Find the best equipment for business networking on facebook, twitter, linked in and more. We have crowd-sourced and reader-tested this list of equipment for small businesses to give you the best resources for starting and expanding your social media marketing campaign.
Here are a few of the best equipment for Social Media Marketing. Each piece of equipment is essential to all businesses looking to grow their brand and reach new customers through social media, especially on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest.
OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a powerful lead generation tool that lets you engage visitors at exactly the right moment. It has a drag-and-drop template for building visually stunning lightboxes, popups, and landing pages that capture leads. Everything from growing your mailing list to recovering abandoned carts can be solved using OptinMonster’s amazing set of tools.
Ready to hear something really cool? OptinMonster can now be part of your social media marketing campaign. Simply use the new ChatBot element to connect to ManyChat. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to share your best-performing optins over Facebook Messenger.
RafflePress
RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin for WordPress. With its drag-and-drop giveaway builder and viral giveaway templates, you can quickly create a fun online contest for your audience.
Where RafflePress comes in handy for social media marketing is with the verified bonus actions feature. This feature lets you reward users with extra contest entries for performing specific actions like:
- Following you on Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.
- Viewing a Facebook post/video
- Visiting your YouTube channel
- Sharing your giveaway on social media
- And much more
RafflePress is the perfect tool for boosting your social media following and engagement. Plus, it can also help you drive more traffic to your site, grow your email list, and even increase sales.
Smash Balloon
With Smash Balloon, you can easily embed social media feeds anywhere on your WordPress website. It’s super easy to set up; simply install the plugin, connect your social media account, and in less than 30 seconds you can display a beautiful social media feed.
By displaying social media feeds on your site, you can turn your website visitors into social media followers. Plus, users can interact with your feeds, without having to leave your site.
Smash Balloon offers 5 different plugins:
- Instagram Feed Pro
- Custom Facebook Feed Pro
- Custom Twitter Feeds Pro
- Feeds for YouTube Pro
- Social Wall Pro
The feeds are also highly customizable; you can decide which content to showcase, design the feed to match your brand, show or hide likes, comments, and shares, and more.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social content streams from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. It is one of the most famous social media tools in the market.
Working across multiple networks with a social team can be difficult, and Hootsuite makes it possible for you and your team.
It will be easier to delegate among replies to fans and followers, eliminating the stress of coordinating answers and potentially neglecting valued fans.
In the past, one of the biggest frustrations with Hootsuite was how it handled social media images. The good news is this issue is now fixed on Twitter so that scheduled posts will show up to four images directly in the feed.
Pricing:
- Free: up to 3 social profiles, 30 scheduled messages, and 1 user;
- Professional: $19/month. 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduling, and 1 user;
- Team: $99/month. 20 social profiles, unlimited scheduling and 3 users;
- Enterprise (custom pricing): unlimited.
MeetEdgar
Posting most updates or sharing a piece of content once just doesn’t cut it these days, which is why MeetEdgar recycles social content for you.
Meet Edgar will schedule and automate re-posts of your content for you, helping get your posts in front of a larger percentage of people. The tool works by enabling you to build a library of social media updates organized into a publishing queue.
Posts can be tagged and separated into different categories to ensure that different content types are evenly spread out in your queue.
Pricing:
- Edgar Lite: $19/mo: connect 3 social accounts, unlimited manually scheduled posts, 10 automatically recurring weekly time slots and 4 content categories (first month for free);
- Edgar: $49/mo: connect 25 social accounts, unlimited manually scheduled posts, 1000 automatically recurring weekly time slots, and unlimited content categories (first month for free).
Sprout Social
Like many of the other social media tools on this list, Sprout Social allows you to schedule updates to your social media accounts.
However, there are a couple of unique features that set Sprout Social apart.
In addition to monitoring and managing multiple social networks, SproutSocial’s clean interface also delivers deeper analytics.
