5 Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools
Social media is a highly competitive field, and any social media marketer needs to be armed with tools to create high quality content. Take a look at Nick’s list of easy-to-use tools and websites to try out.
Buzzsumo (content discovery)
Buzzsumo is an excellent subscription platform if you’re looking to generate new social media or website content, you can just type in a topic and find the most shared articles over the last week, month or year.
The Content Analyser tool in particular is great for exploring what’s popular for your target audience, and how your competitors are discussing certain topics. You can also filter these results based on content type, word count, and even country.
Buzzsumo’s Alerts function (under Monitoring) also allows you to track mentions of a business, notifying you whenever the brand name is used in online news articles or blog content. This is useful from both a brand awareness and customer service perspective.
Canva (image design)
Social posts with images perform better than those with only text on the majority of platforms, so creating quality images is vital. While some of the atoms mainly use Canva to create assets for Facebook campaigns, you can easily create posts for Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest too.
Just upload your own photos to the tool and insert them into the selection of free graphics which already have the right dimensions. The free version offers you more than enough tools to create your own post in just a few minutes.
PhotoJoiner (Collage Maker)
This website allows you to make collages, whether vertical, horizontal or with customised dimensions. Simply choose the layout you’d like under Collage Maker, select a border background and set the border size.
This was particularly useful for one of our clients, BoxNation, when discussing potential fights – putting two fighters close up in a ‘face off’ style. Just ensure you hold the required image licences to upload certain pictures, then it’s quick and easy to create eye-catching collages for your social media feeds.
It’s quite simple to pick up after a few practice collages, and you can customise the dimensions depending on what image sizes you want for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Instagram Stories. When you’re ready, save the image and download.
Buffer Stories Creator
Over the past 18 months the popularity of Stories has skyrocketed, with the current generation of social media users communicating through Stories across Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.
“Right now, we believe that Stories are the biggest opportunity for small businesses to connect with customers on social media and we wanted to give you an easy way to create Stories content,” say Buffer. Their free tool, Buffer Stories Creator, is quick and easy to use. Just create the foundation of your Stories with text, graphics, and a background image or colour before downloading the image.
Hashtagify (hashtag trends)
Hashtagify is a subscription tool to help you research the best hashtags for Twitter and Instagram. It works by searching for and locating popular hashtags, finding the ones that are trending for your audience.
For instance, it finds the top 10 hashtags connected to your brand or a current event. It even searches for related influencers to maximise your social media strategy. Their ‘Hashtags Lab’, updated daily, monitors trending topics to give you an insight into what online users are talking about.
