By now we are all well aware of the importance of social media for small businesses. As a community building tool at heart, it can be a crucial tool for building an engaged, quality audience. But while small businesses are certainly the ones who stand to gain the most from social media marketing, they are also the ones who could find themselves losing out the most if their time and resources aren’t used wisely…
If you don’t leverage social media marketing with the right tools it’s easy to let yourself get carried away and your time wasted. Where small businesses are concerned, the pace is often pretty fast moving; so making the most of the small time you have allocated to social media marketing is of paramount importance.
With the sheer amount of users now, marketing decisions have to be data-driven to make a difference. There are a variety of free tools out there that can help small businesses to get the most from their time and the best possible results. Here are some of our favourites…
Socialrank is a simple to use platform that allows you to identify, organise and manage both Twitter and Instagram followers. It will help to give you a better understanding of who your best followers are and what they are about. With the use of filters you can see, amongst other things, who your most engaged and influential followers are.
Content driven social media marketing is a recipe for success and we’re all about that here at Giraffe. Coschedule analyses and gives quality scores on the strength of article titles and headlines in relation to social media engagement, particularly shares. It will also determine the likelihood that a blog title will be beneficial to your SEO.
Hootsuite is the preferred social media management tool of millions that allows you to schedule, engage with and grow your audience across all of your social networks from one place. It also offers social analytics. Free features are limited but there is a selection of affordable pro plans available.
We can’t recommend Canva enough for image editing. Absolutely everyone in the office makes use of it to create professional graphics for social media posts. It’s simple, easy to use and comes with a whole host of prepackaged graphics and features, alongside a great range of fonts.
If Canva is the sword of Giraffe Social Media, Pixabay is the shield. This website offers over 640,000 images all under Creative Commons CC0 which means you can do absolutely anything you like with them, even use them for commercial use, and you won’t have to attribute a soul.
Marketed as “The simpler way to plan your visual content marketing”, Later is a scheduling tool for Instagram that allows users to schedule and manage their posts ahead of time. Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networks and if you can afford to tear yourself away from instantly uploading your pictures, Later allows you to spread out and create a steady stream of content.
Hubspot’s Website Grader gives a full report on the strength of your marketing efforts across all of your digital channels, including social media, content and SEO. Great if you’re strapped for time and in search of immediate direction.
Uprank is an advanced research tool that analyses and provides data on the strength of your brand’s digital marketing, including website architecture, SEO and social media. It then generates a digital marketing strategy tailored to your site in the form of comprehensive tasks.
AdParlor lets you create free mockups of ads for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, giving you a better idea of what your finished campaigns would look like to users on these networks. Features allow you to reuse your most commonly used social media profiles to help save time when creating mockups. This tool also gives you a great understanding over whether your images are compliant with Facebook’s text guidelines.
