02 November 2022 – Emma Roofthooft – Moon To Bloom Digital Marketing
Social media has radically changed our lives in less than ten years. Excellent social media doesn’t appear out of nowhere. There are more than a few mentions and some timeless content. Sadly, there isn’t a secret to success on social networking. Like any other marketing strategy, great social media is meticulously planned, monitored, managed, and built on a solid and precise approach. You must stay current with the newest trends, methods, and tools in order to fulfil your strategic vision. But which instruments in your content toolbox should be present at all times? I’ll give you a rundown of the key ones here.
Inspiration tools
A major component of marketing is research. You need to know what your competitors are doing and whether what you’re doing is effective if you want to succeed and beat them out. Below are some tools that can help you with this.
To gain useful insights into what your consumers are looking for online, use Google Trends to examine what people are searching for on the search engine and how those searches change over time, by season, and by geography.
Pricing: free
It is an automated autocomplete tool. Following a topical search, the results are displayed, and divided into categories based on the variations that were used to generate them. The “whys” are displayed separately from the “hows,” and are available as a downloadable image. Prepositional suggestions, such as “like,” “versus,” “with,” and “without,” as well as an alphabetical search that appends letters to the original question and lists the most frequent queries that use each letter are also generated by Answer the Public.
Pricing: free to use with limitations
Pinterest, a social media platform and alternative search engine for finding new ideas contain a lot of user behavioural data from the pins and boards that users create to power the tool itself. Trend data can be helpful for your goals if you’re a little inventive. Business-related uses include increasing traffic, raising brand awareness, and increasing sales. However, you can utilize it for research to learn more about Pinterest’s own users.
Pricing: free
It searches through countless social interactions and billions of publications. It provides strong content insights to spark creativity and produce high-performing content to boost output and content success.
Pricing: free for 10 searches
For ideas for content, Ted Talks operate in a slightly different manner. It will inspire you and motivate you to go the additional mile, even though it may only provide you with a few rough ideas for the beginning of your next piece of content.
Pricing: free
Podcasts
Listening to podcasts can help you tackle writing, social media strategy, and more. Some of my favourite social media podcasts are The Freelance Friday Podcast from Latasha James, Creator Club Podcast from Katie Steckly, The Socially Ciara Podcast from Ciara Lynch & The Science of Social Media from Buffer.
Pricing: free
Content creation tools
We live in a visual world. That’s why you should include visual content, such as GIFs or infographics, in your article to keep readers interested for as long as feasible.
Designing presentations, social media posts, infographics, resumes, mailings, logos, and YouTube intros are all possible using Canva. This application is wonderful since it streamlines the design process and makes it simple enough for anyone to use. It helps you avoid wasting time and money on pricey design tools. Additionally, it has a photo library, a variety of designs for every requirement, and stock elements.
Pricing: free plan available
The streamlined video-sharing and recording tool Loom is available as a desktop application and a Chrome extension. What is it useful for? You can simultaneously record both your webcam and your screen. Additionally, you can clip films with this program and link them to your colleagues. Loom is a go-to tool for either recording and exporting your videos or for video messaging with co-workers.
Pricing: free for up to 25 videos
Another effective tool for creating and editing videos is called Biteable. It offers a free subscription with fewer features that lasts forever. With this application, you may produce everything from animated films and social media postings to digital advertisements. You can use a vast collection of video templates that are included.
Pricing: free plan available
My preferred grammar and spelling checker is Grammarly. Your content should be error-free if you want to rank on search engines and give your readers a better user experience. This tool examines your writing for grammatical mistakes, misspellings, plagiarism, and tone. Additionally, it includes a Chrome plugin, which is quite helpful when typing on practically any web platform.
Pricing: free plan available
Occasionally, stock photographs come in handy. Under the terms of the Unsplash license, Unsplash offers a comprehensive stock collection of high-quality photographs and images that are free to use. The platform generates 17 billion photo impressions each month and has over 207,000 contributing photographers.
Pricing: free
Bitly is a free and efficient custom URL shortener that makes it simple to save and share your favourite URLs from all across the internet via social media, email, and other means. By replacing the entire link with a string of numbers and letters, Bitly shortens long URLs. This is crucial because a lot of social media platforms, particularly Twitter, have limited character spaces that make it simple and quick to share information online.
Pricing: free
Planning & Scheduling tools
Maintaining an active social presence without it consuming a sizable portion of your time and attention can be difficult. Social networks’ varying peak hours when users are most active present one of the main difficulties. You must post during these busy periods if you want to interact with as much of your audience as possible. Here are some of my top social media scheduling and posting tools.
Marketing professionals may schedule social media postings across several platforms using Later, a strong social media management software. It is brimming with easy-to-use features and quick insights to help you increase your reach and ROI. Your social media marketing approach will be more effective and efficient if you employ later social media scheduling, which combines clear images with simple functions.
Pricing: free plan available
An individual can manage, monitor, and analyse social media platforms using the social media management program Hootsuite. One can also send messages on social media and schedule them for publication at a later time. Ideal for company owners who wish to control all social media outlets from one location. Hootsuite is special because it is free and has so many features.
Pricing: free plan available
The integrated social media management capabilities included in Meta were formerly branded as Facebook Business Suite and Facebook Business Manager. Both can be used for free, and each acts as a central location for managing business profiles on Facebook and Instagram.
Pricing: free
Planoly started out as a visual planner for Instagram. Since then, it has added capabilities for social media marketing on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter to its list of functions. Planoly’s simple premise is that social media marketing shouldn’t be so difficult. Therefore, it combines social strategy with content scheduling to aid social media managers and business owners.
Pricing: free plan available
HubSpot inbound marketing software provides self-service business intelligence and web analytics reporting to measure the success of your website and online marketing activities. HubSpot also helps your business get found online and convert your website traffic into leads and customers, and optimise based on your results.
Pricing: free plan available
Want to take your social media to the next level? Contact me for more information!
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