Creating and managing social media takes time. And creating great social media content while making sure that your content delivers the highest ROI takes even more. But the good news is that, with the right tools, you can save a bunch of time, create epic pieces of content in minutes, and, ultimately, make your life much easier.
Whether you're looking for content inspiration, to create awesome infographics, track hashtags for your social media strategies, or anything else in between, we are going to show you a few tools that you can use to really improve your social media marketing efforts.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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So, let’s dive into these great tools.
1. Content Ideas Tools
The first step of content creation for social media is of course finding content ideas. The tool that we use to find content inspirations for our clients and us is a website called Answer the Public.
Answer the Public
It's a free and visual tool that extracts the most common queries related to your field from Google and presents them in the categorised keyword cloud.
So, for example, if you type in the keyword “Instagram” into the search bar and click the” get questions” button, the website will give you all possible content ideas in visual formats related to the most common queries about Instagram.
So first, you will see a wheel of keywords related to your topic, then a bit lower you’ll see them organised into five categories as Questions, Prepositions, Comparisons, Alphabetical, and Related. As you can understand, Answer the Public can really give you hundreds of valid content ideas from typing in just one or two main keywords.
2. Content Creation Tools
If you're ever facing a writer blog so you need some fresh injections of content ideas, sometimes posting pictures alone on social media it's simply not enough to attract and convert your audience so it's really important to create content that stands out. Whether it means sometimes you have to create infographics where you have to make memes on Instagram, or you have to create video content, whatever that is, continue reading because we are going to show you a few tools that can help you create amazing content while saving time.
Canva
Canva is a very popular tool for content creation. It offers. hundreds of templates images and illustration assets and dozens of font and text styling. Canva makes it super easy to create unique high-quality images that are just so good for sharing on social media or even your blog.
So, once you've chosen your templates or layout, you can use the resource library to drag and drop different elements of your preference. You can add or edit text and adjust core settings like font colour and image filters.
Any Maker
Another really cool design tool that we want to introduce to you is called Any Maker. This is a tool for creating really cool animation videos and it does it so exceptionally well that you have to try this out.
You can make all kinds of animated videos like whiteboards and vertical presentations. This tool has the largest collections of animated characters properties, bgs icons charts, and maps for you to use.
Giphy.com
If you want to make Gifs, we recommend you Giphy.com. All you have to do is to upload a series of images and the tool will make a gif out of them.
You can then change the size to adjust the order and play with the animation settings to make sure that it's perfect for you.
Alright, now before we move on with the next social media content creation and management tools, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
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3. Pictures Ideas Tools
Sometimes, you might find yourself in the situation where you have to use stock images for your social media, especially when you're not giving any creative assets.
By stock photos, we are not talking about those really cheesy ones of people in suits shaking their hands. No, we want you to stay away from that because they look super awkward and they're just not good.
So, instead, we wanted to show you guys a few websites that offer beautiful photos but without looking really cheesy. And the best part is they are for free.
Pexo
What we love about this website is that it provides high-quality and completely free stock photos. All photos are nicely tagged searchable and you can easily filter the pictures through orientation, size, and colour.
Unsplash
Another website that we want to recommend to you is called Unsplash. Again, it offers a large collection of free high-resolution photos. As their team really comes through new submissions and features, the very best photos on their home page are released for free under the Unsplash license.
It's totally okay to use stock photos as long as you know they're not looking like stock photos, as there's nothing more awkward than stumbling upon an image that feels awkward right?
So, there are a few things that you have to understand when you decided to use stock photos and the number one is that they are relevant to the content that you're posting, and, secondly, is that they need to be consistent with your branding. And the third thing is that they need to be unique enough to catch attention.
4. Social Media Scheduling Tools
One of the secret weapons that every top social media marketer has is a scheduling tool. A tool that allows you to manage your social media accounts on autopilot.
With the right scheduling tool, you can save a ton of time and produce a balanced mix of content across all social networks to engage with your audience at the right time.
Buffer
One of the tools that we want to recommend to you is called Buffer. It has both a website and a mobile app that allow you to schedule content to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn from just one dashboard.
buffer allows you to create a pre-set publishing schedule for each social account so you’re your content always gets published at the most optimal time for each social channel.
Because again, it's very important for the post to be seen at the right time so that they get the most reach.
You can also tailor your content for each network so that you can customise the tone of voice, the emojis, and the hashtags to fit each one.
The whole scheduled content is added to your calendar so you can see at a glance what's lined up for each social network and when.
If you're just starting out, we highly recommend you give Buffer a try. Their interface is super easy and simple to navigate. But don't just take our words for it; a lot of big companies like Spotify and Shopify are also using Buffer to schedule their content.
5. Social Media Analytical Tools
Being successful on social media and generating income and profit is not about just posting beautiful pictures on Instagram.
That's not enough. And that's why it's essential to invest in social media analytic tools that can help you keep tap on the progress of your marketing strategies.
You might be thinking of just using the free Instagram insight tool. You can know what day and the time you should post on Instagram or you can look at what hashtag is performing best or how many followers you gained over a customised period of time. And yes, that feature is cool but it's very limiting, and it's very likely that you'll be handling not just an Instagram page but also a Facebook page and more pages, maybe Pinterest, or LinkedIn, or Twitter.
There are so many platforms that it’s important to find a platform that gives you all of the analytics all at once under one dashboard.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the best analytic tools for cross-channel social media analytics. What we love about this tool is that you can quickly organise and share your data with presentation-ready reports which come with both templated and customisable report options – meaning you have multiple ways to not only gather essential social metrics but truly understand what they mean. and present them to.
This tool also has a feature called advanced listening tool which arms you with valuable data related to the audience: demographics, industry, influence, campaign performance, share voice, and consumer sentiment.
So, it doesn't matter what your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout Social can give you a fast and user-friendly way to discover and display social insights.
Conclusion
We are sure that this article can give you some insight into the tools that you can use to effectively create and manage social media content for your business while saving you time. Just try them out and you’ll see how much easier creating social media content will become, alongside generating more engagement and conversions.
So, what's your favourite social media tool? And if you know some other tools that you wanted to recommend, make sure to leave a comment down below the article so that everyone who's reading can learn something new.
If you need help with your social media marketing or content creation to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
