It’s 2019 and social media continues to be elusive to small business owners everywhere.

You’ve got folks who haven’t tweeted in 6 months, people sharing memes incorrectly on Instagram, and some who mix up their Facebook accounts with their Facebook business pages. Seriously we don’t blame you – managing 3+ social channels is hard work, impossible even. Fortunately there are plenty of tools available that can give you a much-needed boost when it comes to social media management.

Remember, social media marketing is content too. When it comes to building your content strategy you need every competitive advantage you can get. Here are the tools we use (as a note this is not an advertisement or endorsement and we recommend you research other tools before making a decision) and can speak for.

Buffer

There are plenty of honorable mentions for social publishing platforms, HootSuite and Sprout come to mind. For my business though though, we use Buffer.

One of the great things about Buffer, like many social scheduling platforms, is that it makes setting a series of posts for the week extremely easy. You could post once a day, twice a day… and each post you add automatically gets dropped into your ‘Queue’.

When it comes to social media, publishing consistently is a must, we recommend once a day at a minimum but you may find you need to be sharing content throughout the day. Thanks to Buffer you can do a week’s worth of work on one day and let the rest of the week take care of itself. 

One thing we also love about Buffer is the analytics and guidance it gives – we get an email whenever our ‘Buffer queue’ is empty so we know when to create more posts, as well as a social media report card which shows us insights at a glance.

TweetDeck

Monitoring is crucial on Twitter, and TweetDeck makes it super simple.

TweetDeck automatically connects to your Twitter account(s) and gives you notifications, messages, as well as custom streams where you can monitor tweets for specific keywords and respond. It’s a great networking tool as we’re able to view conversations live across Twitter and jump into the mix. It allows us to listen pretty much everywhere and grow as a thought leader in the marketing space, so needless to say I'm a big fan.

If you’ve got a Twitter account you can set up TweetDeck in minutes, so go for it and start monitoring like a pro!

Canva

I’ve recommended Canva many times and for good reason. 

Just to recap:

  • It’s free.
  • It has an excellent knowledge base to get you started on design principles.
  • It has a tremendous UX and makes designing beautiful graphics very simple.

Thanks to Canva’s free plan we’ve been able to create a host of great looking graphics for our website and Instagram account which has been a huge boost to our social and marketing efforts.

Affinity Designer

As a Mac user, I have to recommend Affinity Designer which is a sort of Adobe Illustrator-Lite. Affinity Designer gives me pretty much all I need for basic graphic design at a very wallet-friendly price tag. Coupled with Canva, it makes creating graphics a breeze though we’ve adopted it for our site and app graphics as well making it a versatile and useful tool for the team.

Blog Trackr

I’d be remiss not to mention our own platform, though we’re not trying to be biased because it’s a tremendous help. As noted above, we’re trying to share content daily if not throughout the day, and finding that content is hard. Thanks to Blog Trackr’s newsfeed we can source articles written in the past couple weeks that are specific to our industry so being a thought leader is pretty much effortless.

Not to mention the fact that we integrate with Buffer, making a week’s worth of social media sharing scale down to about 15 minutes.