5 Must-Have Tools to Rock Content and Save Tons of Time

When people say social media is a free marketing resource, they are lying to you. Our cafe team has revamped our social media channel strategy and I’ll be the first to tell you that hours and hours of your valuable time go into curating and creating the content your audience needs, wants, and loves.

And that is not free!

But there are tools available to help manage your social media marketing, and we’re sharing the top five from our toolbox and how we use them.

1. Find relevant content and resources using Feedly.com

We use Feedly to curate content relevant for small business owners. Feedly allows you to follow blogs that serve your target industry. Our list includes blogs with website design tips, SEO, marketing, content development, networking, and sales. Every morning, we review all the goodies created by our list and then populate our social media channels with the content that supports each channel’s goals.

Best Practice Tip: Don’t share the same identical content across social media channels. Determine a goal for each channel and find content that supports that goal.

2. Use Evernote.com to build a story board for your company blog

Constructing a blog post with rich content and information takes time. It’s important to optimize the blog post for search engines while providing content that will drive our audience to action. Some of the content we find on Feedly will be used to support our upcoming blog posts. We use Evernote to store articles and information that will help us write the blog post. It keeps it everything organized and in one place, and allows us to share it with all team members.

Best Practice Tip: Blogs have many valuable uses for a business and for your audience. Write for your audience and then edit for search engines.

3. Use tools like ManageFlitter.com to strategically grow your social media following

Manage Flitter has become a very valuable tool for our office and our clients. For a nominal monthly fee, you can use the tool to target your ideal audience for Twitter and grow your channel. The tool allows for “bulk” actions, such as following a group of your target audience versus one at a time. It’s a real time saver.

Here are a few tools to help with your other social media channels:

For Facebook: Agorapulse Barometer or LikeAlyzer
For Google+: CircleCount
For Pinterest: Tailwind
For Instagram:  Hashtagify.me or Ritetag.com

4. Use PicMonkey.com to create image-based content and grab your audience’s attention

The squeaky wheel gets the grease and visual content gets the clicks. Use Picmonkey to improve your social media and website content. In minutes, you can create eye-catching visual content enhanced with text overlays.

5. Use Google’s Keyword Planner to optimize content

Reach your ideal audience by tweaking your content to include the words and phrases they are searching for online.

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