6 Free Tools to Kick-start Your Business’s Social Media Presence
Social media has evolved into more than just a networking channel to keep up with friends – it has become a source of entertainment, news, gaming, research, shopping and much more! Although social media presents businesses with many challenges, it also presents them with a wealth of opportunities. Every business started somewhere on social media, and it’s never too late to join or expand the game!
Social media management can feel like a full-time job depending on the size of your business. Finding and sharing content, interacting with others and keeping up with the look of your profile can be very time-consuming. With the right combination of tools, it doesn’t have to be!
From a goal as simple as expanding brand awareness to a goal as sophisticated as generating quality conversions, we’ve got a few recommendations to help you get started:
Hootsuite
Keeping up with trending and relevant communications is one of the many challenges a socially active business might face. Considering that 72% of Twitter users who complain on Twitter expect you to respond within an hour and 32% of them expect you to respond within 30 minutes, it’s often possible to miss one tweet that can spiral into one very unhappy customer.
Hootsuite is a tool you can leverage to cut through the “white noise” and identify the messages that really matter to your business. Simply connect your social media profiles and they will all filter into one handy-dandy dashboard!
This nifty tool allows you to set up various streams tailored to what you’re looking for - from keeping up with mentions to keeping tabs on your competitors, the options are endless!
Buffer
Consistency is a vital element of a successful social media strategy. You should be sharing content on a regular basis, rather than sporadically. But realistically, who has the time to sit at their desk posting religiously all day long? Even more so, how do you know when most of your followers are going to be online?
Buffer is a social media tool that allows you to que up your social media content in advance and post that content at an optimal time of day to receive the highest engagement from your audience.
This tool also provides valuable analytics to gauge the success of your content. This can help you determine different topics and strategies to carry-out in the future.
Triberr
Triberr is a tool that can land you more visitors from Twitter. This tool collects similar Twitter accounts into collaborative groups who share each other’s content. This will help you garner traffic outside of just your account.
A Triberr membership will also give you a constant supply of fresh content to pick and choose from; ensuring your feed is full of juicy new content!
Canva
One of the biggest feats on social media is creating content relevant to your audience. Canva is a free graphic design tool that allows you to create various graphics tailored to the network you need content for.
This tool provides a variety of free icons, images and design templates to make a graphic truly representative of your brand. The best part is, it’s super easy to use! You don’t need to know the in’s and out’s of Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to create content for your social media, you just need a great idea!
You can create anything from a graphical testimonial from a happy customer to an infographic explaining an important concept. What are you waiting for? Get those creative juices flowing!
Pixabay
As a business, it can oftentimes be intimidating finding images and graphics that are open for commercial use. The last thing you want is to save an image you find through Google and run into a copyright lawsuit months down the road.
Pixabay is a free image library, housing over 1.5 million royalty free stock photos and videos shared by a generous group of artists. They provide stunning, high quality photos you can use for any graphic, blog post or website page. One of my personal favorites is their vector library, which is also free to use. Vector creation can take a lot of time if you’re unfamiliar with it, so to have a library of pre-made vectors at your disposal is a huge time saver!
Pikwizard
Pikwizard is another fantastic free image site offering over 100,000 completely free images. This site is most valuable for its abumdance of stock imagery including people, which tends to be rare in free stock photo sites. They update their library daily and do not require attribution to use their photos.
Social Media is such an integral piece of the modern day consumer journey. If/when a consumer ventures to learn more about your brand, social media is there to tell them the story they need to hear to make a purchasing decision.
To get some ideas of a constant flow of content, check out our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn!
