8 Useful Tools To Build Your Small Business Social Media Strategy
By Gaurav Belani
Social media is a critical component of today’s marketing landscape. Regardless of your business goals and industry niche, you can use social media to promote your products or services, deliver content, and engage target audiences.
Research shows that 71% of small-to-midsize companies leverage social networking channels to market themselves, with 52% posting at least daily. However, one massive drawback of social media is that it is incredibly crowded.
There are 3.78 billion social media users across the globe, with an average of 145 minutes being spent on it daily. You can imagine the volume of content being produced every day!
That makes it hard for businesses to get the visibility they deserve unless you have an actionable strategy and the proper tools to build it. This article is about the latter, and we will study different solutions your small business can use to develop an effective social media plan.
But before we get started, let us first examine the types of social media posts you can create and post for your business.
Types of social media visuals to use
While sharing textual content is not going anywhere, posting visuals on social media has gained much popularity in the past few years. They are considered to be more engaging and interactive. In addition, content with visuals is likely to get 94% more views than content without them. Here are eight types of visuals you can use to engage your audience:
- Charts and graphs to simplify a complex concept or make data easily understandable or portray yourself as an expert in the industry
- Infographics to combine illustrations, text, and numbers for telling an interesting story related to your offering
- Memes and GIFs for being instantly recognizable and having the potential to go viral
- Product photos to showcase your offerings in the best possible way
- Screenshots and screencasts for properly explaining a service when you do not have anything tangible to share with your audience.
- User-Generated Content (UGC) involves promoting content posted by their customers on social media.
- Videos for promoting a customer testimonial, a product demo, a company event, an industry statistic, and so on
Eight valuable social media tools for small businesses to use
1. BuzzSumo
This cloud-based platform helps marketers and businesses discover the most shared content ideas in the market, uncover industry insights, and identify influencers to collaborate with within their marketing campaigns.
In other words, when it comes to researching what to share with your audience on social media, BuzzSumo is the place to be. The platform allows you to find the most popular or trending social media content and filter it based on keywords, dates, and content type.
According to OptinMonster, 65% of marketers find it a challenge to produce engaging content. BuzzSumo eliminates the guesswork with timely and focused research.
All you need to do is simply insert relevant terms in its search box to access the latest articles, op-eds, and social media posts. The only drawback is BuzzSumo allows ten free searches a month in its Free package, so you might want to purchase a paid subscription for uninterrupted use.
2. Creately
Designing professional-looking diagrams can be stressful and time-consuming unless you use a dedicated diagramming app or a designer who can spend hours making one diagram. That is where Creately enters the picture.
Its SwimLane Diagram software costs less but delivers on the promise to make diagram creation a breeze. You can draw the most complicated processes and add swimlanes in a shorter period. Creately offers smart shapes, easy preset styling options, and a rich library of templates.
Its drag-and-drop editor enables effortless drawing. What is interesting is that multiple people can work on the same visual at the same time, enabling effective collaboration.
Diagrams, charts, and graphs help businesses position themselves as experts in the market by taking a visual approach to present a statistic or research findings. Creately is available on the cloud and has a desktop app for macOS, Linux, and Microsoft.
3. Canva
Great content calls for fantastic imagery. However, designers, although valuable, are an expensive resource for small businesses. But when you require images, videos, or GIFs that are aesthetically pleasing, you can rely on Canva.
This graphic design platform helps you create visually appealing content in a matter of minutes without you having any prior training.
The freemium, browser-based design tool provides templates for all social media channels. It offers many free and premium photos, attractive text overlays and font selections, and drag-and-drop functionality.
Registration is free, and the platform even saves your designs, making it easier for you to keep track of your social media content created using Canva.
4. Boosted by Lightricks
While Canva can help create fantastic photos, Boosted is the app to design modern, fun, and easy marketing videos for your small business. Select pre-made templates created by professional design experts, add your branding and messaging, tweak as you like, and export the results as high-quality videos within minutes.
With Boosted, you can customize your videos using colors, music, fonts that reflect your brand, and you can upload your own stills and clips to bring them into the mix.
In addition, you can resize the videos for different social media platforms. According to HubSpot, 54% of consumers want to see more video content from businesses they support.
Why not leverage this type of social media post when it generates more engagement than any other type of content?
5. Hootsuite
One of the most popular social media management tools, Hootsuite is used by millions of people worldwide and has over 200,000 paid accounts. It is a comprehensive platform that enables you to create and schedule content, run paid social media ads, and measure your ROI.
What is more — you can create streams of new mentions, likes, and followers to stay updated about the interactions social media users are having about your business or with your company pages or profiles. This tool is a boon for B2C companies that deal with customer queries daily.
Depending on the pricing plan you choose, HootSuite allows you to connect with over 35 social media networks and bulk-schedule posts.
6. AdParlor
Sure, social media scheduling tools like HootSuite show you how your posts look when posted, but they do not give the complete picture, and they certainly do not share ad previews. That is where AdParlor can make a difference.
Its free Mockup Generator allows you to choose from various campaign objectives for every platform and view the ad in different formats — from video and carousel on Instagram to news feed and mobile for Facebook.
You invest time in creating a social media creative and writing a copy for it. You do not want your efforts to go to waste. AdParlor not only helps you create the perfect post but also lets you preview it before it is published.
7. AddThis
If your social media strategy does not involve a process to syndicate your content and have as many people as possible to see it, there is a problem. AddThis is a social bookmarking service that offers various free website tools such as Share and Follow buttons.
You can embed these plugins across your business website, specifically on your blog and service pages. This would make it easy for your site visitors to share your content on their most favorite social media platforms.
You can connect up to 200 global social media networks, including Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Pinterest. Plus, you can personalize the buttons to match your branding.
A Smart Sorting feature also displays your visitors’ most recent and frequently used social media channels.
8. Rival IQ
You might have a consistent social media publishing schedule. But how do you know it is working for your small business? Rival IQ is a popular social media analytics platform that helps you measure the effectiveness of your activities across all networks.
Bouncing between different social media platforms to export reports can be a tedious job. Rival IQ pulls all the metrics on a single dashboard for you. Not only that, but it also compares your engagement rates to that of your competitors, so you know where you stand in the market.
Today’s marketers create content for multiple audience segments. They need to know how their content is performing to make quick changes if required. With Rival IQ’s automated and custom reporting, you would periodically get a report on how your social media is faring.
Build your social media strategy
Great social media does not happen overnight. Sadly, there is no magical recipe. You cannot just post randomly on your channels and expect it to fetch you traction. There has to be a purpose behind it. You need to set the context for your social media.
More importantly, you have to stay up-to-date with the latest practices, tools, and trends to deliver on your strategic vision. Hopefully, this toolkit will help you invest your time and energy in the right direction and help you build an effective strategy for your social media.
Learn more about Social Hire
We won't just do social media strategies. Social Hire will work collaboratively with your team to ensure your business gets genuine value from us and that your team gets the most out of the service. Our experienced social media managers are motivated to make a enhancements to your social media marketing and reaching targets in a way that realistically makes a difference to your business goals.
Our digital marketing managers are the wizards that can give you the insight you need to develop your business. Have you had enough of making complex personnel choices that don't work well for your digital presence?
The social media marketers in our company are the best in the business at helping our partners enhance their online marketing. We outline and implement cutting-edge social media marketing plans that help our customers realise their organisational objectives and further their social media presence. Our experienced team of digital experts do your social media strategy creation and management in an uncomplicated monthly plan that is cost-effective and is genuinely useful, whatever results you demand from your marketing team.
Our team are a company that helps our customers further their digital footprint by providing digital marketing on a monthly basis.
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