Are you active on social media with your business? If not, what are you waiting for? And if you are promoting your business on social media, what social media marketing tools do you use?
Many entrepreneurs and small business owners know it is important to have a social media presence to:
- Build awareness for you and your business
- Prove your authority, create trust, and show you’re approachable
- Encourage engagement
- Provide support, customer service
- Increase website traffic
Not unlike most aspects of your marketing, a social media plan is far from “set-it-and-forget-it”. Setting up and maintaining a social media presence for your business takes time.
What Are Social Media Marketing Tools?
There’s a good chance you are a small business owner who already wears too many hats and trying to find more time in your schedule to be active on social media is nearly impossible.
Here’s some great news!
There are some excellent social media management tools out there.
Both free and paid tools are available for everything from graphic design help to social media planners/calendars as well as the social media scheduling automation to push it all out there.
Best Social Media Graphic Design Tools
Graphic design for your social media is more than just a nice image with some text on top. You need to make sure your brand logo, fonts, and colors take center stage.
Best Free Graphic Design Tools for Social Media:
- Canva. One of the simplest, most streamlined options for graphic design, it’s perfect for beginners. Even the experts use it! It offers tons of free, fully designed templates for all kinds of DIY social media graphics (paid upgrade available). Check out our how to guide and top 9 ways to use Canva for your business.
- Gravit Designer. With a simple interface, this tool allows you to design icons and logos. The free subscription allows you to save your documents as PDF, SVG, or BPM. Because it is available online, it allows you to save files to the cloud and provides you with 500MB of space.
- Adobe Express. A pared-down, free version of Adobe that takes just a click to start working on social media posts, stories, and your own templated custom designs. The majority of the templates found here are free (paid upgrade available).
- Coolors. Even if you have zero design experience, this tool helps you find color schemes and palettes that coordinate well together. This means you can ensure your design assets look great with colors that work well together.
- Google Fonts. This library of over a thousand fonts includes only open-source licenses, so they are all completely free to download and use. You can quickly compare fonts side by side and view suggested pairings.
- Unsplash. Here you can search through over 2 million high-quality, high-resolution photos and images, all of which are completely free to use. You can browse through categories to find exactly what you need.
Our favorite? Canva!
Best Paid Graphic Design Tools for Social Media:
- Adobe Photoshop. Used by professionals, this software will get you fantastic results. For everything from photo editing to creating your own custom layout of panels and windows, this is a complete package. Pricing starts at $20.99/month.
- Picmonkey. Great for the beginner, this site has customizable graphic design tools for both desktop and mobile devices. Everything from photo editing to thousands of stock photos, graphics, and effects are all at your fingertips. Pricing starts at $72.00/year.
- Lucidpress. This online graphic design software lets you create and manipulate images and illustrations. It provides a large database of templates to start with. Pricing starts at $10.00/month.
- Genially. A tool that allows you to take your content and turn it into professional-looking graphics on Facebook, Pinterest, a website, or a blog. Pricing starts at $7.49/month.
- Adobe Illustrator. If you are familiar with vector graphics and software, this may be your best pick. Reviewers say that from simple logos to brand books, and everything in between, this software provides tools to do it all. Pricing starts at $19.99/month.
Our favorite(s)? We LOVE the paid version of Canva, but also use Adobe Creative Cloud because it provides subscribers with a collection of software for graphic design, video editing, and photography to name a few. Our must haves are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Stock, and Adobe Illustrator.
Best Social Media Scheduling Tools
Social media networks have different peak times when their users are most active, and if you want to engage with as many of your audiences as possible, you need to post at those peak times.
Who has the time to post “live” at the perfect time?? Not you. Thankfully there are some excellent scheduler and automation tools out there to help. Most of these tools also provide social media analytics and reports to gain audience insight and improve your reach.
- SocialPilot: By far, the top for feature-packed tool options, this robust scheduler combines powerful publishing technology with in-depth analytics. Topped with some excellent collaboration tools, an easy-to-use dashboard, and guided support for your marketing efforts, it is easy to see why it is one of the most popular schedulers for all kinds of major brands. Pricing starts at $25.50/month.
- Brandwatch. Helps you easily schedule, edit, preview, and publish all of your social media posts and campaigns from one calendar. It saves you time, optimizes your ad spend, and identify your best-performing content pieces. Pricing not available.
- Social Bee. Extremely easy-to-use and convenient, this tool allows you to organize your posts into a calendar and even create posts from scratch with its built-in Canva integration. Pricing starts at $19/month.
- Pallyy. A popular tool for smaller companies, it comes with an innovative user interface that allows you to sort through posts for all kinds of channels, from Instagram to LinkedIn. With a lot of drag-and-drop features and Canva integration, it’s perfect for beginners. Pricing starts at $15/month.
- Buffer. Rated as having the best FREE social media scheduling tool by growth collective, this tool allows you to schedule and draft posts on everything from LinkedIn to Facebook. With a shared inbox that allows users to respond to messages and comments quickly, it makes it easy to engage with your social media audience. They have a robust FREE package, after that expanded package pricing starts at $5.00 per social channel/month.
Our favorite? SocialPilot’s affordable, feature-packed, user-friendly interface checks all our boxes.
Our Favorite Social Media Management Tool
Looking to organize your social media topic ideas? Want to make sure you don’t forget anything? Well, don’t forget that you may also need a project management tool to help you keep track of your content strategy.
What do we use to manage our digital marketing and social media marketing strategies? We stand strong by Trello. Good news, Trello has a free and paid version!
Need a Trello template to get started quick and easy? We’ve got you covered, use our FREE Trello template that is our social media management tool with social media calendar in one.
The Best Social Media Tools for Marketing
How much bigger could your business be using social media?
What’s your excuse for not being out there?
Today there are so many time-saving tools out there making having a social media presence easier than ever. From the designs, to the scheduling and automation to the analytics, there’s a tool for each process.
Although there are costs to use some of these tools, the cost is minimal in comparison to the reach you can gain. In other words, getting on the social media wagon is a great way to boost your marketing ROI!
Does your overall marketing strategy need a boost as well? Get in touch about our 12-month marketing strategy service.
