The beautiful thing about social media marketing (SMM) is that, sometimes, the only cost to a small business is the time you have to put into your social media program. Unfortunately, time is the rarest of commodities for a small business owner.
To help you spend your time wisely, here are some free tools to optimize your social media efforts. Should you want to spend that time even more wisely – contact us as we do social media campaigns for small businesses all the time.
Tips to monitor your current activity
- Listen to what customers and prospects are saying about your business with Social Mention. Publishing content is important but it’s not the only benefit a small business can receive from a social media program. You can also learn what customers and prospects are saying about your business, the competition as well as issues which impact both.
- Monitor online reviews with FreeReviewMonitoring.com. Massively important to small and local businesses, understanding review site activity is a critical challenge that can be time-consuming. This tool solves that problem.
- The only thing that changes more often than the weather here in New England is Facebook. LikeAlyzer is a great tool to allow small businesses to run a quick check on their Facebook page, see what improvements can be made and get to it.
- You tend to know which of your Facebook posts are doing well, but what about your competitors? Fanpage Karma provides analytics on posts and post types are do best for your business and your competitors business.
Tips to manage your social media in a more efficient manner
- The most time-consuming aspect of SMM is the time spent posting. What’s more, a truly great social media program posts to different sites at different times of the day. Buffer makes it easy and will keep you from burning the midnight oil.
- Or Hootsuite, if you lean heavily into the Twitter platform (it helps with other platforms as well).
- Are you using more image-oriented platforms like Pinterest or Instagram? Then Tailwind is the management tool for you.
- A key to success with Twitter is finding the right people to follow; Followerwonk can save you hours finding and following the right people.
- Finally, if you want to grow your Instagram or Twitter presence Crowdfire can help.
Tips to get more engagement from your posts
- A picture says a thousand words; maybe more on social media. But dealing with image specs across platforms can be a real pain. Canva has pre-designed templates for every social media image format.
- Content curation – finding information of interest to your followers – is a key tool to growing engagement and followers and Scoop.It is a great, free tool for this. Another is DrumUp, which works really well with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
- Hashtagging is another way to ramp up engagement. Find out which hashtags are used most near your business with TrendsMap.
- Also, Hashtagify.me can help you find the best hashtags fast.
All these tools should help you make better use of the time you spend on your social media marketing efforts. If you find you don’t have the time to put into this, contact us. We’ve got the time …
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