By Andy Crestodina Social media marketing is something that every business needs to incorporate into their marketing efforts. There is too much of an opportunity across the different social media networks to pass on.
The right software and tools can make it not only more effective, but easier as well. We spoke to several business owners to see what they were using for software and tools. Here are their favorite resources that they use to help market their businesses across social media and take advantage of the available attention these platforms give you access to.
Canva
“We like to use Canva to create our social media content. It’s a free piece of software that has all of the popular social media image sizes and templates to use as a base. This helps to create perfectly formatted posts, which we can then pre-load into our management software.” — Andrew Tran, Founder of Therapy
BuzzSumo
“BuzzSumo is a great tool for finding content that has been shared the most. If you are looking for topics that seem to have a great chance of going viral, it’s a great way to ‘test the waters’ and look for content around that topic — and how it performed in terms of social interactions.” — Shawn Schulze of HomeArea.com
Social Report
“Social Report allows us to connect to all our social profiles, get detailed reporting of our content and even set up automation rules for people who respond and interact with our posts, which helps manage our reputation.” — Joseph W. Belluck of Belluck & Fox, LLP
Rocketium
“Rocketium is my favorite social media marketing tool at the moment. It makes creating short videos a snap, which are generally more engaging and effective than static images, leading to more profitable campaigns across multiple platforms.“ — Sean Christman, Founder of Slamdot
SEMRush
“SEMRush. You can track your campaigns and the growth of your social accounts of your business. You can see competitors as well and use the data to see where value may reside and make the needed changes to improve your business.” — Marc Webb, Founder of Real PDL Help
HubSpot
“I love the functionality of the one stop shop experience form the sale modules in HubSpot. We are able to post on multiple medias using a single platform. It is user friendly, fast, efficient and clean.” — Shawn Freeman, Founder and CEO of TWT Group
Analytics
“The analytics that each platform provide (Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook) are some of the best tools available and they are free to access. This data tells you what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to adjust your social media efforts to better connect with your followers.” — Ari Evans of AAA Handbags
Facebook Advertising Platform
“Facebook ads are our favorite tool for social media marketing. They’re ads can reach a very large user base that can be appropriately targeted so that our ads are being viewed by those people most interested in our ads.” — Matthew Kolb of All High Schools
Manual
“We do everything manually and don’t use any automation or scheduling software. Our approach works for us and I think that is something everyone needs to understand. There is no software that will handle your social media without a little human interaction, and we prefer to handle the entire process.” — Christopher Dziak, CEO of Pure Nootropics
MeetEdgar
“MeetEdgar is a good tool that helps to manage and deploy social media content. The nice feature with this tool is its ability to repurpose posts multiple times. You will want to share content several times, as your followers will never all see it if you post once. It’s also very easy to use.” — Jim Epton of Dom Huga Ltd
VidLab
“VidLab is a great app to use for video collages, which do very well on Instagram. It allows you to make really nice clips with no editing skills or even expensive software. It’s a free app and a great addition for anyone making content for Instagram.” — Tom Munroe, CEO of RugStudio
Buffer
“Like many businesses, Buffer is the favorite just because it has a lot of features and works with all social media platforms, and the free version is good for most small businesses. They also now do automated Instagram posting which is a good new feature.” — April Gillmore, CEO of ClickFirst Marketing
Hootsuite
“We use and love Hootsuite. It’s been great for what we do and for staying in front of our prospects and clients. If we didn’t use Hootsuite it would take us at least 90 minutes per day to do what we do on our social channels, and that’s not time we have.” — Ben Walker, Founder of Transcription Outsourcing, LLC
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