As fantastic for business as social media can be, it isn’t guaranteed success. Social media must be implemented into your digital marketing correctly with engaging and consistent content. There are many tools (even free ones!) out there that can help you take your social media to the next level. The experts here at PRG Marketing Communications have but their minds together to come up with a list of essentials to bolster your social media game.
Insights
Starting off the list is one that is actually already built into platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Tiktok all have built in analytics and insights tabs. Just by checking this on a weekly or monthly basis you’ll be able to see what content is performing the best, what isn’t getting the results you’d hoped for and much more.
By seeing what is and isn’t working, you can tailor your content more specifically to address the findings from your analytics. Considering this is built into platforms already, there is no excuse not to use it!
Canva
Canva is probably one of the most popular free tools out there, and for good reason. Unique graphics are always great for social media, it makes it personal to you and gives users something new and fresh to lay eyes on. This is where Canva comes into its own as it’s like a more user friendly photoshop, allowing you to create your own branded graphics and more engaging content.
Canva does have a paid option which might be right for you, but their basic plan is completely free, we would highly recommend using Canva to give your content that extra boost. Canva also has an app so you can create content directly on your phone and post it from your mobile device straight away.
Hootsuite
A must for any business is Hootsuite, a social media scheduling tool. Instead of having to set time aside each day to prepare and post your content, you can go ahead and schedule a week of content in one Monday morning sitting. This is perfect for weekend or evening posting as you can do it in the day and then not have to worry about it!
Their paid options allow for unlimited scheduling, allowing you to schedule away to your heart’s content. There is a similar programme to Hootsuite called Buffer, and that will achieve the same thing! We at PRG just prefer using Hootsuite, feel free to try both out and see which you prefer. Hootsuite also has a mobile app so you can schedule directly from your phone if you like to keep all social content on your mobile.
Unfold
Unfold is a programme that, like Canva, allows you to create engaging content specifically for your social media stories. Its templates allow for consistency among your brand whilst also having a unique feel to each one. Available for iOS and Android, the free plan is rather limiting but as we said, it’s free, so try it out and if you don’t get on with it you aren’t out of pocket.
You may well find that Canva does what you want Unfold to do, but you may prefer the templates with Unfold.
Google Trends
Google Trends won’t help you create or schedule the content, but like insights, it will give you valuable information as to what people are currently looking for.
You can search for any term or topic and from there you can see the volume of search it is getting. For example, I looked up ‘euro 2020’ just now and looked at the day after England beat Germany 2-0, and the search trends for euro 2020 was at 100%, meaning it was at peak popularity. Using this information about your desired keywords and queries, you can tactically post your content during a time where you have more users looking for content related to your business.
There are so many tools out there beyond just these, but we think that these are the best ones to start with as you aim to build your social media presence. With a variety of different aspects being tackled by each of these tools from content creation through to the end analytics, this arsenal covers what you need to get started.
