Social Media Marketing for business can be chaotic in the digital world of writing, posting, designing, curating, researching, following, scheduling, and analyzing.
As a small business owner, you already know that you need an engaging social media presence and part of that is having an awesome social media marketing strategy. (Sidebar: an awesome social media personality doesn’t hurt either! )
To help you navigate that overwhelming world, and start building a brilliant strategy, it helps to have some of your daily, routine tasks automated. This is where social media marketing tools are here to help you.
Automating social media tasks will help you focus on the content creation tasks and make the most of your time! ⏰
There are several different types of social media marketing tools, from clever tools that’ll schedule posts for you, applications that will grow your brand audience and share helpful content, to tools that will help you read web analytics.
Most of them are free to use and have a paid business option if you want to access all the features available.
In this article, I’ve rounded up helpful and valuable social media marketing tools, so you can start automating and transforming your small business by adding these tools to your marketing toolkit right meow.
Content Creation Tools
What are Content Creation Tools?
These tools can help you create, transform and edit your content, whether it’s written, visual, or video! Essentially, you can create content to share on any social media platform using these helpful tools and apps. Pretty nifty, right?
HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
It can be challenging to come up with shiny new content ideas when you blog regularly. This is where Hubspot’s free Blog Topic Generator can help you out.
Add the keywords you want to write your topics around and HubSpot will churn out a list of topics and content ideas for a year worth of blog post content. Just plug in your keywords and shazam! You’ve got blog topics for days.
Google Trends
For Trend Spotting – Google Trends is a free trends search feature created by Google.
It analyses the popularity of the top search terms in the only place most of the world looks things up on – the mighty Google search.
This will allow you to see what your audience is interested in and you can use it to monitor trending topics or products or find a rising niche or trend.
Pinterest Trends
For Trend Spotting – Same deal as above except we turn to keyword research on the visually appealing Pinterest website.
Pinterest Trends allows you to see the highest search terms over time, on Pinterest. You can find popular Pinterest category searches, popular boards and see what time of year the search volume increases or decreases.
You can then use these search terms to define your Pinterest content strategy and maximize your website traffic.
BuzzSumo
On BuzzSumo, you can search to quickly find fresh content ideas, social media platform insights and identify influencers if you’re looking to collaborate.
Research content as you go with the free BuzzSumo Chrome extension, providing immediate analysis of the content you’re viewing in one click.
BuzzSumos Content Research Tools helps you consider new perspectives when you’re feeling stuck for content. Try out their Topic Explorer, Content Analyser, Question Analyser, or Journalist Outreach tools.
Tailwind
Tailwind is a content creation complete marketing toolkit for Pinterest and Instagram. This smart assistant tool helps you schedule Pinterest pins and Instagram posts for maximum engagement.
Set up Tailwind to post to Pinterest and Instagram for you with Tailwind SmartSchedule as your go-to assistant allowing you to schedule weeks of Pins and posts in advance while providing analytics for maximum engagement.
With the Tailwind Instagram Planner, you can curate the ultimate Instagram feed for your followers to scroll through. Get help with writing captions, finding hashtags, re-gramming, and let SmartSchedule schedule your IG posts and Stories at the best time for engaging your followers.
The Tailwind Create feature allows you to create and schedule professional-looking content all in one place.
Joining Tailwind provides you with comprehensive and user-friendly marketing tools such as Content Discovery, Hashtag Suggestions, Smart Scheduling, and Analytics and Monitoring.
Tailwind is an official Pinterest and Instagram Marketing Developer Partner tool, so you can have confidence that Tailwind is always working in your best interests.
Buzzstream
If you use influencers to help your content reach the right audience then BuzzStream is an effective and helpful tool to start building relationships.
Use BuzzStream to help you find the social media accounts and contact details of the biggest influencers in your industry or niche.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is an all-in-one marketing platform for content planning, project managing, and calendar scheduling.
Its simple, uncluttered interface makes it perfect to plan and organize all your content marketing projects in one place, where you can collaborate and view your content calendar.
It integrates beautifully with Google Docs, Google Analytics, Evernote, MailChimp, WordPress, Zapier, and a few others.
