Do You Have the Time to Manage Your Social Media?
If you run a small business, one thing that you probably don’t have a lot of is time.
You don’t want to spend a huge amount of time searching for the best marketing tools to achieve your goals and then learning how to use them, all while trying to juggle everything else.
In this blog, we have listed the main tools we would recommend to most small businesses. Of course, every situation is different, so we do recommend tailoring a system that works for you.
Hootsuite – Manage all your social media in one place
Kicking it off we have Hootsuite. Undoubtedly the most used marketing tool for social media, with hundreds of thousands of active users, daily.
This all-in-one platform allows you to curate and schedule content. Measure your social ROI, run social media ads, and create images specific to platform sizing.
We love that we are able to monitor multiple accounts and keywords, bulk-schedule social media posts and connect with over 35 social networks.
Explore Hootsuite for yourself.
Canva – Create professional-looking images for all your social platforms
Canva has been well used by school students all the way through to thriving businesses. You can use Canva to create completely unique images from scratch or to improve photos that you already have. It lets you create brochures, flyers, posters, graphics, invitations, calendars, videos, presentations, cards, infographics, labels, letterheads, CV’s, menus and much more. With a huge library of free stock images, you can start designing everything you want in one place.
The platform includes an impressive number of editing and layout tools as well as everything from image cropping to blur effects to background removal. Objects can be easily arranged and layered in a project, and it’s straightforward to add extras like text captions or fun stickers on top of whatever you’re doing.
Why not, get creative this lockdown with Canva?
Pinetools – A whole host of online tools to enhance your photos
Pinetools is another great desktop tool you can use to split your images, which is perfect for your Instagram feed if you are wanting to upload more than one image, with a continuous background image. They offer a tonne of editing options and gives you all the control in determining exactly what your image will look like to match it to your Instagram theme.
Create an Instagram feed to be jealous of this year!
Kapwing – Where content creation happens
Kapwing is an online image, video, and GIF editing platform, with a huge library of tools you can pretty much do everything you need in one spot. Enhance your digital storytelling with their online tools, such as meme maker, subtitles, trimmer, looper, filters, and many more.
Discover how to create viral memes with Kapwing.
Lightroom – Amazing photos. Anywhere you are.
Lightroom is a firm favourite for us at Simpsons, as part of the Creative Cloud family it has a host of features that allows you to create, edit, organise, store and share your photos across any device.
Their easy-to-use tools like sliders and presets lets you create photos that look just the way you want.
Delve into the Creative Cloud family and have a photo album anyone would be envious of.
Unfold – Create beautiful stories with templates
Unfold is a story editor that offers hundreds of award-winning Instagram story templates from collections like Film and Scrapbook. It allows you to curate collage layouts for Instagram Stories, may it be video, boomerang or image, with easy-to-use designs, fonts and tools to take your content to the next level.
“Social media is this constant battle to stand out from the crowd. Unfold allows people to create and express themselves in a way that’s simple and intuitive and we think that is the reason people have responded so well.”
Take your Instagram Stories to new heights with Unfold.
So, there you have it 6 social media marketing tools for small businesses. If you think we have missed any obvious ones off the list, then please leave them in the comments below.