Social media marketing is perhaps one of the most important parts of digital marketing as a whole. A lot of traffic is created as a result of successful marketing campaigns, while a good image online leads to trust, name recognition, and a huge follower base.
But what are the means of getting your digital marketing campaign to succeed? This article will discuss eight essential tools and services for effective social media marketing.
1. Hootsuite
If you are like most brand owners, then you have multiple social media accounts for your company. And of course, the biggest issue with them is that they are very impractical to maintain at the same time.
But instead of jumping from one account to another, you can just have them all in one place! That would be great, wouldn’t it? And Hootsuite gives you an ability to do that. It is a social media management tool that will let you control all of your accounts from one dashboard. You can schedule posts beforehand and see statistics for how much engagement you get on them.
2. BuzzSumo
When operating a business, you must always stay on-topic. If there is something people in the industry are talking about, you must always be ahead of them and in possession of invaluable information about the matter.
Of course, the perfect way to do this is to stay online for hours, reading posts and monitoring what everyone is discussing. BuzzSumo will make your life much easier by doing this job for you. With the help of its analysis solutions, you will be able to discover the trending topics, keywords, and key influencers. You will also see how well your content is performing and how many backlinks have been made to your site.
3. Mention
Knowing which websites have links to your content is pretty useful. But what is even more helpful is when you know who is talking about you and your brand.
Social media platforms allow you to include an ‘@’ sign and a username to address someone or a hashtag to stick to the particular discussion. Nevertheless, a lot of the time people may simply name your brand and you will not know that they were even talking about you!
And this is when Mention works wonders. The tool monitors social media and web content in real time and notifies you when someone mentions your brand. You can also set it up to notify you for certain keywords. Mention also provides you with competitor insights, so you are able to see both their and your own performance.
4. Affable
Nowadays, advertisements are absolutely everywhere. In fact, they have become so common that our brain instinctively ignores them most of the time. Online, we scroll past ads and skip them when they pop up on YouTube videos.
On the other hand, you have the social media influencers who are willing to promote your products to their enormous audiences. After all, people are much more likely to opt for a service if a figure of authority (at least for them) recommends it. This is why finding the right influencers to advertise your brand is crucial, and Affable can help with this tremendously. The tool delivers the best fits for your company and connects you with the most effective online personas to collaborate with. With Affable, you can also view the influencer’s demographic and its breakdown according to various factors.
While creating quality content is important, it might be not as effective if you only cater to your English-speaking audience. Every business should strive for international acclaim and success in the global market, so there is no reason to target your marketing only at certain countries. Think bigger!
In order to spread out into foreign markets, you should internationalize your company. Localize your content to find more followers on social media who prefer using their native language rather than English. The Word Point is an online translation service that can translate your content into over forty-five languages. It can be SEO-optimized and they guarantee a quality translation which means that you won’t have to worry about getting gibberish like what Google Translate produces.
6. Canva
Engaging written content is amazing, but what is even more outstanding is eye-catching visual content. The primary representatives of this kind are photographs, illustrations, and infographics. If you can’t create visual content, you can consider your marketing campaign a failure even before starting it.
Despite this lack of particular skills among marketers, they still somehow manage to succeed. This is due to the easy and accessible visual content creation software. One of such is Canva. The site, which has gained popularity in recent years, lets you develop anything from simple illustrations to charts to infographics. It has dozens of templates available for anything from flyers to posters. As for the content for social media, you have over 2 million items in their library that you can add to your illustration or infographic.
7. Picasion
Images are very in-demand and always have been. A popping design can go a long way and produce unexpected results. However, what is considered fancy now is something different.
GIFs are like a mix between still images and videos. You could say they are a short video but in another file format. They don’t have a sound, but usually, contain a strong message with anything from a cute kitten that will make you go ‘aww’ to a short cartoon. Contrary to popular belief, GIFs are actually not that hard to make, and Picasion proves this. The site lets you make animated GIFs from still images. You can import them from your device, Flickr, or Picasa. The speed and size can be customized, and once you are done, you can share your work on social media or embed it on your site via a custom HTML code.
8. Animoto
When YouTube was created, it quickly became an online and cultural phenomenon. The way people use the platform even nowadays is simply amazing with big companies posting promotional material, while others post daily vlogs and personal life updates.
It would be a shame if you did not take advantage of this platform that holds so much potential. But even if you don’t want to use YouTube for social media marketing, you still need to consider making videos as part of your content. Animoto is an online social media video maker that allows you to create engaging content from scratch. It has an easy-to-use design and all the features you could wish for. Moreover, the tool is pretty simple to operate, so you won’t need any special skills.
Conclusion
To sum up, try all of these tools and services and see which ones are best for you. Maybe you will discover that your brand is better marketed visually and start creating engaging and interesting videos. These are the essentials that will get you to the top.
The article provides a comprehensive overview of the key essentials for effective social media marketing, covering topics such as audience research, content planning, platform selection, and performance tracking. However, some of the tips are quite basic and could benefit from more specific and actionable advice.