Social media marketing is the best way to connect with your market in the age of digital marketing. Social media is responsible for bringing out a number of product trends and saturated markets. These apps will make it easier for you to connect with your audience and help you conquer these saturated markets!
There are plenty of social media marketing tools to choose from and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. However, these apps will help you cut through the noise and save you hours of time so you can focus on growing your business.
1. Quik
If you ask anyone what the most engaging and digestible type of content is, they’ll tell you, “Video content.” Just ask Facebook’s VP for EMEA, Nicola Mendelsohn, who believes the tech giant will be populated exclusively by video content by the year 2020. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for marketers to master the video-making and video-editing skills necessary to produce solid, regular content.
Have no fear, though, because now you don’t have to (although it’s a valuable skill to learn) thanks to the handy app, Quik. Using Quik, you have the ability to make silky smooth video transitions, synchronize music, and add any necessary filters easily. It’s perfect for short recaps or highlight videos. It removes the tedious work needed to stitch each clip together. I just started using Quik, and I find that it adds a whole new dimension to the type of content I can create.
2. Over
If there’s one program all marketing beginners should master, it’s Photoshop. It’s a wonderful tool for designing content and editing photos. Unfortunately, the program costs a good chunk of money and has a bit of a steep learning curve, so it’s not always the most facile tool for marketers to acquire. That shouldn’t deter you though, because there are plenty of apps that can provide you with photo editing tools at a more basic level.
One free app that I’ve been using for years is Over. It allows you to add text and artwork layovers to your photos. Want to add some messaging and texture to your images? Now you can with this easy-to-use app. It’s great for calling out locations or people, and there are hundreds of additional in-app purchases that can provide additional artwork for your every desire.
3. Snapseed
We all want our photos to look professionally edited, but the marketer working alone rarely has the time and equipment for that. Even if I were to make the investment into a DSLR camera, I would still need a lot of practice before I started churning out high-quality photos. Even then, I’d still need to master the editing side of things.
I can’t help you with the camera, but I can share an app that gives you a one-stop photo-editing shop. There are some basic photo editing tools available on your smartphone, but with Snapseed, you get all of those photo basics coupled with more advanced features like Lens Blur, HDR Scape, and Glamour Glow which can add a whole new layer of detail to your photos. It’ll take some practice, but your photo collections will shine in a whole new light—literally and figuratively.
4. Repost
Most social media platforms maintain the same basic functions of liking, commenting, and sharing content. It’s an easy and uniform way to engage with other web users. Unfortunately, Instagram seems to buck the trend, as, until September of 2015, users could not share the content of others. Now, users can share privately with their friends, but not publicly to their own feeds.
Instagram cites the “personal” aspect of their platform and “prevention of spam” as the reasons for their limited reposting functionalities. Consumers still crave the mass sharing option, and with the app Repost, you’re able to share your friend’s content, or that of anyone else you see fit, to your own feed. I’d recommend against using Repost on a frequent basis because you want to maintain the integrity of your own Instagram page, but sprinkle it into your mix every once in a while if you find something worthwhile.
5. CoSchedule
Once you’ve finally created your beautiful content, you can put your finished product online. The finish line seems to be right in front of you, but with as many as eight social media channels to update, it’s merely a mirage. If you’re updating everything on the fly, the process can feel like an eternity. If you schedule everything ahead of time, you save a lot of stress and headache, but you still face the daunting and time-consuming task of updating eight accounts for every post.
6. Facebook Barometer
Does it seem like your Facebook strategy is missing something? A little perspective can go a long way. But when you’re so focused on what’s right in front of you, it’s tough to consider external factors.
Let’s say your client’s Facebook following is growing at a steady clip. Or maybe your social media marketing agency is rocking reach compared to previous months. Nice work!
But how do your results compare to your competitors’?
After all, your competitors are working hard to attract a similar audience. It’s essential to keep their progress in mind when you review your brand’s results.
With the free social media tool Barometer, you can compare your Facebook Page to your competitors’ Pages in seconds. Connect your Facebook Page to this free tool, and see how your performance stacks up to over 58,000 other pages. You can compare metrics like:
- Fans reached
- Engagement rate
- People talking about your page
- Negative feedback
- Organic reach
- Paid reach
- Viral reach
- CTR
To fine-tune your Barometer, choose the audience range that matches your Facebook Page and get more accurate industry averages.
Then scroll down for page insights like reach and impressions.
You can compare your Facebook Page against the industry average for the past 30, 90, or 180 days to get a better idea of how your brand is truly performing.
