Any social media manager worth their salt nowadays has to be always on the lookout for ways to streamline and automate their processes. However, hundreds of applications and websites were developed in response to this need in order to assist managers in improving their performance while decreasing costs.
When you hear the term “social media tools” or “social media management tools,” applications like Hootsuite and Buffer are likely the first ones that come to mind. Even if I now know that scheduling is the most time-consuming aspect of social media management, there are still many other things to do to reach your objectives, I still believe it is essential.
The truth is, I didn’t know about at least a handful of the resources I named below.
By doing research for this essay, I was able to accomplish two goals at once: improve my own knowledge and inform you, the reader. I’ll run through the greatest tools I’ve found for each stage of your social media journey, all of which are free or very cheap to use. Okay, let’s get moving!
Ideate
As expected, this is the initial stage of making content for social networking. Most individuals probably turn to team brainstorming sessions or follow popular accounts to stay on top of industry trends and get content ideas. Pinning one’s success on the success of another is another simple method. Why do I call it “piggybacking?” Because using this tool, you can find out how much interest there is in a certain subject or term before devoting time and energy to build a campaign around it. Without BuzzSumo, you’d have to waste time doing trial and error. Search results can be narrowed down by date range, origin nation, language, content category, file size, and author credibility.
BuzzSumo doesn’t offer a free plan, but you may try it risk-free for 30 days. After that, monthly subscriptions start at $99 USD. If paid annually, your monthly cost drops to $79.
Create
After you’ve decided on a concept, it’s time to gather your creative resources. It may be a video uploaded to YouTube, an Instagram story, a Twitter picture post, a Facebook ad, or a banner ad on LinkedIn. In this case, Canva is the best option because it has pre-made layouts for all of them and more. The fact that they provide a wealth of informative articles and lessons in addition to their intuitive applications is another reason I enjoy using them. Canva’s free tier is robust in features. Their monthly memberships begin at $499.
Simplify
If you have a company or a brand that sells goods, you probably also have a website where you feature those goods for sale. The URLs to individual products may be too long to easily share on social media. This changes the number of characters available on several social media sites. The solution is not to be less imaginative with your caption, but rather to shorten the links to the relevant product pages or pages on your website. Bitly is useful in these situations. Bitly lets you reduce URLs to fit inside the character restriction of an SMS or save room for more imaginative subtitles. They can also make connections to external domains that they own. In other words, you may customise the link by replacing the term “bitly” with your company’s name.
Schedule
We’ve spoken about resources that can help you make content. The next step is to get them up on your social media sites, and Crowdfire is a great tool for doing just that. Schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram for business, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, then publish them straight from Crowdfire. TikTok and personal Instagram profiles may be updated similarly, but only with the help of app reminders. You may either select an item to publish from the Content Curation menu or write your own pieces using the Compose feature. You may also use the caption editor, the hashtag manager, and a lot more features!
Engage
The updates to your social media profiles have been uploaded successfully. Now, you have to check all of those accounts many times each day to respond to comments and interact with your audience. Yes?
In a word, no! Crowdfire Mentions is, once again, a time-saving tool that may be used to get to the bottom of other, more pressing matters. Or you might just have more time for yourself.
Whenever your company or brand is mentioned online, this tool will collect such references so you may respond appropriately. Filtering options include assignee, social network, and open/closed/pending status, as well as assignee and social network. You may also refine your search based on the type of account you’re logged into. This includes options like “Twitter Post comments,” “Twitter Direct Messages,” “Facebook Post comments,” “Facebook Direct Messages,” and so on.
Analyze
The consensus is that you can’t develop a strategy for social media without first collecting data on the impact of your previous output. In this virtuous loop of Social Media activities, Social Media Analytics serves as both the beginning and the finish. If you’re looking for a free tool, Google Analytics is a top pick. The major way it does this is by revealing how many people are being sent to your site from your social media profiles, and hence how many potential customers you’ve attracted.