For example, the platform gives you calculated engagement and influence scores, and if you’re using social media for customer support, it also measures your response time.
You can even turn your messages into action items to create workflows or reminders around your social activity. This way, you can connect the points of conversations that happen online to real business.
Another perk is discovering new people to connect with and systematically remove bad connections, using the discovery tools.
Pricing:
- Standard: $99 per user/mo: manage up to 5 profiles, all-in-one social boxes, social content calendar, review management, asking and social CRM tools, plus other features;
- Professional: $149 per user/mo: 10 social profiles, everything in plus scheduling for optimal send times, custom workflows for multiple approvers and steps, response rate and time analysis reports, plus other features;
- Advanced: $249 per user/mo: everything in professional plus Message Spike Alerts for increased message activity, digital asset, and content library, chatbots with automation tools, plus other features.
Animoto
Animoto is another great video platform that allows non-experts to create captivating multimedia. Animoto allows you to turn existing video clips and images into video slideshows with little effort. You can either use one of their existing storyboard templates or build a video from scratch depending on how much time you have and your ambition!
Animoto does offer a free version, if you don’t mind having their branding on your videos. Other plans are at €28 or €69 per month based on your business’s needs. Annual subscriptions offer significant discounts.
How to Create Quick Videos with Animoto:
- Use one of the many storyboards provided by Animoto to speed up your video creation process. Each comes with a song, a style, and a particular structure.
- Replace the existing template content with your own text, video clips, and photos.
After you create your video, you can download it in various formats and levels of quality and upload it directly to your social media platforms. There are many ways to use video in your social media marketing, so make sure you do some research to find out the best route for you.
Knowing how to create a great video is one thing but understanding how to create good marketing videos is another. Consider a social media and marketing course to use video to its full potential!
Placeit
One more video tool in this list is PlaceIt. This image and video tool allows brands to showcase their products and digital designs in realistic web/video environments. It can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars on externally sourced product videos and images.
A one-time purchase on the platform costs a few dollars, or you can choose to pay $14.95 per month, or $89.69 yearly, depending on your brand’s needs.
How to Create Video mock-ups with Placeit:
- Search for your desired environment. Tip: include your preferred device (e.g. iPhone or Mac) and background (e.g. office or cafe).
- Upload your image or enter a URL to grab a screenshot. Placeit will automatically place your image in your selected environment.
Once you have your product images, you have the tools you need to promote your products on social media via organic or paid posts.
Boomerang
On the other hand, Boomerang by Instagram is another rising video creation tool among digital marketers. It lets users record a series of images and play them in a loop.
The new form of digital content has helped many brands generate more engagement.
Some even use these boomerang real-time videos as their social media content with fantastic results.
Google Charts
Google Charts is a powerful tool for data visualization among digital marketers, especially when it comes to connecting with your real data using Google’s connection tools.
It offers interactive charts and highly customizable items, including lines, fonts, background colors, and many other features.
It’s a very user-friendly content creation tool that requires very little Javascript knowledge. And it’s completely free!
Infogram
Infogram is another great tool that digital marketers use to turn overwhelming marketing data into understandable and visually attractive charts. There is a wide range of charts to choose from, such as pie charts, line charts, bar charts, and more.
You can even take your design to the next level by creating a story with animated objects.
You can easily add these beautifully organized graphs to your articles to add a more authoritative tone to your writing. Infogram is user-friendly and doesn’t require much of a learning curve.
So if you can’t be bothered with Excel sheets, simply create visualized data with Infogram. Make your marketing reports easy-to-read while sharing knowledge with your audiences at the same time.
Alternatively, you can use Visme, another great content creation tool for infographics.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a social media expert or new to this field, we’ve got the equipment you need. From cameras to tripods, and from microphones to speakers, we have new, used, and refurbished equipment for sale. Our experts can provide customized advice for all of your needs, including equipment for social media marketing, social media advertising, and digital marketing.