The number of marketing online tools available on the internet is growing at a rapid pace, there is no way I’m going through all of them. In this article I am not going to review or explain each tool, but focus on what they can do for you and how can you use them most efficiently.
1. Social Media Scheduling: Buffer
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Sprout Social, MeetEdgar
Perhaps our best time-saving tip for social media marketing is scheduling posts ahead of time for your social profiles. You can batch the social media marketing process: Do all your curating and composing all in one go, then spread those updates out across the next day or week.
How we use Buffer: The forever free plan at Buffer lets you connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and to schedule ahead 10 posts for each network. If you share three posts per day, that means you can stay three days ahead all the time.
We’ve found a lot of value in the hand-picked content suggestions (thanks to Courtney who finds all that great content!), which are easy to read then add.
Also free:
- Hootsuite (free for your first 3 social profiles)
2. Design: Canva
Great, paid options if you can swing it: Photoshop, InDesign
Over 2 million people trust Canva to help with creating images for social media, blog posts, and practically any other use you can imagine.
How we use Canva: The optimized sizes and built-in templates make it fast and easy to create tall pictures for Pinterest, rectangular ones for Twitter, square for Facebook or Instagram, and any size in between. We find Pablo (another free alternative) to be great for Twitter-sized images of 1,024 pixels by 512 pixels, and Canva to work really well for all else.
Also free:
3. Real-time Analytics: Google Analytics
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Chartbeat
Google Analytics does pretty much everything in terms of tracking the traffic to your website. It’s a huge, monstrous amount of info, generously given away for free.
How we use Google Analytics: As a social media marketing team, we appreciate the ease with which we can see traffic from the different networks (Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals). We can check the engaged reading time by looking at Time on Page. And for the real-time stats of who’s on our site right now, we can simply click on Real-Time > Overview.
Also free:
- Go Squared (free for the first 100 visitors and 1,000 data points)
- MixPanel (free for 25,000 events per month)
4. Website optimization: Hotjar
Great, paid options if you can swing it: KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg
Let’s say you’re curious how your visitors are actually using your website—where they click, how far they scroll, etc. Tools like Hotjar can show you exactly what your visitors are doing, via heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps, and visitor recordings. Hotjar also has options to analyze your funnel and to insert messages and surveys to your visitors.
How we use Hotjar: User research can be incredibly powerful stuff. I find great value in seeing how someone interacts with blog posts. How much of the post do they read? Where do they pause? What do they click? Seeing all this information helps me design my posts in a clearer way.
Also free:
- Inspectlet (free for 100 recorded sessions)
- SumoMe Content Analytics
5. Reports: Simply Measured
Great, paid option if you can swing it: SumAll Reports
Simply Measured offers enterprise-level analytics and management for big brands and their social efforts. It has a wide array of free tools for the rest of us, too.
Among Simply Measured’s reports are these:
- Twitter Follower Report
- Twitter Customer Service Analysis
- Facebook Fan Page Report
- Facebook Content Analysis
- Facebook Competitive Analysis
- Facebook Insights Report
- Instagram User Report
- Social Traffic Report
- Traffic Source Report
- Google+ Page Report
- Vine Analysis
Phew! That’s a lot of reports!
How to use Simply Measured: Each of these reports costs no money, although Simply Measured will ask for a Twitter follow or a Facebook mention in exchange for the free report. You can save loads of time in pulling reports from this one location as you seek to gain insight on where your social media efforts have been going lately. They’ve got all six major social networks covered: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Also free:
6. SEO: Open Site Explorer
Great, paid option if you can swing it: Moz Pro
is a great free tool for checking your domain and page authority and also for checking how many links you are getting and from which source. You can also check your competition. But the free version only gives you 3 reports per day. Signing up offers unlimited reporting on all your links, keywords and competitors.
How to use Open Site Explorer: Plug your blog’s URL into Open Site Explorer to see the high-level stats like page authority and incoming links. You can also click over to the Just-Discovered tab to see recent links and Top Pages to see which pages on your site get the most links.
Also free:
Zest
Zest.is is another download that’s particularly useful for digital marketing, it’s a Google Chrome extension that collects suggested content from users
- 2. Managing social media updates
Hootsuite and Buffer
I’ve used Hootsuite for posting updates to social networks and reviewing what others are saying for nearly five years now. Hootsuite and Buffer are comfortably the most popular free tools for posting and reviewing social media updates, you probably use them.
But Hootsuite is great as a way of keeping tabs on competitors and influencers too. If you use Twitter lists you can have a stream for each of these which is more practical than following everyone.
- 3. Finding influencers
There is no single free tool that works well for this. Often using Google or LinkedIn manually are the best way.
A long while ago you could use reputation tools like Klout, Kred or Peerindex, but these have faded. I find that the use of Twitter auto-follow means that this often skews the results.
LinkedIn sector skills used to be the best source for finding business influencers because of grouping by narrower topics – but LinkedIn killed this – monetization again. LinkedIn advanced search is probably the best replacement.
Conclusions
The saying goes, “Nothing in life is free”. That’s not entirely true when it comes to online tools. Free online tools are great because they save you time and money. The term “tool” can be used broadly to describe many things therefore uses are generally interchangeable. Below are the various ways you can use free marketing tools to promote your business.