Not all businesses have the luxury of an on-demand content creation, social media management, or design staff. Attempting to manage and grow your company and it's employees on a daily basis is a large undertaking it itself, leaving many brands "social media dashboards" to sit and collect marketing cobwebs. (I hate spiders). More likely than not, you're now hearing on a regular basis about the importance of implementing a strong social media marketing strategy to expand your reach and convert new leads into customers. With the importance of organic social media growth at an all time high, and a cost-per-click amount most likely at the lowest we will ever see it, there is a vast number of opportunities for your business to capitalize on right now! In this blog, we're sharing 4 free social media management tools to improve your marketing efforts and simplify your strategy.
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Buffer is a software application designed to manage accounts in social networks. This cost-free tool allows you to:
Schedule Posts For Later- Share your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more often. Get the most out of each post.
Post To All Of Your Social Networks- As you add content, you can easily select which of your social accounts you want to post to. Post the same message to all accounts or add context by customizing each.
From personal experience, Buffer is a great tool for someone early on in their practices of social media management. The ability to schedule your content to post at various times, allows you time to sit, strategize and schedule your social media messages for a determined period of time. Whether your business is a one-man-show or in the growing stages with a smaller, time conflicted staff, Buffer allows you to dedicate only a small part of your day to social media management while maintaining a 24-7 digital presence.
Similar to Buffer (above), TweetDeck betters your social media management by allowing you to schedule your tweets to post at various times throughout the day, helping you establish a successful Twitter account from the ground up.
The benefits to TweetDeck is the ability to maintain various streams at one time. You can:
Create A Custom Twitter Experience- Organize and build collections, keep track of lists, searches, activity and more.
Find Exactly What You're Looking For- Create searches to track topics, events and hashtags. Refine the results with filters at the top of each timeline.
Manage Multiple Accounts- Tweet, monitor and follow new accounts from all — or just one of your accounts.
The ability to monitor more than one Twitter stream at a time enables you to monitor various aspects of your brand, or in an agencies case, many brands at one time. We highly suggest setting up streams for individual target keywords. This way, anytime someone posts using your keywords, you have the opportunity to see their message, and politely step into the conversation by presenting a piece of content, solution, or offer of your own. Engaging in social media conversation is an important method in growing your audience and humanizing your brand. TweetDeck is here to help you do just that.
For anyone attempting to run a business without a design or graphics team, it can present quite the struggle to keep up with modern day advertising methods. For some, finally getting their business on social media can seem like a great milestone, until soon realizing the constant need for updates in design and customized branding. How do I update my Twitter header? How do I brand photos with my business logo? Canva makes design simple for everyone, offering presentations, social media graphics, and more with thousands of beautiful layouts. Implementing customized design to your social media management strategy will increase the overall style over your brand as well as have a great impact on your efforts to humanize your brand. Although more limited than a team of experts, Canva offers both free and paid features that will allow the most simplistic of users to create a complex looking design for their personal or business use.
Hopefully, the free tools we've suggested help you get on your feet! Social media management is a marketing effort that can eat up time yet spit out results. From restaurants to manufacturers, our team at ImageWorks,LLC., has experience in creating, growing, and managing social media accounts in a widespread variety of industries providing prominent ROI and a next- level tier of customer service and engagement.
Have a favorite social media tool you like to use? Let us know in the comments below!