5 of the best tools for social media marketing

Digital marketing beats traditional marketing in most areas of comparison, and for a good reason. The Internet has enhanced the range and speed of communication, especially with the invention of social media websites. Channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are excellent promotional choices for any marketing mix, giving a brand access to much larger audiences than achievable with traditional marketing. Unfortunately, most businesses fail to make an impact on social media at first. This article gives you five tools to make sure this doesn’t happen to you and your business:

Tools to help make an impact on Social Media

• Graphic creation

It takes something beautiful to capture the attention of social media users these days. Think about how many posts you see every day. In the space of five minutes, a social media user can be exposed to well over 100 different pieces of content. Are your graphics sticking out? Canva.com is a great free graphic design program that has countless templates to manipulate for social media marketing content.

• URL shortening

The problem with many webpage URLs is their length. This is especially true when looking at blog articles or sub-sub-sub webpages. This is fine when browsing a website because you don’t pay attention to the page’s URL, but seeing a long URL on social media is just off-putting. Keep your URLs bite-sized and ideal for social sharing with Bitly.com or a similar URL shortener.

• Data collection

Data has become more valuable than many commodities of yesteryear. Data can, when analysed carefully, significantly improve the decisions made by marketers looking for clues as to what the target audience wants to see and engage with. On Facebook, this can easily be done with the use of Facebook Business Manager. This fantastic feature lets you analyse each post’s performance, and even export data sets for use in meetings and presentations.

• Content curation

An essential aspect of social media marketing success is curating content that can be shared across your channels. All brands should be monitoring their competitor activities – it’s business 101. The same is true for online activities, with a particular focus on the types of posts, and the reactions to those posts. Better yet, gain access to thousands of tried-and-tested social media marketing posts in your industry with a curation tool like PromoRepublic.com.

• Posting automation

Many brands stick to one social media channel at a time. However, a large number of brands believe that the more is, the merrier when it comes to posting on different social media sites. For those who are looking to spread their marketing messages on the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn – the answer is Buffer.com. The paid version is capable of linking multiple social media accounts to one schedule dashboard, where posts can be set and scheduled across all social channels.

Social media is indeed a tough nut to crack at first, but there are ways to make the jobs of social media marketers much easier – as seen in the points above.

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