Social Media Marketing is one of the most valuable digital marketing strategies that small business can utilize to connect with and engage potential customers. Although it takes time and effort, it can lead to a massive increase in leads and an increase in your customer retention rate.
As a small business, if you are looking to venture into Social Media Marketing on your own, you are going to need the help of some tools to manage your accounts and automate some of the processes. To make your life easier, we have collected the top Social Media Marketing tools for your small business.
Sprout Social
Widely used by Fortune 500 companies, Sprout Social is one of the top social media management tools on the market. While it is used by giant companies, it can also be used by small to mid-sized companies to provide basic automated posting, analytics data, and more.
Digitalux uses Sprout Social for all of our Social Media Marketing campaigns and could not be happier. The price tag starts at $60/month, but it is well worth it.
HootSuite
Another social media management tool, that provides generally the same information as Sprout Social, is called HootSuite. This tool is also widely used by big brands all over the world and why people find it so appealing is because there is a free plan. The free plan is great for small businesses looking to start their first Social Media Marketing campaign but not feel like they have to pay a monthly fee.
While the reporting features in HootSuite are not as good as Sprout Social, we find them to be a very close second.
Buffer
As the most basic Social Media Marketing tools, Buffer provides you with only the essentials. Their bread and butter is “queuing” posts and/or status updates. What that means is you can add content to a queue which is then posted at a later time.
This tool is perfect for those who want to invest just a small amount of time at first building their social media presence.
Pablo
Also from the fine folks over at Buffer, Pablo is a great tool for creating sharable quote images in seconds. They provide you with custom background images and even a database of quotes to choose from. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll notice I use Pablo on a regular basis and the engagement I see from those posts are always above average.
The best part? It’s free! You don’t even need to be a paying member of Buffer to use this amazing tool.
IFTTT
If you manage a lot of different social media accounts, you know how much time can be wasted posting the same thing to each channel. That’s where IFTTT comes in handy. IFTTT stands for “If This Then That” and it allows you to set up recipes for specific social media actions. For example, let’s say you tweet an image on Twitter but also want it to be posted on Instagram. There’s a recipe that will automatically post every image you post to Twitter, to your Instagram. What’s more is that there’s literally thousands of recipes you can choose from.