As odd as it may sound, if you’re a business owner in 2021, you absolutely need to be
active on social media. From getting more sales to building up your brand loyalty, social
media can do a lot for your online presence- and if this COVID-19 pandemic has taught
us anything about our businesses, it’s that we need to be prepared to move everything
completely online.

The catch is that online marketing can be incredibly demanding. Social media
marketing alone is a full-time job if done correctly. Whether you’re deciding to take on
the task of social media yourself, or you are outsourcing it to a digital marketing team
*cough cough* Dalex Design *cough cough*, you will want to make sure that the correct
tools are being used.

Online marketing tools are essential to keeping things organized and saving you time.
Nowadays there are a plethora of options for you to choose from, and many tools do the
exact same thing. It’s a bit of an oversaturated market, but we’ve compiled a list of our
favorite tools to use for all of your social media marketing needs. Let’s get into it, and
talk about what we love about each platform.

LastPass

First, let’s address the elephant in the room. The infamous password. How much time
have you wasted on just trying to remember your password? How many times have you
had to do a password reset for an account you own? It can be a very frustrating
experience.

This is where LastPass comes into play. LastPass is a password manager and
password generator which stores your personal information in a secure vault. From your
LastPass vault, you can store passwords and logins, generate stronger passwords for
your accounts, track personal information in notes, and much more.
All you have to do is remember your one single LastPass master password, and
LastPass will autofill web browser and app logins for you.

Buffer

One way businesses are able to produce so much content so often is by automating
everything. Buffer is a great tool for managing and automating all of your social media
accounts. If you are posting to multiple networks on a regular basis, there’s no reason
why you should be posting manually.

Buffer will help you create a calendar and share content on different social media
networks, all at once. The beautiful thing is you can add as many posts as you want to
in a queue, or you can schedule them for bulk upload. Additionally, they have an inbuilt
tool for analyzing the optimal times for posting. They do this by comparing the
engagement that you received from previous posts.

The only catch is that it works only for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you are
looking to add LinkedIn, you will need to use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite or, our
personal favorite, Sprout Social. This brings us to our next point.

Sprout Social

Similar to Buffer, Sprout Social is a one-stop location where you can manage
everything that is associated with your social media marketing. This includes content
curation, publishing, scheduling, and of course reporting and analytics.
Sprout social supports Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even
Pinterest. In addition to scheduling and automation, other features of Sprout Social
include:

Smart Inbox: Their smart inbox collects all messages sent by people to your social
accounts. The inbox monitoring tools also allow you to keep track of what people are
saying about your industry and your brand. They monitor for news items based on
hashtags, keywords, locations, and more.

Team Collaboration Tools: This feature allows you to split up the work involved with
managing your social profiles. You and your teammates can also get live activity
updates so nobody will accidentally work on something that’s already complete.
Analytics: Sprout Social comes with a wonderful and full reporting suit. With this tool,
you’ll get message-level insights, access to custom URL tracking, analytics based on
tags you’ve used, and more.

Bitly

Small but mighty. There’s nothing worse than running out of room on a social platform
like Twitter because your link is too long. Not to mention, long links are just eyesores
and nobody enjoys seeing them in posts. The solution? Bitly. With Bitly you can create,
shorten, and share links. It also lets you track clicks, see site referrals, and locate which
geographical area where the most clicks are coming from.

Influential

Influencers are everywhere. It’s no secret that they are slowly but surely taking over
the world. With a massive influencer increase over the past few years, businesses
began to ask how they could capitalize on the opportunity to network with them. Hence
the term “influencer marketing” was born.

The trouble with influencer marketing is that if it’s not done correctly, it can be a total
waste of time. However, if it is done the right way, it can be a big benefit to your
business. Just as with everything else, there are now third-party tools that will help
ensure you’re successful with these marketing efforts.

One tool that you can use for influencer marketing is Influential. Think of this tool as
basically a matchmaker. It is currently the leading platform that helps businesses
connect with influencers on various social media platforms. Now, we’re sure that you’re
delighted at the thought of not having to manually seek out influencers all the time – and
we know you’re curious as to the secret behind this miracle tool.

It’s all about AI. Influential uses AI to thoroughly research your profile. With the help of
transparent data and machine learning, it studies and learns about your followers. The
main goal of this research is to learn about your targeted audience. From there, it pairs
you with the best influencers that will work well with your brand.

Canva

Have you ever looked at another business’s social media feed and wondered how
they create such visually compelling content for their brand? You may think that they’re
all Photoshop and graphic designer pros, but think again! Chances are they’re using a
little website called Canva.

Canva is an online graphic design tool, and it’s making the task of creating custom
graphics a whole lot easier. It’s easily accessible by phone or tablet and is completely
user-friendly. It makes it simple and provides the tools necessary for you to create
aesthetically pleasing graphics to share on social media. Here are just some of the
features we love about Canva:

Stock Images: In the free version of Canva alone, you have an image library that
consists of more than 200,000 images for you to use. If you want to upgrade to Canva
Pro (which is very affordable) that number then jumps from 200,000+ to over 60 million
images, illustrations, & icons. With this amount of professional stock images at hand,
there’s no limit to what you can do!

If you prefer to use your own video or image, no problem! Canva has an easy and quick
upload process.

All the Fonts: Want to add some text to your graphic? No problem! With Canva you
have several fonts to choose from. Just like with images, if your brand has your own
fonts you'd like to use that Canva doesn't already offer, you can upload them directly for
use as well.

Templates: This is one of our favorite features of Canva. If you still feel as though you
don’t have the design skills to create something from scratch, there are hundreds of
templates you can use. You can quickly create professional-looking content in just
minutes! While these templates come predesigned, you can still make them your own
by changing the colors, images, fonts, and beyond.

Not only can you use Canva to spice up your social media content, but you can also
use it to design things like invitations, presentations, posters, brochures, flyers,
business cards, merch, and much more.

Hashtag Generator

Oh, the infamous hashtag. They’re all over the place. But what in the world are they,
actually? An easy way to think of hashtags is as a way to connect social media content
to a specific topic, event, theme or conversation. Hashtags also make it easier to
discover posts around those specific topics. In short, hashtags aggregate all social
media content with that same hashtag.

By including hashtags in your posts, you are taking part in a conversation happening
on that social media platform. Most importantly, a hashtag will make your posts visible
in that conversation. Hashtags can help lead to greater engagement, boosting your
brand’s social media engagement through comments, likes, shares, followers.

All of this to say, using hashtags is an art. We’re not just being dramatic about this.
You need to know which hashtags to use for which posts so that you can increase your
reach, but if you use too many you will look spammy. For example, using more than six
hashtags on Instagram posts can decrease your engagement.

This is where Hashtag generators come into the picture. A hashtag generator like
Ingramer is a free (typically) service that will help you find the best hashtags to use.
WIth a hashtag generator, you manually enter a keyword, keyphrase, location, or
hashtag, and the tool helps you find common or popular hashtags. With others, you can
upload a link or an image, and the AI algorithm will suggest hashtags based on the
image or link content. Pretty cool, right?

As we said earlier, this list goes on and on. These are just a few of our favorite tools
that we use on a regular basis. We know it can be overwhelming, but you’re on the right
track! Considering you’re reading this, it means that you are serious about making your
brand shine a little more brightly.

If you would rather let us worry about your social media so you can spend more time
handling your business, our dedicated social media team would love to work with you!
Learn more at www.dalexdesigngroup.com/social-media-management