When it comes to social media marketing, small businesses usually don’t know how to best leverage social media platforms for their marketing goals. A lack of focus and misinformation tends to be the issue, especially due to the massive amount of resources out there that all claim to be the best practices.
Startups are incredibly conscious when it comes to investing time. With time being so valuable, social media is commonly on a lower priority as the outcomes and purpose of SMM aren’t always clear for new businesses.
To save time and ensure that your online efforts are not wasted, we have compiled a list of social media marketing tools specifically for small businesses.
But why is social media marketing important in the first place?
How social media marketing impacts small businesses
According to Statista, over 90% of businesses use social media for marketing purposes. If you don’t understand how to effectively use social media, you will quickly fall behind your competition.
Here are some of the few benefits that you can achieve when using social media marketing:
- Online presence: You can build your online presence through a large social media following.
- Brand awareness: By posting social media content, more people would be exposed to your brand and be familiar with your market offering.
- Credibility/Authority: Customers often check a business’ social media account to see whether they are popular and well-received by others.
- Engagement/Community Management: As a platform, social media allows your business to engage and support your customers.
- Low cost: Social Media activities can all be done organically without paying for advertising, making it an attractive option for small businesses with a budget.
- Promotional platform: Social Media can be used to post content that promotes your services/products to your followers.
- Targetting: Through the use of hashtags and engaging with specific accounts, you can target the niches that are relevant to your business.
- Traffic: If you link to your website on your social media accounts, you will potentially experience increased traffic, which can boost your SEO ranking and leads.
Social media marketing is a must when marketing online. To help you grow and manage your online presence, here are our top tools.
Top Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
1. HootSuite
Hootsuite automated social media tool that allows you to schedule and publish content across your different channels. It is a popular tool among digital marketers, due to it being intuitive to use and allows you to access a large range of social media platforms.
Link: https://hootsuite.com
2. Unsplash
Unsplash is a great resource for free to use stock images that can be used when making content and whatever your business needs images for. The images are high-quality and they offer a broad variety.
Link: https://unsplash.com
3. Canva
An incredibly useful online graphic design tool that allows anyone to create aesthetic content with ease. There are premade templates and resources that you use for free.
Link: https://www.canva.com
4. Hashtagsforlikes
This website helps identify which hashtags are the most popular for a certain topic. Hashtags are incredibly significant when trying to target potential customers that might be interested in what your business is offering.
Link: https://www.hashtagsforlikes.co
5. HubSpot
If you’re a digital marketer, chances are that you have worked with HubSpot before. They are simply unmatched when it comes to tools relating to inbound marketing, customer relationship management, and many more marketing activities.
Link: https://www.hubspot.com
6. Google Trends
This is Google’s official site that analyses which search terms are the most popular across different regions. Use this tool to target popular topics that you can make content around.
Link: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
7. Analytics
This isn’t a specific tool, but for most social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, there are native analytics dashboards. These dashboards show analytics relating to your content, followers and their behaviour. Make sure to pay attention to this data, as you can directly measure how effective your marketing activities are.
Conclusion
As a small business, social media marketing is often approached without fully understanding the best practices or how impactful it can be.
To keep it simple, rely on these specific tools to help you be more productive and manage your campaigns effectively.
Additionally, you need to be aware that it is necessary to have a solid strategy and quality content for any of these tools to be useful for you.
Social media marketing tools are also particularly important when scaling your business. Having streamlined automated processes will allow you to increase your online activities with ease.
If you want some to talk to us about social media marketing or want some expert help, check out our services.
