About 62% of all businesses in the US have under five employees, and 76% of those small business owners consider marketing to be a major challenge. Most small business owners are hard-pressed for manpower, making it tough for them to dedicate resources to marketing. However, social media has been identified as a potent marketing channel for businesses of all sizes and the need to be present on social is more strong now than before.
With mobile apps, small business owners and social media marketers can manage social media marketing without much effort. Here is a list of super useful apps to simplify your social media marketing efforts.
LastPass
LastPass means last password, or the last password that someone using the app will ever need to recall, because the app stores passwords and lets users access their accounts without having to type them every single time. As social media marketers or business owners, you may use multiple apps and websites that require accounts with passwords. LastPass is a great way to save the time wasted on logging in and out of multiple accounts.
LastPass has a mobile version with complete features that integrates its web app, so you can create new accounts on your desktop and access them on your mobile device with ease. You do this by creating a LastPass account, downloading the app on all your devices and logging into the app on each of them. Once you have, LastPass will store passwords across your devices and allow you convenient access from all of them.
LastPass is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
DrumUp
With DrumUp, you can source fresh content relevant to your company to post on a daily basis. The content curation and social scheduling software helps you manage your complete social media presence with ease. You begin by signing up with one of your social media pages (Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter). Once on the software, you can add the rest of your social media pages.
Next, you set your keyword preferences. You can also add the RSS feeds of you favorite news and industry content sites. DrumUp’s machine learning algorithm sources content based on these settings and suggests them to you in a “Recommendations” feed. From the feed you can schedule content to be posted at a specific date and time across multiple social media accounts. You can also let the app choose a schedule time for you, or store the articles that you like in a content library for future use. Additionally, the software lets you create custom posts with images, emojis and GIFs, and tracks all of your posts to report engagement and click-through data. You can use DrumUp’s mobile app to quickly schedule some posts or review recommended content when you find time in between tasks.
DrumUp is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Pikiz
Social media feeds are very crowded. About 500 million tweets are sent out each day, and for your content to stand-out and catch your followers’ attention, you need eye-catching images.
Pikiz is a simple graphic editing software that lets you create images for social media in a short span of time. You begin by installing the app and creating an account. Once you have, you can choose from a list of canvas sizes depending on which social media platform you intend to post your content on. The software has a collection of stock images and basic templates that you can work with. You can choose an image for your background and add text or an overlay with ease. You can also choose from a host of interesting fonts and coloring options to make your image more engaging. The editing options are very simple and intuitive. You can create an engaging social media graphic in a matter of a few minutes. Considering that the stock photos on the app look great, you don’t need to be a great designer to create graphics on the app.
Post creating the image, you can either download it or directly share from the software to your social media accounts.
Pikiz is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Quora
Some of the best marketing tactics that I have come across have been on Quora. The Q&A community has over 100 million active users and is just the right place to find useful information that you can use to amp-up your social media marketing efforts. The best part about Quora is that people share their actual experience, and the answers (the good ones) are very specific and usually actionable. Once you have viewed a few questions on a topic or submitted some of your own, the app intuitively begins to display Q&As related to your interests on your feed.
You can also use Quora to answer questions and build your influence in your industry. In other words, you can be your company’s influencer. To find the right questions, you need to state your area of expertise in your profile details. Once you have, the app will find and deliver questions in that area to you. It is good to put some effort into making your answers precise and useful. Doing that will earn you “up-votes” and followers on Quora. Where relevant, you can suggest your product/service to people who are seeking them and in the process earn visibility fro your company.
Quora is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Brand24
One of the ways to destroy you social media brand, is by miscalculating it. Your brand is what people say it is, and unless you are monitoring their words closely, you are miscalculating your brand. For instance, McDonald’s introduced the “#McDStories” hashtag in 2012 to encourage customers to talk about their “McD experience”. Instead, the brand got stories about weight-loss that people observed by avoiding McD food, and rumors about body parts being found in their facilities.
