Social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to promote a business, organization, campaign, event, or product. Celebrities, politicians, and people like you and me are using social media to share their journeys, experiences, and yes, even what they had for lunch. With a single post, tweet, photo, or video, we have the power to instantly connect with others across the globe. Once it is determined which social media platforms are relevant to your needs, there should be consistent and creative engagement. To help streamline social media processes and get the most out of your experience, below are several applications and services available for curating content, scheduling posts, managing multiple accounts, and tracking results.
Content Creation
As previously highlighted in our introductory guide to building a stronger social media presence, visuals help posts to stand out from an endless stream of text and entices users to “stop the scroll”.
- Adobe Express is a free graphic design application that allows users to create social graphics, memes and animated videos.
- Pixabay offers more than 940,000 free stock photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos which can be socialized without attribution.
- With Scoop.It, content can be curated from other sources and shared along with personalized comments across multiple social media platforms.
- Hootsuite Enhance allows users to create compelling images and then add customizable text, watermarks, company logos, and filters before sharing to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest right from the app itself.
- With Gifs, users can take any video from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube and quickly turn it into a GIF using its web application.
Schedule Posts in Advance
To ensure content reaches your target audience, it’s important to post frequently and at optimal times. With the following tools, you can schedule multiple posts to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram at specific times throughout the day:
- Buffer makes it easy to consistently schedule content across multiple social media profiles to increase reach and user engagement.
- With Hootsuite, users can also manage multiple social profiles and schedule effective social content from a single dashboard.
- Schedugram is an easy way to queue posts to Instagram. In addition to setting specific times to post images or videos, Schedugram automatically converts uploaded files into the right size and format for Instagram.
- Yala uses machine learning to determine the best times to post to Twitter and Facebook.
Manage Multiple Accounts
How many window browsers do you currently have open? If the answer is more than two, these tools can help! Consolidate multiple windows into one, organized and easy to read window to improve your workflow:
- Ghost Browser enables users to log into any website with multiple accounts from one window.
- Engage is a standalone app by Twitter to help users manage multiple Twitter profiles.
- Panda 5 also enables users to browse multiple websites at the same time for distraction free reading and built-in bookmarking to improve workflow.
Content Reporting & Analytics
To gauge how your social media marketing is performing, it’s crucial to analyze and compare weekly, monthly, or quarterly content reports and analytics. By understanding which types of posts provoke more interactions and comparing which platforms amplify your social media presence, analytics can help your company reach its end goal. From generating leads to bringing awareness to a cause, the following tools can help track results:
- PostReach automates content reporting by delivering traffic statistics, page views, clicks, and shares through weekly email notifications.
- SproutSocial measures follower growth, analyzes engagement ratios, and monitors trends in popular hashtags.
Overall, social media marketing is one of the smartest and simplest ways to connect with the public on a more personal level. We recommend implementing a well-thought out social media strategy first, and then streamlining processes to ensure each account runs as efficiently as possible.
Interested in social media marketing? Contact us today to see how we can help!