Social Media Marketing Tools

January 21, 2016

Your Recipe for Social Media Success

In today’s business landscape, using social media as part of your marketing arsenal isn’t just smart, it’s necessary. Perhaps the greatest value of social media is the ability to showcase your business’s personality and commitment to your customers in a very real and friendly way. These social media marketing tools will make your efforts more successful and efficient!

Social media is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools. If used correctly, it can help you create a strong personal connection with your prospective customers. However, it’s easy to make the mistake of diving right into social media without a social media strategy. At best, this will waste hours of your precious time. At worst, it can lead to a PR disaster for your business. Effective social media marketing requires a clear strategy that takes into account what your goals are, who your target market is and what drives them.

Let’s Get Started!

The Social Media Strategy Workbook is a Microsoft Excel file. The Workbook contains macros, which must be enabled for the tool to function correctly.

Download the Social Media Strategy Workbook

Who (Persona) Tools

Tools in this category will help you fill in the details about your Whos. From statistical demographic information to avatar creation.

Up Close & Persona is an in-depth online marketing persona development tool.
Pew Research Center releases data sets and studies that are often useful in developing personas.

Where (Social Network) Tools

These tools will help you get your social media profiles set up and optimized.

When (Timing) Tools

Tools in this category will help you find the optimal times for social media posts. Be aware that these are usually paid tools, and they most often calculate optimal post times based on your entire audience rather than your specific Whos.

What (Creation & Curation) Tools

The tools in this section are invaluable. From content aggregation and content curation tools to software that shows you what’s trending in your industry or with your followers.

Feedly is a great tool for content curation. You can select your interests, and it will taylor a newsfeed for you.
Flipboard is another content curation tool. Based on your selected interests, it puts together a constantly updated and highly visual news feed custom made for you.
Canva is a free online design tool. It helps you create perfectly sized and visually appealing graphics for your social posts.
Pablo is a free online design tool that enables you to create fast and simple images to accompany your posts.
Relay makes creating share-worthy content a snap with no technical or creative skills required.
SproutSocial Size Guide always has up-to-date size guidelines for social channels.

How (Posting) Tools

These tools are the magic wand of social media marketing. They help you maintain a consistent posting schedule, and they even include analytic information in many cases. Also, many offer nonprofit discounts, so always be sure to ask even if it’s not mentioned on their site!

Hootsuite is the leader in the Social Media Marketing Management space. It offers everything a Social Media manager needs from publishing, to monitoring, including reports and team collaboration features.
Social Oomph is a simple posting tool with a dashboard that combines Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plurk, and your blog into one spot to schedule posts or monitor social media activity.
Buffer provides a simple way to manage your social media posts.
Agorapulse enables you to manage all your social media message in one place, schedule and publish content, and get reports on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Edgar is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to recycle categorized social media updates and re-post them later automatically to reach more fans & followers.
Sprout Social allows you to schedule content on all of your social accounts with a convenient publishing system and provides great reports that show social content and monitored keyword searches.
Post Planner makes it easy to find, plan and post content that is scientifically proven to increase social media engagement on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

For even more small business tools,
head over to our Suggested Solutions page,
and check out our Free Small Business Tools post!

Jillyn

Founder + Executive Director

Marketing Strategy, Business Optimization & Web Development

Jillyn is a business process and strategy expert. She has nearly a decade of Fortune 100 experience and has spent the past six years helping small businesses and nonprofits expand their success. Along with the day-to-day operation of the Technology Aloha business and team, she stays involved with every project we work on.

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