Your audience will talk about you brand, whether you want them to or not, and there is very little that you can do to control everything that they say. The best way to manage your brand name, is by monitoring it and responding swiftly. Social media marketing tools like Brand24 help with that process. You can set up “Projects” on Brand24, each with one keyword/theme that you want to monitor. The obvious keyword to monitor is your brand name. Once you have created that project, the tool will alert you of mentions as they happen, or on a daily or weekly report. The real-time alerts that the tool offers are useful because you can thank people for positive mentions and attend to the negative ones before they cause any real damage. Brand24 also has a sentiment analysis feature that sorts mentions based on the emotions associated with them, so you can deal with the more pressing ones first.
Brand24 is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Trello
Businesses create a ton of content on a daily basis – email pitches, blog posts and the lot. Trello lets you manage your content in one place.
The Trello dashboard has columns with cards in them. You can label columns from the left of your dashboard to the right to represent stages of a process. Each column can have cards that represent parts of each stage. For instance, the first column can be where your team members submit tasks, the second can be where you assign approved tasks to different team members, the third column can be for submission of content and the fourth for completed tasks. Every card can hold attachments in multiple formats. Trello also lets you add deadlines to the cards and view completion status at a glance.
The cards can be moved between columns as the tasks progress. To communicate with your teammates, you can tag them and leave comments for them in the cards.
Trello is a super efficient way to manage tasks in a business, especially when you’re on the go. It is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
IFTTT
Most small business marketers can’t set aside the time necessary to create content for multiple social media platforms. IFTTT can help bridge that gap.
IFTTT stands for “If this, then that”. It is an app where you can create recipes for automated content posting. For instance, you can instruct the app to post your Facebook statuses to Twitter, or send you an email each time your favorite publication posts something. There are quite a few diverse recipes on the app that integrate different social media apps and tools. You can create a set of recipes to cover your content marketing efforts on social media.
You begin by choosing a “Trigger channel”, a “Trigger action” and an “Action channel”. You then need to fill out the trigger details to make you recipe specific. Say your trigger channel is Twitter, you trigger action could be “New mention of you” and your action channel can be email. So when someone mentions you on Twitter, you will get an email. Several social media marketers have listed their recipes in articles. All you have to do is find such articles on a top publication sites, and copy the recipes to the dot, and you’ll instantly and effortlessly have a powerful social media marketing plan.
IFTTT is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
MailChimp
If you have client/subscriber email addresses stored on a CRM or excel sheet, you can upload them on MailChimp to create an automated email campaign. Email campaigns can help nurture new leads and prompt existing customers to reorder.
MailChimp’s email marketing software comes with pre-designed templates and a drag and drop editor that makes creating emails easy. After you have created your email campaign you can schedule it to go out to the email list that you have uploaded. You can also use the app to segment your email list and target customers with content targeted at them. The software also offers analytics to track the effectiveness of your campaign.
MailChimp’s mobile app is useful in managing your email lists and campaigns on the go. You can set up the campaigns on your desktop and then monitor them conveniently from your mobile device.
MailChimp is available as a web app and mobile app for Android and iOS devices.
Google Analytics
You can’t optimize how you spend resources available to you unless you know what is and isn’t working for you. Google Analytics is a completely free tool that gives you useful insights, like where your traffic is coming from. The tool has traffic sources broken down to each social media platform. You can use the data to identify and boost the platform that is driving you the most traffic. For instance, if most of your traffic is coming from Facebook, you will be able to verify that fact and allocate more resources to the platform.
You can also add UTM parameters to social media posts to identify the more successful ones. Google’s URL builder can help you create unique UTMs for each of your posts. Once you have created them and set-up conversion tracking for your social media posts, you will be able to track your posts’ success. The mobile version of Google Analytics can be a quick means of tracking the progress of your social media activity when on the go.
You can access your Google Analytics dashboard on Android and iOS devices.
Wrapping up
Social media marketing can be time-consuming without the right apps to help. With the right mix of apps, you can achieve your marketing goals without spending excessive amounts of time on implementation.
Keywords:
- Social media marketers/social media management – based on the title that you choose
- Mobile apps
- Social media marketing
- Small business
Author bio:
Disha Dinesh is a content writer at Godot Media, a leading content creation firm. Her interests include social media and content marketing for small businesses.
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