5 Tools To Make Managing Social Media Platforms Easier
Reading Time: ~3 Mins | Written By: Mackenzie Mowat
We know that building a following on social media is about frequency and consistency, but that can be easier said than done. As a brand, you naturally want to build communities across as many platforms as possible. Depending on the size of your following and posting schedule, it can be hard for one person to manage a brand’s social presence, let alone multiple brand’s! Luckily, there are tons of great tools available to make managing all of your social media platforms a lot easier. Take a look at some of our favourites below:
Hootsuite and Later
Hootsuite offers an array of extremely helpful tools for social media management such as publishing, insights, scheduling, and more. The content calendar is fairly user friendly and allows you to easily schedule posts far in advance on popular social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Hootsuite’s Analytics page provides great insights about your posts, such as engagement rates, amount of comments, followers, and so much more. We’re really just skimming the surface with Hootsuite, so be sure to check out their website to learn more.
If you’re not looking to spend money on your scheduling software, Later offers a great free version that allows you to schedule your content and auto-posts to your specified channels. Later also allows you to view your posts in their ‘visual planner’, which lays out how your feed will look once all of your posts are published on Instagram. There’s also something very satisfying about the drag-and-drop feature to schedule posts! All in all, Later is very user-friendly and a great tool especially if you’re a more visual learner/person.
Canva
Canva is a great free tool that allows you to create professional looking social media graphics for free. It offers tons of customizable templates as well as stock photos for all your content needs. Canva doesn’t just limit you to 1080x1080 photos, either. You can create Facebook banners, Pinterest graphics, Instagram stories, as well as presentations, resumes, and so much more. This is truly a great resource to create professional looking graphics in a user-friendly platform for no cost.
Google Trends
If you’re looking to create relevant content that your audience is likely to engage with, Google Trends is a great tool that gives you insight about recent and trending events. When planning your content, or if you’re reevaluating your social media strategy, it’s a great idea to consult Google Trends to find out what your ideal audience is talking about and brainstorm how you can create content relevant to those topics. This can also help you create a more comprehensive hashtag strategy as well!
LinkTree
LinkTree is a simple yet highly effective tool that keeps all of your links in one place. It is especially useful for Instagram, where you are unable to add a link in the caption of posts and only have one spot for a link in the bio of your page. LinkTree is usually best utilized within the Instagram bio section, and contains all of the links that the page’s posts refer to. As a straight-forward and free tool, this is definitely a smart one to integrate into your strategy.
Bonus: Bit.ly
Sometimes links are excessively long and make integrating into a social post awkward and unappealing. Not only does Bit.ly shorten your links, it allows you to customize them to whatever you’d like, and provides you with data including how many people have clicked and shared your link. You can also see where (geographically) people who have clicked your link are located. This is a great free resource if you’re looking to customize your lengthy links and interested in the data behind who is clicking.
Creating a comprehensive and integrated social media strategy is no easy task - let these tools help you along the way! Whether you are starting your social media strategy or looking to integrate new and helpful techniques, we hope you are able to utilize these great tools to help manage your social media channels a bit easier. To learn more about social media, check out our 6 week digital marketing course which covers an entire module on social media.
