Top Social Media Marketing Offers

Social Media Marketing Tools

If you decide to do your own social media or keep it in-house, social media management tools are a blessing.

There are many reasons why you should be using social media apps and tools (more on that in a minute), but the biggest takeaway is that they keep all of your social activities in one place and simplify the management of your daily content and campaigns.

In this guide, we hope to shed some light on some of the best tools on the market today and help you decide how to choose the right tools for your business.

What are the best social media platforms for small businesses?

There are loads of social apps and networks out there now. But for small businesses, the most essential social media apps are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• YouTube
• Twitter

These platforms are where the majority of your target audience (for pretty much any industry) are spending a lot of their time.

By meeting your audience where they’re at, you will open up many windows of opportunity.

The best thing about marketing on social media platforms is - it’s free.

You can of course create paid ads, but really take advantage of creating great social profiles and leverage organic content.

Why use Facebook for social media marketing?

Facebook Business and Ads Manager lets you organise and manage your Facebook business page and your paid ad campaigns in one place.

Aside from the fact that Facebook is the most popular platform for social media marketing, here are some other reasons why you should marketing on Facebook:

• You can target specific people
• Facebook ads are affordable
• You can utilise retargeting
• Facebook ads are easy to set up
• It offers thorough analytics and insights

How do I get the most out of Facebook marketing?

Here are some top Facebook marketing tips and tricks (that cost absolutely nothing) you can start using today:

• Optimise your photos
• Choose the best CTA buttons
• Optimise your posts
• Make your content share-worthy
• Use video as much as possible
• Schedule your posts when your audience is active

Why should I use Instagram for social media marketing?

Instagram for Business is like Facebook’s Business Manager where you can manage your profile and content using various free tools to promote your business.

Instagram is said to be the most effective social platform for user engagement and connecting with your followers.

Here are some other reasons why you should market your business on the ‘gram:

• Visual posts generate significantly higher engagement
• One-third of the most viewed stories are those of businesses (Hootsuite, 2020)
• 200 million Instagram users view a business profile at least once per day
• 130 million users click on shopping posts every month (Instagram, 2020)

How much does it cost to advertise on Instagram?

Organic Instagram marketing is free. You can leverage free marketing tactics such as influencer partnerships and branded community hashtags to promote your business.

For a paid instagram campaign, you will typically pay between $0.20 to $2 per click.

Why use YouTube for social media marketing?

YouTube for business helps you use the world’s most popular video platform to build you business and grow your audience.

Here are a few reasons why your business can benefit from YouTube marketing:

• Video marketing provides a high ROI (Wyzowl, 2018)
• You can create various types of video to align with different parts of your marketing strategy
• YouTube users view over 4 billion videos per day - that’s a lot of traffic
• Video can increase your visibility on search engine rankings

How much does YouTube marketing cost?

For paid Youtube ads, you can expect to pay between $0.015 to $0.040 per view for a 30 second ad.

Why use Twitter for social media marketing?

Twitter for Business has a range of tools to help you create compelling social campaigns.

Here are just a few reasons why Twitter is a great social media marketing platform:

• The @ tag used on Twitter boosts engagement
• Twitter really empowers you to highlight your brand’s voice and personality
• There’s no such thing as too many posts on Twitter
• Twitter’s analytics are some of the best across social media platforms
• Anyone has the potential to go viral

What are the social media marketing best practices for small businesses?

Here are some things to keep in mind when marketing across social media platforms:

• Not all engagement is positive: If you get a complaint or a negative comment, it is not advisable to remove it. Instead, address the issue and bring the commenter back on your side.
• Not all content is good content: You'll find many sites telling you to post every single day to build a following. But posting irrelevant or useless content will turn off people quickly.
• Be yourself: On most social media, people want to interact with a human. You should remain professional, but there is no reason you can't be friendly and personable too.
• Be consistent: Don't post a flurry of content and then disappear for months. Work out a realistic schedule that allows you to create valuable content and post regularly.
• Make connections:The adage, “Build it and they will come”, has sadly gone the way of the dodo. If you don’t try to engage with your audience, it's unlikely you'll gain much traction.

