What does it take to succeed at social media marketing? Common strategies include sharing great content, posting at the best times, communicating your unique brand voice and engaging consistently.
For small businesses that do not have the luxury of maintaining a dedicated team of social media executives, success can also be quantified in terms of the hours spent on social versus the measurable business impact of efforts. Marketing efficiency, no doubt, matters as much as marketing effectiveness, especially if you – like most social media marketers – can afford to spend between an hour and five hours each week on online social engagement.
When you cannot hire an extra pair of hands, a toolkit becomes essential, something that can assist you with various aspects of social media marketing, empowering you to do more and better in less time. Here are four tools to keep on your radar; even some large, established organizations use these tools to supplement and energize their SMM activities.
1. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
The reward for picking out interesting, rare or topical themes is increased engagement via comments, likes and shares on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social networks. It is part of building your audience’s trust in your ability to deliver something of value, and differentiate yourself from the competition. But the stressful bit is to continuously create quality content that doesn’t resemble the hundred other posts on competitor sites, websites in your niche or online magazines. HubSpot’s blog topic generator is designed to keep your blog topics list fresh and engaging.
It is super-easy to use : just add three terms or keywords around which you would like to create posts. They can be as broad or niche as you want them to be. For each set of terms, the tool proposes five topics, and you can hit the ‘try again’ button for more. Some suggestions are compelling and can be directly employed as headlines too. For instance, a search for ‘steel’, ‘doors’ and ‘windows’ returned these interesting results : ‘The worst advice we’ve heard about windows’, ’10 signs you should invest in windows’, and ‘What will doors be like in 100 years?’, all of which you can refine or tweak to create non-generic content.
2. DrumUp
DrumUp is a content discovery, curation and scheduling platform that has earned immense patronage in a short span among not just social media marketers but also businesses implementing employee advocacy programs. The advocacy feature enables businesses to leverage their employees’ social media presence by making it easy for them to share branded content and company news with one-click scheduling or immediate posting.
– Combine with HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator to create fresh or time-sensitive content efficiently
– Schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn from a single dashboard on your desktop or mobile device
– Add, follow and curate updates from your favorite feeds
– Save curated content to a content library for re-purposing and re-promoting at opportune times
– Use DrumUp’s native advertising solution to promote your content on the platform, and boost views and social shares
3. Canva
Visual content – images, infographics, graphs – constitute sticky content that linger in our minds a lot longer than textual content. Studies show that when people hear information, they recall just 10% of it three days later. When they view the same information next to a relevant image, they are able to retain 65% of it after the same number of days.
Creating visuals is trickier than writing a post, and if you don’t have prior experience designing killer graphics, you may prefer to pick free images from stock photo galleries, and little else. With Canva, you can generate striking web-optimized graphics pretty easily.
The free tool has a simple drag and drop interface. Pick one from several stock templates on the site to add visual elements to your posts or convert posts to infographics. Editing and positioning images and text, changing fonts and colors, and including your brand logo on every post is all very easy.
Besides adding relevant images to your blog posts and embedding images to Facebook posts, here are some visual marketing tips using Canva:
– Embed a SlideShare slideshow to your LinkedIn post
– Create Pinterest pins and boards
– Optimize your Facebook cover photo
– Create Facebook ad images
– Make postcards with inspirational quotes/a social message to share on Twitter
4. Tweepi
Tweepi helps you analyze your Twitter following and engagement potential critically. The Twitter management tool allows you to manage your followers by (a) providing information on the people you follow (b) those who are already following you (c) those who are not following you back and (d) those you are not following back, all in one place without confusing you. You can take quick action on available opportunities and let go of inactive followers judiciously. Tweepi also simplifies the task of engaging key followers with @ mentions, with the option to move them to a separate list to monitor their engagement with your brand.
– Find your target audience
– Follow your competitors’ followers
– Discover people who are talking about a topic related to your niche
– Follow people who are using hashtags relevant to your industry
Explore these tools in detail and try them out to start building out or strengthening your social media marketing toolkit.
Source: B2C
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