It may seem like there’s nothing more to a successful social media strategy than simply creating and sharing an abundance of content. However, there’s a lot more to it than it seems. In reality, building a successful social media presence requires a combination of a thoughtful strategy and the best social media management tools.
Elements of a Social Media Strategy for Small Business
Before investing in social media management software, you’ll need to outline a strategy. With that in mind, here are some templates to organize your social media processes, clarify your goals, and choose the ideal social media management tools for each activity.
Audience Targeting and Research
It’s important to take the right approach, but before deciding what that is, you must clearly define who you’re trying to reach. Identify your target customer and conduct audience research to learn as much as possible about them. This will inform the rest of your social media strategy.
Best Social Media Management Tools for Targeting and Research
You must know your audience, including their values, habits, demographic information, and where they spend time online. The best tools for this aren’t necessarily tied to any specific social media platform. Instead, you can focus on research and targeting tools such as:
- Survey Monkey: Audience polls and surveys
- Your CRM Platform: Pull demographics and other data from your customer info
- Make My Persona: A proprietary tool for developing an audience persona
With tools like these and some of your own legwork, you can create customer profiles that you can target on social media.
Selecting Social Media Platforms
Audience research will give you a plethora of information about your target customers’ online behavior. Still, you may want to dial things in a bit more. These social media management tools will give you deeper insights into the platforms you are considering so you can identify the ones that best align with your social media marketing goals.
Free Social Media Management Tools for Competitive Analysis
If your social media marketing goals are competitive, these tools are ideal for performing competitive analysis and determining where you’ll have the biggest impact with your social platform marketing.
Sociality.io is a competitive research tool that generates a significant amount of data about your competitors across multiple social media platforms. It includes data from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Information can be downloaded in multiple formats or integrated with business analysis tools via APIs.
Brandwatch offers a side-by-side comparison of your brand and its competitors, reporting on reputation and audience sentiment. This information helps narrow down which platforms to choose and what your strategy should focus on.
Social Media Management Software for Keyword Trends Analysis
These tools are great for researching keywords and trends that are relevant to your brand and niche:
Hootsuite is a social media listening tool that you can use to gather insights about your products, industry, and any keywords you choose. It works with Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, so you should be able to use this platform to quickly identify the high-performing channels in your industry.
Keyhole tracks keywords and hashtags across a wide variety of niches. You can also use the tools to keep tabs on industry influencers you might want to partner with.
Align Goals and Channels
Once it’s time to further focus your campaigns, these tools will help you track the specific goals you’ve set for each platform:
Social Media Management Software for Goals and KPIs
Facebook Pixel is most commonly known as a tool for tracking Facebook ad campaigns. However, you can also use it for tracking audience data even if you aren’t currently running paid ads. All you have to do is create Pixel code for your website and landing pages to track responses to your organic Facebook campaigns.
Sendible is a social media monitoring tool that gives insights into several metrics across every major social platform. It’s particularly useful in tracking engagement and audience metrics. It’s not an option if your budget is limited to free social media management tools only, but there is a limited free trial available.
Content Planning and Strategy
When consistent content creation is the backbone of a successful social media presence, you’ll need collaborative planning tools to ensure business continuity. These content planning and strategy tools will help you with the logistical side of social media content:
Best Social Media Management Tools for Content
Monday.com isn’t specifically for social media content planning, but many social media managers rely on it nonetheless. You can use it to assign tasks to content team members, schedule social media postings, and outline plans for future content.
Concured is an AI tool that analyzes your content and suggests topics that allow you to improve on what you are offering your audience. It also compares your content to your competitors and provides insights into how you can rank higher.
Content Creation and Collaboration
Ultimately, every social media campaign includes creating the right content to share with your target audience. These tools make it easier for your teams to create engaging content to achieve your social media marketing goals:
Social Media Management Software and Creation Tools
Google Docs is a great platform for creating content, editing, and sharing with others. Multiple team members can contribute to and provide feedback on a single piece of content.
Canva is a content creation tool that makes the creative process more accessible to people who aren’t artists or designers. It has a selection of templates, layouts, and design elements that significantly expedite the creative process.
Adobe Express is a subscription-based tool for creating and editing videos for social media campaigns. A free plan is available, or users can opt for the paid plan, which gives access to advanced features and makes it easier to incorporate brand elements.
Audience Management and Engagement
If people aren’t engaging with your content, chances are they aren’t following your pages, going to your website, or purchasing your projects. With that being said, it isn’t enough to simply earn attention on social media. You have to stay on top of that engagement using powerful tools. If you’re on a budget, plenty of free social media management tools are available for you to use.
The following tools allow you to track engagement and create a better user experience on your social media channels:
Best Social Media Management Tools for Audience Management
Juicer is a social media moderation and aggregation tool that allows you to moderate the comments on your social media pages. You can also tell it to automate the process and handle a lot of the moderation itself. It also curates posts and comments from your various social media accounts to a single social media feed on your website.
ICUC is a social media moderation tool that works on several platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Brands use this tool to manage and moderate text comments, images, and videos. In addition to protecting your brand from potentially harmful content, ICUC is also a scalable solution for community building.
Social Media Analytics
There are helpful analytics tools for every social media platform. Many of these are free social media management tools that are native to each platform, but there are also several third-party tools that are worth considering.
Free Social Media Management Tools for Analytics
Google Analytics is often used to track SEO and content marketing performance. However, the tool also provides insights into which social media platforms your website traffic comes from.
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management and analytics tool that displays analytics from various sources in one dashboard. This makes it especially useful for campaigns that involve multiple platforms.
Facebook and Instagram Insights are tools provided by Meta that allow business users to track audience engagement, reach, demographics, and other data.
Combining the Best Social Media Management Tools with Expertise
The social media marketing experts at Galactic Fed combine proven processes with a custom-curated approach for every client. Learn more about what we’ve done to help our clients achieve their goals, or check out our free marketing plan.
