6 Social Media Tools to Help Your Business
September 6, 2018 By Ashley Orndorff, aka Marketing Geek
Social media can help your business connect and engage with current and potential customers. It’s a great tool to increase brand awareness, supplement other marketing efforts, and more. Between planning content, posting it, and engaging with others, managing social media for your business can become time-consuming, especially if you’re building a presence on several different networks. That’s where social media tools come in. Social media tools can help you save time by allowing you to schedule content ahead of time, easily create graphics, and more. Here are a few social media tools to help your business:
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to plan and schedule content to multiple social networks and monitor engagement from one easy-to-use dashboard. There are several social media network integrations available, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Although you can no longer use third-party tools to schedule to Facebook profiles, you can use them to schedule content to Facebook pages. So, it’s important to make sure your business has a Facebook page and not a profile in order to use social media tools for it.
Hootsuite now has only paid plans. They no longer offer the free plan, but you can do a 30-day free trial to make sure you want to use it before you pay anything. Different plans offer different numbers of social integrations for your dashboard, different numbers of users, and additional features. But, all paid plans offer unlimited scheduling.
There are plenty of options available to fit with what your business needs. Plus, you can always start with the free plan to try things out and then upgrade to a paid plan later, without losing any of your data or history.
2. Buffer
Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer allows you to schedule content to multiple social media accounts. You can customize posts to different social media sites from one platform. They offer several plans with varying levels of features.
For example, the free plan allows you to schedule up to 10 posts for each social network, while paid plans allow for more. With the free plan, you can schedule content to three social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram.
With a paid plan, you can extend the number of social networks in your account and also get the ability to post content to Pinterest along with the previously listed networks. In addition to scheduling content you create, you can also share content to your connected social networks as you come across it by using the Buffer mobile app or browser extension. This makes curating content from others a much easier and faster process.
3. Later
In addition to Hootsuite and Buffer, Later is another option for scheduling posts ahead of time. It was originally launched as Latergramme, a tool for scheduling posts to Instagram.
As more and more tools added Instagram to their available networks, Latergramme integrated with Later to create a more robust social media scheduling platform. Now, Later allows you to manage Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest from one platform. There is a free plan available, but if you want to share videos through the platform, you’ll need a paid plan.
4. Canva
Social media is all about engagement and graphics tend to get more engagement. Unless you have a dedicated in-house designer, creating graphics for social media can be a hassle. That’s where Canva can help. With Canva, you can easily create beautiful social media graphics using images and information.
Whether you’re creating a meme, a text graphic, or even an infographic, Canva can help you do it with templates, swatches, text, and pictures. You can also upload your own images to use in your creations. It certainly won’t be the same as having a talented graphic designer on hand, but it does give you some tools that can help you create sleek and professional graphics for your social media profiles.
5. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a social media scheduling tool with an automatic re-sharing feature. If you’re doing things right with your content, you’re creating high-quality, relevant, and valuable content for your business. It’s important to continue to promote this content over time to continue driving traffic to it. But, many businesses only share content once and then focus on sharing only new content instead of ongoing promotion.
MeetEdgar can work with another social scheduling tool or handle it all to help you focus your efforts on new content while also promoting evergreen content for you. Although it does not have a free plan, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee to give you a risk-free trial. It’s $49 per month and allows you to create an unlimited library of your content MeetEdgar can use for automatic re-sharing. Currently, you can connect to Facebook Pages and Groups, Twitter, and LinkedIn Profiles and Company Pages. Instagram and Pinterest are not available yet, but are on the way.
6. Plann
Plann is a social media scheduling tool that encompasses a content planner, scheduler, and more into one easy-to-use tool. Between visual drag-and-drop planners, templates to follow, auto-posting features, and more, there are a lot of resources to make social media management much easier. In addition to supporting several social media platforms, Plann also integrates with Canva, Unsplash, and other tools to help you get what you need in one place.
When it comes to social media for your business, social media tools can help you save time, track relevant keywords, topics, etc. through social listening, post better content more often, and reach more of your potential customers. It may take some trial and error to find the perfect mix of tools for your business, but there are plenty of options available to find a good fit.
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