Social media tools for business

I last wrote about the importance of social media tools for business a couple of years ago, with some tips on best tools for scheduling social media content. Social media is now even more important when building awareness and business relationships with prospects, stakeholders and influencers.

Most of the apps we wrote about in 2016 are still of value today although this fast-changing market means not all are still in their 2016 incarnation. Here are some more that you may find useful and that are equally useful in both your personal and professional life:

• ContentStudio: The 'discovery' side of this is a great complement to social media management tools. You can use it to track content, key words and issues. It includes written content but also videos and images. It can be a great source of market intelligence. You can use the other elements of the tool to plan and post social media content.
• Although we mentioned Hootsuite and Buffer in our previous article, these are still valuable tools to have in your toolkit. Hootsuite is a well-known and reliable tool for social media management. Using Hootsuite you can monitor, post and schedule social media but it also lets you keep track of people mentioning a company, topics and influencers. You can set up separate feeds for items but can also move tweeters (like influencers) to a single news feed, so can more easily see and respond to posts, useful as tweets can easily get lost in the sheer volume that’s generated on Twitter. Buffer has a simpler interface than Hootsuite and includes a really easy way to generate images with text that can be used to enhance your social media. Called Pablo, it includes copyright-free images and includes pre-set sizes for social media such as Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

Some of the key social media tools also have in-built features which can be useful:

• Facebook business pages: Schedule and publish events (and you can even add a co-host if you’re working with another organisation); set up offers or discounts; list your job vacancies; and schedule or backdate posts.
• Twitter:  Add up to 4 images to your tweets  - and tag up to 10 people; create a poll on Twitter with up to 4 choices of answer, and set the duration of the poll.

Don’t forget about YouTube:

• The second biggest search engine tool behind Google, the amount and breadth of YouTube content continues to increase exponentially. A quick search on “small business” or “marketing” will give you a feel for the type of information that’s available on there. This is a great environment for placing educational or thought-leadership material – content which is genuinely useful.

At TheAnswer Ltd, we often work with clients on their social media campaigns. We are experts in employing sites and applications especially for social media and can offer advice on using platforms such as Hootsuite, or if you would prefer, manage the whole process for you.

Contact us

If you'd like to talk to us about your marketing plans, just contact us on catherine.dhanjal@theanswer.ltd or call us on 0800 998 7990 or 0794 166 9925.