Everyone seems to be talking about Facebook, twitter, instagram and yes, google+ these days. There isn’t a lot of talk, though, about how to actually use these beyond sharing photos of red cups and salads in mason jars. I’m here to help you with that. Let’s see if we can turn those likes, hearts (favorites for you Twitter veterans) into real customers.
Canva
is an amazing tool that's easy to use and free to start. Canva uses an easy drag-and-drop editor to create professional looking social media posts in just a few clicks. Use Canva's drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design consistently stunning graphics. No more boring graphics or terrible images used on your facebook or instagram posts.
Use it to quickly add text and borders and special graphics. You can upgrade and pay individually for custom graphics and artwork.
Hootsuite
is my favorite tool. Mainly, because its free to start with. Hootsuite combines all of your social media accounts into one dashboard. You can make one post and then it will distribute it out to your various social media channels. One dashboard can also give you a great analytics view, showing your recent followers, engagement reporting and overall performance. They also offer mobile apps that allow you to track this on the go. From both their web based login and their mobile app, you can schedule posts as well, which can be a huge time saver. Just schedule 5 posts on a Sunday night, and it will post them throughout the week for you. (Take care of point number one)
If you’ve never heard of this, you really need to get this. Now.
IFTTT
stands for “If This Then That”. They offer recipes, but digital recipes. It also can work with hardware devices that support the service. It’s also free. (See a trend here?) So one of the great things I use IFTTT for is posting something to instagram, but then having it post same content to Twitter, but placing an actual image on Twitter verses the “pic.instagram…” url that someone then has to click. If you’re a business using both Instagram and Twitter, please do not tap the share to twitter and have a weblink for me to click. Use IFTTT and it will natively post the photo for you!
If you have any social media accounts, chances are you have a website as well. I hope you are at least using
Google Analytics
for your website and already have it set up. Did you know that Google analytics has a section called “Acquisition” that will show you your top traffic sources? Chances are social media will be a large percentage of your traffic. Social media is great to display quick updates and some basic profile information, but customers still like to browse your “virtual showroom”. Find out if social media is driving enough traffic to your website with Google analytics
Mailchimp
in itself isn't a social media tool. It’s core product is an email marketing tool, which is free for the first 2,000 email addresses. However, mail chimp has great integrations with many social media accounts and website forms. For instance, you can setup a tab on your Facebook page called “Newsletter”, and when a user clicks on that tab, it will have a mail chimp signup form which will allow you to collect email addresses that you can then use for email marketing.
The most important social media tool is the one you use. These are all great, and free I might add. Breeze Digital Media can help you setup Google Analytics, Mailchimp and even a Hootsuite account. Get in touch with us by visiting
breezedigitalmedia.com/contact