With frequent changes, constant updates, and conflicting information about best practices, it can be tough to keep up with social media. Just when you think you have one site down pat, a game-changing new feature or algorithm is rolled out, or your target audience moves on to a new platform. At E-Power, we totally get how frustrating it can be for marketers to keep up with and effectively manage social media programs. After all, that’s why we specialize in it! It can be a full time job! We use a few social media resources to help make life a little easier on us and our clients. If you’re looking to up your social media game, here are a few of our favorite social media tools:
Canva
Visuals are SO important on social media, no matter what platform you’re using. They’re what grabs your followers and actually gets them to pay attention amid the thousands of other posts they see each day. In fact, visual content is 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. Unfortunately, developing compelling visuals takes time and skills that many marketers don’t have. That’s where Canva can be a total lifesaver! For those without much graphic design experience, don’t worry. It’s super easy to use and they have a variety of tutorials that can help you get the most out of what they offer. Canva also has a lot of pre-made templates and pre-sized images that can save you time and provide inspiration for your own designs. If you do have an eye for design, Canva provides resources that help you dig deeper – such as learning about eye-pleasing color combinations and font selections.
Hootsuite
Scheduling posts and monitoring accounts are key responsibilities for social media managers and marketers. Hootsuite makes it easy! You can schedule posts across major platforms without constantly switching back and forth between tabs and logins. You can also easily set up and monitor streams, like mentions and industry-relevant hashtags. Hootsuite also offers the Hootsuite Academy, which provides platform training and certifications to further your social media knowledge.
Buffer
Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer is another great tool for scheduling content across various social platforms. Depending on your membership (there are free and paid versions), you can develop detailed and specific schedules for each major platform. The Buffer extension also allows you to share articles and posts – including retweets – from anywhere on the web with just a click. Not having to copy and paste links into the Buffer platform itself can save you a lot of time.
Google Analytics
At E-Power, we LOVE Google. While Google Analytics doesn’t help you schedule your social media content or create images that pop, it sure can be a powerful tool in driving social media efforts. The data we gather using Google Analytics helps us track what social media efforts are driving traffic and conversions for our clients. That data is critical for determining where to spend the most energy and money, proving ROI to your boss, and getting a big picture view of how exactly social media is impacting your overall marketing strategy. To get the most out of your social data in Google Analytics, make sure you’re tagging all of your URLs so that you can analyze different campaigns and topics at a more granular level!
Feedly
Again, Feedly isn’t a tool that helps schedule or create content for social. Rather, Feedly is one of our favorite ways to find share-worthy content and stay informed about major social media changes and trends. The RSS management tool makes it easy to track and discover niche, industry-specific content that can supplement your original posts. Additional content means more opportunities for engagement and more reasons for people to follow your social accounts. Besides following industry posts, social media and marketing-related feeds can also help keep marketers and social media managers in the loop with the fast-paced world of social media.
These are just a few of the social media resources E-Power uses every day to help our clients effectively use social media to amplify their overall marketing strategy. Obviously, there are a lot of great resources out there, so this is just the tip of the iceberg. What are some of your favorite tools to help manage accounts and engage your audience?
P.S. All of these tools are helpful and make managing and analyzing your social media efforts a bit easier, but if you’re not getting the results you want on social media, or just don’t have the time to try to keep up with all, E-Power can help! It’s one thing to be organized and have all of your tools in place, but if your social media marketing strategy isn’t up to par, you will quickly find that the data you’re analyzing isn’t what you want to see.