If you have a blog and you use Twitter for promoting your content, CoSchedules ‘Click-to-Tweet’ plugin can be a great help. This smart plugin turns your note-worthy blog content into small tweetable pieces of content, which can then be instantly shared by your followers.
CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser is a smart tool for bloggers or writers who are compiling post or article titles.
Simply enter your proposed title or a keyword and CoSchedule will score your headline and rate its SEO value and sharability. It will also tell you if it will rank well if it’s too long or short and will help you improve your headline quality going forward.
Visual Content Creation Tools
Wave Video
Wave Video is an online, easy-to-use video making and hosting platform for creating or repurposing short videos for your website or blog. These videos can be promotional ads or social media videos.
Use any of Wave’s stock video, audio clips or images to enhance your content, add captions, and easily embed videos on your website – or anywhere.
Video content is fast becoming one of the drivers for gaining more reach to your brand, so for all things video-marketing, Wave is your go-to social media marketing tool.
And did we mention Wave Video is completely free?
PiktoChart
Piktochart is a web-based app for people who love to create infographics or social media visuals. Piktochart turns any text or data into a visual story using their free library of templates, graphics and design components.
You don’t need any experience in graphic design, just start with one of their templates, customise it to your brand and you can create engaging infographics and visuals which you can then share on any platform.
Awesome Screenshot and Screen Recorder
Awesome Screenshot is a free to use and helpful little chrome extension that allows you to take a screenshot in three clicks from your taskbar.
You can take a screenshot of the visible part of your page, the full page or of a selected area you specify. You can then add text to the image, crop it, add arrows & shapes or blur out sensitive detail.
The multiple saving and sharing options are so useful including saving an image or pdf, save to the cloud on Drive or DropBox, upload to get a shareable link or connect directly with Slack, Asana or Trello for collaboration.
Awesome Screenshot also has a record function allowing for the recording of the whole desktop, single tab only or a camera only option. Perfect for uploading small explainer or tutorial videos.
Content Discovery or Content Curation
What are Content Discovery or Content Curation Tools?
Sometimes thinking of new content ideas can be the hardest part of content creation. Content Curation or Content Discovery tools will help you discover new topics, hone in on existing trends and find and share valuable, relevant content.
See an article, blog post or video that you love but don’t have time to read or watch? Save it to Pocket.
Pocket is a free content discovery tool that is perfect for bookmarking content for inspiration or managing a reading list for you.
When you save links to Pocket with the app or chrome extension, it ‘saves it for later’ for you in a simplified and organised list format. So when you’re pressed for time and you find something you want to read later, put it in your pocket.
Feedly
Feedly is the app for you if you like to keep a check on various blogs, the latest news, explore trending conversations on the socials, trending videos on YouTube and keep up with what’s going on.
Feedly organises all this web content into one place for you, enabling you to consume this content in your personalised feed.
Twitter Trending Topics
Twitter is better known as a popular social media platform but is under-used for its content discovery features. Twitter’s Trending Topics keep you up-to-date with world conversations and you’ll find this feature on your Twitter homepage.
It gathers information about the most current global topics and you can filter by your location or by the users or pages talking about them. You can also find specific hashtags to your niche or industry.
Joining in on trending conversations will help attract a highly relevant audience and increase your Twitter engagement.
SEO Tools
What are SEO Tools?
These are apps or tools that score the potential of content for placement on search engine rankings. Depending on which tool you use, they can guide you through keyword research, search engine ranking and backlink building.
Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
If SEO is an important part of your social media marketing strategy (and if it isn’t yet, it should be) then sign up for the comprehensive SEO toolkit that is Ahrefs.
Verify your website and Ahrefs Webmaster tools will audit your website for technical SEO issues and then suggest how to improve them.
If SEO is an important part of your social media marketing strategy (and if it isn’t yet, it should be) then sign up for the comprehensive SEO toolkit that is Ahrefs.
Verify your website and Ahrefs Webmaster tools will audit your website for technical SEO issues and then suggest how to improve them.
Improving on issues such as keyword placement, internal linking and backlinks will help boost your SEO rankings in search engines.
This tool also allows you to see how each blog post ranks in organic search and it tracks keyword rankings.
