The five best social media marketing tools for small businesses

Whether you love it or hate it, social media marketing is around to stay.

With 3.04 billion active social media users worldwide, many businesses are taking advantage of these cost-effective marketing platforms to reach their target audience, increase traffic to their site and ultimately win new customers.

Despite its capabilities, social media marketing can be challenging to carry out amongst a variety of other marketing and core responsibilities. Add to this the fact that these platforms are ever-changing, and it can arguably be difficult to keep up with the demand that social media requires from businesses to reach audiences.

Since its advance, countless tools have been introduced into the social media world to support marketers and businesses in making the marketing process easier and more effective. With so many amazing tools out there, we have chosen just 5 of our favourites that will support you in getting the most out of social media marketing:

Hootsuite

The perfect way to ensure you are posting to social media consistently, scheduling your posts in advance using Hootsuite will not only reduce the amount of time you spend on this, but also bring all your social profiles onto one platform, streamlining your strategy and ensuring that even when you are out of the office, activity is ongoing.

Pexels

According to research, a tweet with an image will receive an astounding 150% more retweets than those without, and therefore each and every tweet should be accompanied by an engaging image. Sourcing an appropriate image can be tricky (and pricey), however Pexels provides a wealth of FREE stock images for you to use alongside your posts.

Canva

Not everybody has an experienced designer in house to turn images into engaging social visuals, but this is a key part of any successful social media strategy. Canva is a design tool that provides you with social image templates, with drag and drop features that allow you to easily create a beautiful social image or simple animation to share on your social platforms.

Buzzsumo

Of course, when sharing social media posts you want to ensure that it is relevant and interesting to your target audience. Buzzsumo is an ideal tool for sourcing trending topics and finding content that is being widely shared. This can subsequently inform the rest of your content strategy and, as the tool shows you content shared across platforms, you can easily decide which social media platform will bring you the highest engagement.

Analytics

Google Analytics is a vital source of information for your entire social media strategy, with a code added to your website, you can track your visitor’s interaction with your site. For social media users, this will highlight which platforms are performing the best, and where visitors go following a click through to your site. Most social platforms also provide their own analytics so that you can see even more stats on post engagement (likes, retweets, etc.).

So, there you have it, our top 5 tools for small business social media marketing. Are you getting the most out of your social media? We’d love to hear about your favourite social media tools on Twitter, get in touch today.