4 FREE TOOLS TO BOOST YOUR SMALL BUSINESS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Small business owners spend their days wearing multiple hats. One moment you’re sending invoices as accounts receivable, the next you’re approving employee time off as HR. The burden of doing it all on your own can leave little room for managing your brand online.
You know online marketing is mandatory, but the overwhelm is real. Whether you’re using Instagram to increase your digital footprint or Google to boost your search marketing results, these four free social media marketing tools will help grow your online presence, freeing you up to head your other one (wo)man departments.
1. Awario
Monitoring your social media accounts every minute of the day is a tall order, even for massive marketing teams with limitless budgets. Awario lets you listen in on keyword and brand mentions across all your key social media platforms.
These include conversations with and without the #hashtags and provide a portal to reply to users directly without even logging into IG.
Awario takes it a step further, sorting mentions by follower counts so those with the highest number of followers appear first. They’ll even go as far as show you brand-relevant accounts to develop your influencer marketing strategy.
2. Planoly
Planning, scheduling, and publishing your Instagram posts just got a lot easier. With this app, you can manage and edit your posts to perfection, then send them out into the world from your desktop or mobile phone without ever leaving the Planoly platform.
You can create photo blocks and stagger your posts to make your feed cohesive. They’ll help you see which pics look best grouped together so you can pack the most punch to each post. Schedule out a week or month in advance, for a set-it-and-forget-it style approach to the ‘gram.
3. Add Your Business to Google My Business
As a Dallas SEO Agency turned Digital Marketing Firm, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention Google My Business as part of our prescribed online marketing suite.
To increase your website traffic, you need a complete business listing profile both on and off Google My Business. The search engines crawl and return all variety of data, including that which they find on social media. Just another reason to make sure your information is accurate and up-to-date.
Start by making sure you’re a verified business, and complete all the listing information. Even small changes like seasonal hours or events you offer should be kept current so they’ll be more likely to show up in the Google Information Panel and beyond.
For more information, see Google’s official Google My Business page. Need some help getting set up? We can help.
4. InShot
Video marketing is a content trend that’s expanding by the day. Whether you want to post to your Instagram stories or simply need a video editing tool that’s easy to learn – not to mention effective – InShot is the app for the job. It can clean up your photos and piece together your social media videos to help engage users through visual storytelling. You can splice videos together, add your logo, layer music, crop or blur your background – anything you need to make your video marketing strategy pop.
You may be a Jack or Jane of all trades, but no successful small business does it alone. Employ these free social media tools to help grow your brand online without adding extra time commitments.