For businesses seeking to boost their social media presence on a budget, 2015 was an excellent year. A whole new menu of amazing tools has been released, and some older ones have been reimagined. Here are 15 of the best social media tools for businesses on a budget.
- Bit.ly
Use Bit.ly to shorten even the longest URLs into short, manageable web addresses. Short URLs are necessary to succeed on microblogging sites like Twitter, which regulate the number of characters that are permitted per post.
- Canva
Often referred to as “Photoshop for people who can’t use Photoshop,” Canva enables users to create stunning visual content, even if they aren’t natural photographers or designers.
- Easl.ly
Like Canva, Easl.ly also turns laymen into design experts — only Easl.ly focuses solely on infographics. Infographics are the workhorses of visual social marketing, and Easl.ly has helped more than 800,000 users create more than 1 million infographics.
- Shopify Gift Certificate Template
Use the Shopify gift certificate template to create the uniform, brand-consistent gift certificates to distribute during contests, giveaways and other promotions you hold on social media.
- Agorapulse Facebook Timeline Contest Organizer
Once you’ve got your gift certificates ready, you’ll find that organizing and hosting contests is a tedious, time-consuming organizational headache — one that Agorapulse Facebook Timeline Contest Organizer can make much more appealing.
- Tagboard
Once relegated to only the Twitter landscape, hashtags now play a role in most social media formats. Tagboard lets users find hashtag keywords and campaigns no matter the network on which they appear. Just type in the term, and Tagboard searches for hashtags on any social media sites where they are relevant.
- Coschedule Headline Analyzer
The Coschedule Headline Analyzer will do exactly what its name implies — analyze your headlines for emotional appeal, length, keyword content and so on. Headlines are incredibly important, even on non-article content, and Coschedule Headline Analyzer backs up even good writers.
- ManageFlitter
ManageFlitter helps social media teams become faster and more efficient on Twitter. Social media teams can manage multiple accounts at the same time, sort followers and see who unfollowed any account.
- If This Then That
One of the best automation tools for use on social media, IFTTT enables users to set “triggers” to automatically engage some social activity. For example, you could set a trigger that If someone follows you on Twitter, then IFTTT follows them back for you.
- Mention
Sort of like Google Alerts for social media, Mention is a tool that scours the Internet for keywords, names or other online indicators. The difference is, it looks through social media networks instead of blogs and web pages.
- Viraltag
Viraltag lets users push their visual content to several platforms at the same time in an effort to drive traffic.
- Schedugram
Schedugram was designed with Instagram marketing in mind. It features web uploading, scheduling, and multiple-account management to the image-based platform.
- Edgar
Edgar is a newer tool that helps marketers recycle older posts by categorizing those former posts, scheduling them to be reposted on different networks and keeping all posts in a library database for re-use.
Not exactly a social-media tool, Pocket is the best by far of the saving/organizing manager class of applications on the market. It is, therefore, a power generator for content ideas. When you see a web page, an image, a video or literally anything else online, you simply save it to Pocket, tag it if you choose and revisit it later when you’re drumming up ideas for content.
- Linkfluence
Linkfluence provides both social media monitoring and social media research for businesses, brands and agencies alike.
2015 was an amazing year for social media tools. A wide range of new tools have been revealed, and several established tools have been improved. Most don’t require much investment and many others are altogether free.
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