5 Tools You Need to Enhance Your Social Media Strategy
Social Media is a time-consuming job for many small businesses. This article explores 5 tools that will help you grow your audience, save you time and get the most out of social media.
If you’re reading this, then you already know that social media is a critical component to your marketing strategy. It’s a brilliant platform for building brand awareness, generating leads and consistently supporting the growth of your business.
Not to mention that 54% of the worlds total population are on social media. A drastic figure that resembles the power that’s there to be harnessed.
Of course reaching these customers requires an effective social media strategy that has been created for you and your audience. If you’ve no idea what your social media strategy is, click here and get in touch before reading further.
Now, if you’ve personally been running your businesses social media you’ll know that one of the challenges is time. Social is a 24/7, 365 days per year activity, so you need all the help you can get when it comes to getting the most from social.
There are many ‘tools’ or other applications that you can use which will certainly make your life easier, and help you find the joy managing social media once again.
We’ve called out just two types of tool, that in our eyes, are an essential asset to your armoury.
These are; Creative and Scheduling.
What do we mean by this?
Creative: Creative tools we’ve defined as those that advance your ability to create stand-out visual content with a relatively easy and cost effective solution.
Scheduling: Scheduling tools, well… they’re quite self-explanatory. These are tools that allow you to block-schedule content so you’ll still be posting on that platform even when you’re not online.
Ok, now that’s explained. Let’s jump into it.
Creative:
Lightroom
Adobe's Lightroom is a tool that lets you edit photos both on a laptop and with a highly functional mobile app. Users across social media are highly susceptible to aimlessly scrolling through content, it’s increasingly becoming more about your visuals, graphics and creativity that will ‘stop the scroll’ for those precious moments of engagement.
Filters, presets and many other key features make Lightroom a user-centric tool that turns a novice into a skilled editor.
Canva
Canva is essential your graphic-designer-best-friend. It’s a super simple and user friendly website that helps you to create custom, on-brand graphics for your business social media accounts. The website has lots of templated designs from Facebook banners to LinkedIn posts that allows you to jump right in and get creating. So if powerful graphics scare you, Canva will be with you every step of the way.
Unfold
Have you ever wondered how businesses on Instagram have really engaging, visual stories? Unfold is probably the secret app behind their creativity. Packed with templates that encourage you to create your Instagram stories to new heights, Unfold is the ideal app for lifestyle brands who want to create stylish stories to keep their followers engaged.
Scheduling:
Falcon
Falcon is a social media management platform that allows you to create organic and paid social posts across a variety of social networks. The platform has an interactive content calendar that integrates with HubSpot, Microsoft, and Salesforce. Perfect for remote teams, it’s easy to manage channels, campaigns and approval points to ensure brand alignment, as well as a host of useful data insights.
Later
Later is a super user-friendly social media marketing and scheduling platform that lets you plan and organise your upcoming social posts across Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and more. With an interactive ‘drag-and-drop’ calendar, its a super easy way for you to map out your scheduled posts and see at a glance how your feed will look.
There is also a built-in analytics function, which will help you figure out the best time of day to post, and the best hashtags to use.
Your Next Steps
So now you have the right tools in your kit-bag that will allow you to create stunning visuals that will stop your audience in their tracks, and paired with efficient scheduling platforms, you’ll be showing up in all the right places, at all the right times.
There’s never been a better time to get social.
For more information on how we can create your perfect social media strategy and enhance your platforms, click here and get in touch.