3 of The Top Tools to Use in your Social Media Marketing

As an entrepreneur or solopreneur, you will find yourself in the challenging spot of having to work in your business as well as on your business until such time that it becomes financially viable for you to take on additional people to assist you. Social media marketing is a relatively inexpensive tool which makes it easily accessible for entrepreneurs to use as part of their digital marketing strategy. Thus, having the skills of a social media marketer are indispensable. However, social media is quite time consuming and – as you will probably be doing this yourself in the beginning – it could take very valuable time away from what you should be doing: making money and generating new business. We’ve sourced three indispensable tools that can help you save time in your social media marketing efforts and help you to focus on the tasks that matter.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Hootsuite

Each social media channel that you post on has their own best practices in terms of how many times per day you need to post as well as what times are best in order to generate the most engagement. As it is not practical to spend hours and hours each day posting on your various social media channels we suggest that you use a tool like Hootsuite so that you can schedule posts for a couple of days in advance at the times that you want so that your presence on social media is maintained. It’s free for up to three social media accounts and you can schedule up to 20 posts in advance. For a nominal yearly fee you can increase this number. It’s a must-have in any social media marketer’s toolkit!

Grammarly

As we said in the previous paragraph, social media demands a lot of copy. And, as you are probably trying to minimise the time you take to schedule social media posts, you’ll be generating this copy very quickly. Unfortunately, the quicker you are at this task the more likely you are to make mistakes as you are not thinking very carefully about what you write. These mistakes can find themselves to your social media platforms – something which is very difficult to live down in any digital marketing strategy.

This is what makes a tool such as Grammarly so unique.

The company behind this product has developed a unique algorithm that analyses text that you input into their platform for grammatical errors. It’s free to use for basic grammatical analysis but if you want more complex editing you’ll need to upgrade to their pro version.

Canva

A well-designed graphic – especially on Facebook and Instagram – goes a long way to increase your audience engagement and improve your digital marketing strategy. You could engage the services of a professional graphic designer to assist you create beautiful bespoke images however, if this is beyond your price range we suggest using Canva.

When you open this app, it asks you what your job title is. Once you’ve selected it, it asks you what you want to create. Canva makes these suggestions based on the job title you’ve selected. Once you’ve made this selection, it gives you templates that you can use to design your project.

Canva gives you loads of functionality for free. When you upgrade you also get access to 400 000 complimentary stock images. In addition, you are also able to organise your designs using multiple folders that you can share with your team. You have the ability to resize your designs easily as well as to save your company’s corporate identity.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

What we’ve shown here is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of tools that can help you in your social media marketing strategy and can help you as a social media marketer. If you want to learn more about how social media can assist you in your digital marketing strategy, sign up for the Digital School of Marketing’s Social Media Marketing Course. This digital marketing certificate – which is the only one of its kind to be certified by the MICT SETA – will help you take your social media marketing efforts to the stars. To learn more about this digital marketing course and to register, follow this link.