KeySearch
If you’re writing with SEO in mind – which is a must-do these days – KeySearch is a valuable tool that allows you to do keyword research in your niche before you start to write anything.
It provides you with helpful information such as how easy or hard a keyword is to rank for, how many monthly searches that keyword has and the top ten blog posts currently ranking in Google for that keyword.
You can search other similar keywords and also find those glorious long-tailed, easy to rank for, low competition keywords.
Yoast SEO Plugin
Most bloggers or writers use the Yoast SEO plugin which works seamlessly with WordPress as you write.
Enter your main keyword, write out your blog post and as you work, Yoast will list the good results, the improvements to make and the problems.
Yoast will then suggest how to adjust your blog post to optimise it for search engines. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Most content on social media platforms has such a short shelf-life, it almost feels like your content becomes lost in the feed once you’ve posted it.
That’s where Pinterest can become your new social media, SEO best friend. Because content pinned on Pinterest stays there for weeks, even months, every Pin you create and Pin, becomes evergreen content that drives traffic straight to your website or business platform.
Web Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool, offered by Google, that tracks and analyzes web traffic. Out of the few available free analytics tools, Google Analytics is possibly the most powerful and comprehensive.
It tracks every bit of incoming traffic into your website and analyzes the who, what and where of the data.
You can see how users find your website, where they come from, you can track what users do when they’re on your website and discover the most popular pages or posts on your website.
You can then use this data for SEO and marketing purposes.
Security
LastPass
LastPass isn’t a social media marketing tool, but it’s an extremely useful tool to have in your marketing toolkit.
LastPass saves all your passwords to all the websites you use, in its encrypted vault. You can access this vault anytime and view your usernames and passwords.
Which makes remembering hundreds of passwords and logins a thing of the past.
The main benefit of using LastPass is that you only have to remember one password and you can use it to store other things such as bank details, card accounts and addresses.
Email Marketing
What are Email Marketing Tools?
These are tools that can be set up to create, send, track and report on email campaigns. Email marketing is easy to manage and creates a direct line of contact with your audience by sending highly engaging email newsletters.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an all-in-one email marketing platform where you can create email templates, manage your email list and automate your marketing campaign.
It’s one of the more popular email marketing tools, mainly because they offer a ‘free forever’ option.
Mailchimp has an easy-to-use WYSIWYG web builder to develop campaigns, intuitive automation features, autoresponders and simplified tracking for analytics.
And MailChimp is web-based, which means you can use it on any web browser without needing to download and install software on your device.
It also allows you to preview and test the email campaign on different email clients over desktop, mobile and web-based interfaces, so you can ensure your email will display correctly.
It also has a geotargeting feature and you can set up email delivery times based on subscriber’s timezones. MailChimp easily integrates with WordPress, Shopify, and many other platforms.
Mailchimp’s ‘free forever’ plan is limited to sending only 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 email subscribers. Plus, the free plan doesn’t get you features like send-time optimisation, advanced segmentation, etc. You are also required by their terms to display their branding logo somewhere within your email.
MailChimp is ideal for bloggers with smaller email lists and small businesses just starting with email marketing.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a powerhouse email marketing platform for professional bloggers and marketers. It’s incredibly popular, easy to use and impressive.
With ConvertKit, you can run ultra-targeted campaigns, set up easy to manage auto-responders and segment subscribers into categories of interested customers and customers who have already purchased – helping you increase conversions by target marketing.
First-rate features you’d expect include a landing page builder, attractive email templates and engaging email sign-up forms.
The integrations are excellent and bountiful, connect ConvertKit with your favourite tools including Shopify, WooCommerce, Teachable, MemberPress, Thinkific, CrowdCast, Stripe, Zapier, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, WebinarJam, SumoMe, OptInMonster, LeadPages, ClickFunnels, Payhip, GumRoad and so many more.
And this brings us to the end of our list of Must-Have Social Media Marketing Tools for your Small Business!
I hope you have discovered some effective tools to help you stay on top of marketing in your small business and to increase your ever-expanding social media marketing knowledge base. While social media marketing can be ever changing and overwhelming, these tools can take a lot of that stress off.
