Get Social: The Best Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

What if there was a way that you could get your small business in front of your ideal client as they go about their everyday life? And what if it was free? That’s the power of social media.

Streamline and Elevate Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns with Ease

As a small business, investing large budgets in advertising and expensive marketing campaigns isn’t realistic. With social media marketing, you don’t need to splash the cash. Your customers can discover you as they go about their daily social media browsing—as they’re scrolling through their feeds and exploring topics they’re interested in.

That being said, consistently creating relevant content and sharing it across the major social media platforms your ideal client frequents takes a lot of time and effort. There are multiple steps involved in successfully executing a social media strategy. You’ve got to figure out what content to post across multiple accounts, then create those posts—captions and visuals— and then track your social media analytics so you know what’s working and what isn’t. All while keeping up with demanding algorithms and fast-paced trends.

Instead of trying to do this all manually, take advantage of the social media marketing tools available comfortably within the budget of a small business. Here are some of our favorite social media automation tools to streamline your marketing efforts and elevate your social campaigns.

Social Media Marketing Tools That Make Your Life Easier

When streamlining your content creation, social media marketing tools tend to come in 3 categories: research, creation, and social media analytics tools. You can find a social media marketing tool to help you come up with ideas for relevant content, create the content, and monitor its success—basically the whole social media marketing process. Let’s explore examples of these tools in each category.

Content Research Tools

Coming up with engaging content ideas for social media posts can be unrelenting. You end up wondering “What else could I possibly write about?” That’s where this type of social media marketing tool comes in handy. By automating research into popular posts, you’ll never run out of content ideas again. Most of these social media tools use social listening to find out what topics are being discussed across social media platforms and therefore what your target audience is interested in seeing.

1. BuzzSumo

With BuzzSumo, you can explore popular social media posts over a specific time period, on specific social platforms, and according to the format of the social media content, making it an incredibly insightful social media marketing tool. Knowing the hot topics of the moment will massively improve the success of your social media campaigns as you join already trending conversations.

2. Google Trends

Google Trends supports your social media marketing through another type of social listening. It collects data on topics that are ranking high in Google searches. This suggests it’s on the mind of your social media followers and should therefore be translated into your social media posts.

3. Portent

Once you’ve selected topics of interest from this social listening, you can also get support coming up with catchy ways to start your social posts with the social media marketing tool Portent, a title generator. Scroll-stopping first lines are the best way to up your engagement on your social channels.

It’s well worth looking into social media listening tools to help you come up with engaging ideas for your social media marketing. Social listening across multiple platforms is a lot of work if done manually so use the social media automation tools available to you.

Content Creation Tools 

Boosting your brand online only begins with the social post idea and caption. Most social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram require or are improved by images, graphics, or videos alongside the text in the caption. This is a good opportunity to share brand photography— especially if you are building a personal brand.

1. Free Images for Your Social Posts

Otherwise, a social media marketing tool to look into is a copyright-free image provider where you can get photos to include in social media posts. There are multiple websites offering free images that you can use in your social media marketing including Unsplash and Pixabay.

2. Eye-Catching Graphics

To create eye-catching graphics without expensive software like Photoshop, utilize social media designing tools. Canva is very popular for creating social media graphics because it is user-friendly, even providing templates for social posts. It integrates with Giphy which is the go-to for finding GIFs to share on social media accounts. GIFs are well-loved on most social media platforms as it brings humor and fun into your social media strategy. You can even use Canva to schedule posts so it’s a very useful social media marketing tool to have in the mix.

3. Attention-Grabbing Videos

Video content increases social media engagement, so you should also be on the lookout for an online video creation platform. Hitfilm is a free video editor popular among social media marketers. Canva also has some video capabilities if you’d like to keep the number of social media marketing tools you’re using to a minimum.

When looking to increase social media engagement, tools like these can be really useful because they enhance the visual appeal of social posts. There are plenty of content curation tools out there to speed up and make the process of content creation easier without even spending a cent.

Social Media Management & Analytics Tools

With all that’s involved in social media marketing, you need a social media management tool to keep everything in order. Key capabilities to look for include the ability to schedule posts, track social media performance, and manage multiple platforms at once.

1. Automate Your Posting Schedule

Some well-known social media scheduling tools include Buffer, Later, and Hootsuite. They all give you the ability to schedule posts across multiple social media accounts as standard. You can organize your marketing strategy on a social media calendar. You can also use their in-built social media analytics tools to see what is working in your social media content.

2. Monitor Your Progress

If you’re looking to invest in a social media marketing tool that has advanced capabilities, HubSpot’s social media management software might be for you. You can monitor the ROI of your social media efforts due to the social media software linking to your CRM and therefore connecting the dots of whether leads are turning into paying customers. (Interested? Podium Customers can get started with HubSpot for free.)

Sprout Social is categorized among social media engagement tools because as well as managing the social media calendar with the capability to schedule posts on multiple accounts, it has the functionality to manage conversations taking place on any major social media platform. By increasing the efficiency of your responses to messages, comments, mentions, and such, the success of your social media accounts will accelerate.

After putting so much effort into finding ideas for and creating social media content, it only makes sense to invest in a social media marketing tool that helps you to manage and monitor your marketing. The social media management platform you go for depends on the needs and priorities of your business.

Add the Right Tools to Your Toolkit

Managing the success of business social media accounts is no small feat. However, the social media marketing process is cyclical in nature—research, plan, create, monitor and repeat. So once you have these social media tools in place in your business, you’ll experience continued growth as your carefully curated social media marketing reaches and converts more and more of your target audience