“The answer to the question how to use Social Media remains in the name itself – being social; listen and respond; civilize the brand.”
The first social media platform that got widely recognized was Six Degrees, and it was in the year 1997. The site was simple; it allowed users to upload pictures and become friends with others. Two years later, the first few blogging sites came into existence, and we all know how that turned out to be. By early 2000s, websites like MySpace and LinkedIn were already gaining momentum. It was then in 2005 that YouTube came into being and further changed the social media scenario. Revolutionizing the social media circuit was Facebook and Twitter, which got introduced to the world in 2006. And nothing has been the same on this planet again. (Source: Small Biz Trends)
The term “social media marketing” started gaining more prominence as years began to pass by. Be it a quirky teenager or a CEO; all feel the significance of social media. The presence of social media is ubiquitous. It has been there. More than 22 years, and it is only getting stronger with every passing day.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you are already aware of the same. We live in an era where technology dominates our everyday life.
Suiting Social Media Marketing to Business
While many of us retort to social media for leisurely purposes, businesses have changed the climate by conducting marketing campaigns to reach out to their target audience.
A study conducted by the Content Marketing Institute highlighted that 83% of B2B marketers use various social media channels to carry out extensive marketing campaigns. On an average, one B2B company uses six social media channels including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
All of this confirms the vitality of social media marketing in the modern world. All of this confirms the importance of social media marketing in the business circuit.
Amidst all the growth and improvement and raging popularity, there is a lingering question that still needs an answer.
When does a product/service become a brand?
Businesses can use social media marketing to boost the reach of their product/service to the target audience, however, not using these platforms aptly will make every effort go futile. Social media is a vast platform and needs to be navigated right. To ensure that your product/service is becoming a brand, you need to put in considerable efforts.
When your product/service can communicate with the target customers effectively and efficiently, a product/service becomes brand. And as it has been proven a million times, a compelling social media story about a brand can engage the targeted customers.
Social media marketing helps you humanize communications and build a relationship. Real ones!
Also Read: 12 Months – 12 Ways to Make Your Attractive Website in 2019
The 7 Free Social Media Marketing Tools You Need
While building valuable relationships with potential customers is essential, it is also pivotal to measure the same. Every campaign launched on social media platforms should be measured. Not only to analyze the success (or failure) of the same but to also allow you to make effective changes to the same for the future.
Only by understanding the performance of the various social media marketing campaigns relating to products/services, can you push the same to become a brand.
But, how do you measure your performance on social media marketing?
For your ease, we have listed down the seven best free social media marketing tools that ultimately boost your sales and enhance your business.
1. Buffer: Useful Campaign Management Tool
Buffer is an incredibly useful tool for campaign management and social media marketing, for it comes with a combination of several free and paid services. Buffer lets you schedule virtually any kind of social media post on any platform you can think of.
It efficiently lets you design the posts and the time you want to upload it on social media platforms. Importantly it features an analytics dashboard for all the posts within specific timeframes allowing you to evaluate your post performance and engagement. It also helps you to access advanced analytics.
There are more than 1,000,000 people using Buffer, which combines both individuals and businesses. Buffer also has 16, 204 paying customers. Till date, 87,798,149 posts have been shared on social media using Buffer.
This validates the use of the tool, which makes managing social media campaigns easier.
2. Sprout Social: Best Customer Relationship Management Tool
Sprout is an all-in-one social – media marketing tool that includes paid plans offering a wide range of services to businesses. Sprout Social is exceptionally beneficial and comes with a set of essential features relating to social media marketing. The features include:
i. Scheduling capabilities
ii. Analytics platform
iii. Social listening functions
iv. Multi-level access for tight coordination between teams.
Their social analytics is unique and are geared toward engagement tracking. It helps the managers to foster and nurture relationships through instant replies to comments, queries, and requests.
Sprout Social is extremely popular and makes customer management easy for businesses.
3. Feedly: Simple Content Aggregator
Feedly is considered as a feed reader for social media marketing campaigns. It offers an easy and simple way to aggregate your information in one particular place, thus making it convenient for RSS feed readers to quickly scan headlines and complete stories at one glance from a variety of different providers.
Content ideation is made comfortable using Feedly. Using this application, you can find inspiration and discover good content to share. According to your reading preferences, it shows a feed of content from across the internet.
The niche of businesses using Feedly is growing at a slow yet steady pace. At the moment, there are 60,000 Pro subscribers in Feedly.
4. Canva: Visual Content Creator
For all social media marketers who have difficulty wrapping their head around the creation of visual content like graphic designs, Canva has your back. Majority of social media users rely heavily on visual content due to its essential outreach. For social media marketing campaigns, using visual materials is extremely important. Since it ensures to make your content more engaging, relying on the same is common.
Canva allows you to create beautiful designs. From Facebook posts to infographics, Instagram shares to videos templates, Canva has a wide range of designing opportunities available.
Canvas can help you create eye-catching graphics. And the best of it all, you don’t need elaborate software skills to use this tool either.
Spread over 179 countries with 10 million users, Canva is one of the most useful social media marketing tools for optimizing your content and social media marketing campaigns.
Also Read: The Next Big Thing in Digital Marketing
5. Bitly: URL Shortening Tool
Sharing URLs on your social media campaigns is a must, especially if you want to make your business look credible. However, on platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, a chunky URL can be a hassle. And with all the word limits, you don’t want the URL to steal the spotlight and be the central character. This is where Bitly comes to your aid. It helps you shorten chunky URLs and allows you to share the same on various social media platforms without worrying about the word limit.
Notably, the tool also allows you to check the performance of every URL on a single platform instead of dividing your attention between different sources, which saves your time, and energy. Both free and premium plans are available and can be opted for the fantastic services.
Bitly has shortened almost 37 million URLs as of 2018.
6. Hootsuite: Integrates Different Social Network
Hootsuite is regarded as one of the best social media marketing tools available to the experts out there. It is incredibly useful for SMM campaigns as it allows you to view multiple streams at once and carefully monitor your customers’ views.
Using Hootsuite, you can post updates, schedule the same, read responses and give feedbacks. You can also view metrics and statistics, giving you a fair idea about the performance of every single post. Reputed companies make use of this social media marketing application for a better and more organized marketing approach.
Some advantages of Hootsuite include:
i. Monitoring multiple social media platforms in one place
ii. Allows you to schedule a post in advance
iii. Marketers can easily view analytics data
iv. It enables you to share information easily
v. Using Hootsuite, you can manage customer service efficiently on social media
Hootsuite has over 16 million users spread across 175 countries across the globe.
7. SocialOomph: Best Twitter Management Platform
SocialOomph is ideal for those businesses whose primary target audience are all from Twitter. It mostly leans towards Twitter management and offers services like scheduling tweets, tracking relevant keywords, shortening URLs and allowing you to manage five twitter accounts at once. They also provide a wide variety of unique management features for multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
This is a best budget-friendly tool for automation of your social media platforms especially Twitter. It is worth using to enhance your social media marketing and boost your business conversion rates.
Though there are both paid and free versions available, the services available become limits for the latter.
Also Read: 3 Social Media Platforms Ideal for Business
To Conclude
Social media is one of the cost-efficient digital marketing platforms available at this moment, which significantly increases your business visibility. It helps in brand awareness and enhances your sales. Social media marketing indeed converts your product/service into a brand.
These social media marketing tools allow you to keep track of everything that is taking place in this otherwise vast landscape. So, start implementing the same for your brand campaigns and witness success like never before!
If you want to know more about the above-mentioned social media marketing tools, subscribe to our newsletter today. To seek expert help on social media marketing services, contact us at WebCaptive.