be able to craft content that’s appealing to them and increase the chances of them engaging with your business. Research is essential to improving your business and achieving growth. Hence, having the necessary data will keep you on your toes, and help you stand out from your competitors.
What is Facebook Audience Insights best for?
- Figuring out what makes your audience tick
- Crafting engaging content based on insightful data
Grammarly
Grammarly is incredibly helpful and is a tool that shouldn’t be taken lightly. These days, when you’re posting on social media you should be incredibly tactful. Just ignoring the smallest detail can result in severe backlash from the social media community. Hence, you’ll want the content you create to have impeccable grammar and language that captures your audience’s attention.
Grammarly helps to double-check that your content’s grammar, spelling, and even punctuation is of the highest level. While you can use the basic Grammarly tool to scan for any errors, you can pay to upgrade Grammarly for premium features, and even send your content to professional proofreaders.
What is Grammarly best for?
- Scanning for spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors
- Informing you about the content’s clarity, engagement, and delivery
Mention
Part of the success of your business via social media involves tracking and monitoring keywords. With Mention, you’ll be able to add your brand’s name, hashtags or keywords to this useful tool and it’ll provide you with updates whenever someone mentions any of the above.
This way, you can monitor your brand and quickly engage with individuals that may have expressed interest in your business. You can also track any other type of keywords to have a better idea of what your audience is searching for, and utilize this data in your paid advertising campaigns.
What is Mention best for?
- Tracking and monitoring your brand’s keywords, name or hashtags
- Know what keywords your audience is searching for
Missinglttr
Even if you have a scheduling tool in place to help you regularly post on your social media channels, your difficulty maybe crafting the content instead of posting it. With Missinglttr, it’ll actually help to create content by taking a look at the blog posts you’ve already curated and create a year’s worth of social content for you. In total, that’s nine posts over the course of the year that’s dripped out to your various social media channels.
This way, you can focus on creating blog posts on your website, and you won’t have to worry about what content you’d like to post on social media. You’ll just need to have someone help with the scheduling (or you can use one of the tools mentioned before), and you’re all good to go.
What is Missinglttr best for?
- Curating social media content from your blog posts
- Receiving templates that help with content creation, scheduling and more
- Those that have trouble coming up with content
Hootsuite
While there’re Planoly and Buffer, there’s also the incredibly popular Hootsuite. Similar to the other two tools, Hootsuite helps with the scheduling of multiple social media accounts. It also allows you to collaborate with team members and has an approval process incorporated into the tool. You can also proceed to assign tasks, see all your comments in one place, and even plot a social media calendar within the tool.
Hootsuite is also well-known for its social media courses to help in developing social media skills and giving you a better idea of the foundations of social media marketing. Hootsuite also goes one step further by giving you in-depth breakdowns of your analytics, and even integrate other platforms such as Reddit for additional feedback and customer data.
What is Hootsuite best for?
- Scheduling posts on social media platforms
- Collaboration with team members
- Breakdown of analytics, and you can even find out what community-based platforms are saying about your business
AdEspresso
With social media, you may be on the fence about what content or design works best for your target audience, and that’s where AdEspresso comes in. This tool helps with A/B testing so have a better idea of which advertisement resonating more with your target audience.
Ads can also be managed from this one tool, and you can easily see what’s working well and what’s not. With AdEspresso you can continue to tweak your advertisement until you’ve tested the different variations and ended up with the perfect image, content, etc. Detailed metrics are something else you’ll get with AdEspresso, and smart filters will figure out what should be promoted and for how long.
What is AdEspresso best for?
- Optimizing advertisements and figuring out what’s best for your target audience
- Taking out the guesswork of a complicated social media advertising system and helping to streamline efforts
Canva
Design is a huge part of social media, and you’re going to have minimal engagement if you don’t have an eye-catching design that’s aesthetically pleasing. With so many businesses on social media channels, there’s increasing pressure to produce a design that’s going to stand out and resonate with your audience – especially on channels like Facebook and Instagram. However, designers can be expensive especially if you’re a business that’s just starting out.
Canva is an incredibly useful tool that’s sought after by marketers as it contains plenty of design tools, templates, and tutorials that are perfect for social media. Most of the elements you need are also free, and it’s also incredibly easy to use.
What is Canva best for?
- Businesses that don’t have the budget to hire a designer
- Those who are not design-savvy but need aesthetically pleasing social media marketing materials
Unsplash
If you’re on a budget, you may not have the ability to fork out a large amount of money to hire a photographer for photos. Websites like Shutterstock and iStock can also be relatively expensive. When it comes to social media, having images that are synonymous with your brand that the audience can relate to is incredibly important. This is especially true if you’re targeting Generation Z, as they’re a digitally inclined audience that’s particular about what they consume.
Unsplash is a website that has high-quality images that are not only gorgeous, they are also completely free. There are plenty of images that you can find on Unsplash ranging from food to models, animals and more.
What is Unsplash best for?
- Businesses that don’t have the budget to hire a photographer
- If you need high-quality free images quickly
Conclusion
With the number of tools currently available on the market, promoting your business via social media doesn’t have to be an overly difficult process. These tools will not only help you save money, but they’ll also help you save copious amounts of time and effort that you could be used in other parts of your business.
By being resourceful, knowing what tools work best for your business and delegating accordingly, you’ll be well on your way to differentiating your business from your competitors, engaging your target audience, and achieving your goals. Social media can be difficult to navigate in the beginning, but by using the tools above, it’ll soon be a piece of cake.
