The development and implementation of a solid social media marketing strategy can deliver a range of benefits to both B2B and B2C businesses. Whether it’s the business focused network of LinkedIn or the more consumer oriented Facebook platform, with so many social platforms to keep up with. Effective social media management can sometimes feel like an impossible task.
Whether you manage a single social platform or several, it can be all too easy to feel overwhelmed or frustrated when it doesn’t seem as though you are driving the results you want. This is why equipping yourself with a variety of tools to enhance your strategy and streamline your social management processes is essential.
To get you started, here are five of the best tools that will help you to up your social game and improve your approach to this powerful marketing channel.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most advanced and universally trusted tools for streamlining the social media management process. Creating and sharing content across your social platforms is essential, however, it also takes a considerable amount of time to get right.
Millions of people globally use Hootsuite to manage their social channels and ensure that content is published and pushed to the feeds of the right people during peak engagement times. This means that if one of your social channels experiences high levels of engagement at 3am, you can schedule content to cater for that audience without needing to be available to manually share posts at anti-social hours.
An easy to use dashboard will help you to effectively manage your social channels, allowing you to draft, schedule and share posts, monitor your social calendar and view your latest posts. The ability to see everything that is happening at a glance will simplify your social sharing processes and give you the clarity you need to deliver a first-class social strategy that your audience will enjoy and which will help you to drive measurable returns from social media marketing.
Buffer
Buffer has become one of the world’s most popular social management platforms. In fact, more than 75,000 businesses are using Buffer to enhance their brands globally right now. Although it isn’t a hugely feature-rich platform, the tools Buffer offers are remarkably intuitive and easy to use. Presenting its service as a smarter way to share on social media, Buffer helps its users to build their social audience whilst growing their brand online.
Providing the ability to shape an optimised post for each social network you are targeting, Buffer’s user-friendly dashboard facilitates the planning, creation and publishing of content for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Buffer also facilitates collaboration, allowing you to communicate with your team and ensure that every social campaign is carefully orchestrated to go live without a hitch.
In addition to delivering efficient scheduling tools, Buffer actively encourages its users to focus on the creation and delivery of high-quality content, which will drive growth and engagement for your business.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse provides social media management software for businesses looking to drive engagement, with a focus on building authentic relationships with their audience. In addition to facilitating audience engagement and content scheduling, Agorapulse also provides accurate up-to-date reports that allow you to determine the effectiveness of your social strategy.
A variety of scheduling options allow you to take full control of your approach to social media and ensure that your content calendar is bursting with high-quality content that your audience will want to engage with. A built-in social inbox will help you to locate, manage and respond to your mentions, comments and direct messages, ensuring you never miss an opportunity to communicate with your audience.
As social feeds are fast-paced and constantly evolving, a real-time collaboration tool will help you to keep in touch with your team and guarantee that every aspect of your social strategy is being covered by the right person at all times.
Canva
Although not all social media platforms are as visual-focussed as Instagram, there is simply no getting around the fact that supporting your posts with high-quality imagery is an excellent way to capture the attention of your audience.
There are many professional image editing software options available, Photoshop arguably being the most prominent, however, these programs can be both complex and time consuming to use. This clearly isn’t ideal when you have several social accounts to manage, which is where Canva comes into play.
Canva has an extensive selection of pre-built layouts and templates, which means that creating engaging imagery for your social channels can be completed in just a few clicks. With perfectly sized templates for everything from Twitter banners to Instagram posts, all you have to do is drag and drop your chosen elements on to the canvas and save your image ready for publication to your chosen social platforms.
SEMrush
SEMrush prides itself on providing seamless access to an all-in-one toolkit that will streamline your marketing life. In addition to delivering world-class insight into the keywords on which your competitors are bidding, SEMrush can help you to improve your understanding of the keywords you are ranking well for and those you might want to begin targeting to ensure that you remain one step ahead of your competition at all times. Importantly, this information should be used to inform your social strategy and influence the kind of content you are sharing to your social channels.
At its core, SEMrush is an online visibility management platform and its dedicated social media toolkit provides users with an intuitive dashboard from which to effectively manage and track all their social platforms. From scheduling posts to ascertaining the most appropriate times to post each day, this user-friendly platform also allows you to learn from the successes and failures of your competitors’ efforts. It enables you to identify ways in which you can increase your reach and ensure that as many pairs of eyes as possible are on your content at any given time.
Special Mention: Grammarly
Building trust with your audience is crucial and they aren’t going to be as receptive to your social messaging if it is littered with spelling or grammar errors. Although spell checkers are generally fairly good at picking up spelling mistakes, they aren’t always particularly adept at flagging up issues with grammar.
Grammarly will catch a variety of mistakes, including word usage and squinting modifiers. It will also highlight potentially overused words, ensuring that your content is always thoroughly proofed and polished before you hit the publish button.
Installing the Grammarly add-on into your browser means that you can edit your content from whatever tab you are using without being forced to copy and paste it into the Grammarly site itself. Although this might not sound like a particularly impressive capability, anything you can do to streamline your social process will save you precious time and make your social management life a little simpler.
Whether you are a social media expert or just starting out, having one or more of these tools in your digital armoury will allow you to focus on enhancing engagement and driving even more powerful results from your social presence.