7. Bit.ly
When you share links on social media, you don’t always want to show the original URL. Maybe the URL is way too long and would clutter up your post so you’d prefer a shorter link. Perhaps the URL points to a website that you don’t manage and you’d like to find a way to track stats.
Many of the best social media management apps include tools that automatically shorten your URLs. But these built-in tools don’t always give you much control over the process.
Bit.ly—one of the social media marketing tools out there that make work easier
Meet Bi.tly, a free social media marketing tool that shortens URLs and stores them in your own personal database.
With Bitly, you can make any URL shorter or create a URL with a custom slug, such as bit.ly/my-custom-slug.
Within your database, you can give URLs original titles and add tags for better organization. That means you can tag all URLs related to a campaign or promotion so you can find and analyze them easily.
But Bitly offers much more than shortened URLs. This tool also provides basic analytics, so you can understand how each link performed. You can monitor the number of clicks your URLs received each day, and you can track each link’s referrals.
With a quick glance, you can see whether social media, email, or SMS campaigns drove clicks.
If QR codes are part of your marketing strategy, you’ll appreciate Bitly’s simple QR code generator. You can create a QR code for any Bitly link, giving your audience another way to connect with your brand.
If you have extra room in your budget, Bitly also offers paid features.
With a paid plan, you can create branded URLs with custom domains, which can improve CTR and help you reach your web traffic goals even more reliably.
8. Canva
Whether you’re sharing a blog post, a seasonal sale, or anything else on social media, you need images. Good, high-quality images.
But snapping your own photos and designing your own graphics takes time and money.
If you don’t have much of either to spare, Canva is an excellent option. This free design app lets you create all kinds of graphics, from Facebook cover images and Instagram Stories to tweets and images for your blog posts. Canva, one of the most popular social media marketing tools for easy design crafting. You can get started by choosing from hundreds of templates.
All of Canva’s social media templates follow each platform’s recommended image dimensions, so you don’t have to worry about resizing. Just swap in your own text, logos, and photos to customize each graphic.
If you don’t have original photos to work with, choose from Canva’s free library or download free images.
Once you create something you like, you can use it over and over. Just copy the design and update the text or images, and you’ve got a branded template that you can reuse.
If you find that you’re using Canva constantly, you might benefit from the paid version.
When you upgrade to Canva Pro, you can set and save brand colors and fonts, add GIFs, and resize designs for other platforms with a single click.
9. Biteable
Creating content for social media is an essential part of the game. Visual content gets three times more engagement on Twitter than plain ol’ text, so good visual content can help you take it to the next level.
With Biteable, you can easily create engaging, entertaining, and informative short videos to share on social media.
With a host of free video templates, footage, music, and animated scenes, Biteable is a godsend for anyone who wants to create studio-quality quickly without needing expensive resources like film or sound recording equipment.
Biteable was created to be super easy to use and one of the cheapest tools of its type on the market. Most features are available even with free accounts (it’s pretty cheap to upgrade to Premium anyway) so why not add a bit more excitement and spark to your social media content by creating some short, super-shareable videos?
10. Buzzsumo
Research is a crucial part of marketing. If you want to do well and leave your competitors in the dust, you need to understand what they’re doing and if what you’re doing is working or not.
Buzzsumo is a research tool that tells you how your content is doing and who’s spreading the word.
Sometimes when you sit down to create content, you’re on fire. Other times it’s like pulling teeth and you’re just grateful to have met a deadline. It’s impossible to guarantee success, but a tool like Buzzsumo can help you increase the odds.
One of the most powerful research tools on the market, the functionality includes:
- Find content that’s most shared on social media channels – you can enter your own or someone else’s domain and see what’s been shared socially.
- Find influencers related to particular topics.
- Get alerts based on keywords, brand name, links, author name, or domain.
- Track competitors and do an analysis based on their content.
- Use it to research keywords and trending topics your audience is interested in. You can use it to find interesting new posts to share or to search for content ideas based on what’s performing well.
- And, if you’ve got some cash to splash, Buzzsumo Pro is a powerhouse for competitor research.
Conclusion
If you’re unfamiliar with social media marketing, it can seem like a very complicated subject. There are a lot of tools, tips, and tricks that you need to know if you’re going to be able to have any success at it. Social media marketing is one of the most important things you can do when getting your business off the ground. It is challenging to write a post, wait for likes and retweets, and hope your followers will share your content with their own followers. It takes a lot of time and energy that you want to be spending on doing actual work instead.