Why should I use social media tools?

A decent social strategy requires a regular and consistent content schedule, which involves sourcing images, writing copy, creating hashtags, tagging relevant accounts, etc.

Can you imagine using a spreadsheet and a local or Google drive to keep track of your weekly posts? That's far too complicated and requires a hefty amount of work when a social media management tool can keep things nice and organised.

Here are the top reasons why you should use social media tools:

• Save loads of time: You’re far too busy managing critical tasks to curate your social accounts. Tools remove the manual labour from social media management.
• Schedule in advance: Get ahead of schedule and schedule your posts in advance to increase your productivity.
• Proof posts before they go live: It’s always worth getting a second pair of eyes to scan for avoidable and sometimes embarrassing mistakes. By saving posts as drafts, proofing is quick and easy.
• Keep all of your channels under one roof: If you have Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, manage them all in one place without having to jump between platforms and forget what’s posted where.
• Get better analytics and insights: If you don’t track your social analytics, you’re missing out big time. Social media tools give you key metrics and offer historical performance insights and trends which can help you map out how to move forward.
• Boost your creativity: Apps open up so many themes, visual elements and content ideas that can inspire you to create more authentic and engaging posts.

What types of social media tools are on the market?

Social media tools have a wide range of features to help you with all social media marketing tasks. Some of the top features include:

• Social templates and themes
• Stock imagery, video and music
• Content scheduling and management
• Content discovery and ideas
• Target audience research tools
• Data, analytics and reporting

How do I choose the right social media tools?

Consider these things to find the right tools for your business.

• Number of users/seats: Most tools have a limited number of users that can use the platform at once. If there will be multiple users that need access, ensure you check out the various plans to avoid bumping heads.
• Features: It’s important to know what tools you will need to decide on the best plan. There’s no point wasting money on a feature-rich package if you only need basic features. There’s always the option to upgrade as you evolve.
• Integrations: Can it integrate with other software you use?
• Customer support: Some platforms offer more customer support than others. Check out their blogs, how to guides, FAQs and contact section to see how easy it will be to address any problems you encounter along the way.
• Price: Compare the features offered against the price and the level of customer support available.

What are the best social media management tools for small businesses?

Here’s our pick of the best overall social media management tools:

• HootSuite
• Revise Old Post
• Buffer
• CoSchedule
• Sked Social
• Zoho Social

What are the best social media image tools?

What’s more important - the image or the caption? Social media is all about engagement so you'll need clean and beautiful visuals that speak to your audience. Here are some of the best tools and apps to find, create and edit your images:

• Canva
• Unsplash
• HootSuite
• Pablo
• BeFunky
• Skitch

What are the best free social media tools?

There are some excellent social media free tools for businesses on a budget. Bear in mind that these tools do have some limitations, but they’re a great option if you’re just starting out.

• Hootsuite’s Free Plan
• Tweetdeck
• SocialOomph
• Ubercircle
• Friends+Me
• Over

What are the best social listening tools?

Social listening is all about monitoring the comments, mentions and discussion on your social platforms. It gives you audience insights and feedback about your brand, business reputation, industry trends and topics and your competitors.

Examples of social listening include direct mentions of your business, keyword-related discussions or direct customer feedback.

You can then analyse and leverage social listening data by feeding it into your social strategy (and other business strategies) to improve customer experience.

Some of the best social listening tools are:

• Zoho Social Listening
• Sprout Social
• HubSpot
• Buffer
• HootSuite
• BuzzSumo

Are there any free social listening and monitoring tools?

Here’s our pick of the best free tools for to track social mentions:

• Google Alerts
• TweetDeck
• Social Mention
• Followerwonk
• BuzzSumo

If you have any more questions about which social media tools are best, you can reach out to the community. You can also reach out to a social media marketing agency right here on SavvySME.