With billions of people from around the world using social media to share information, make connections and build businesses, for a business that knows nothing about it, it can seem quite overwhelming. Used correctly, with a strategic approach, social media can bring huge success to your business. Think about it – Glossier, Pretty Little Thing, Netflix, and Depop all found popularity with social media, and with that, increased sales.
Let’s face it, your business needs a social media presence. Whether it’s a large corporate company or a small online business. Social media is essential to your business marketing plan, to drive growth, generate sales and raise brand awareness. But, social media consumes a lot of valuable time, especially when you’re running a busy business, already wearing many hats and focusing on different areas. So I don’t think I need to keep banging on about how important social media is for your business, let’s just skip to the good bits.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Social Media Managers have a tonne of apps that can help them out with content creation, that they don’t want you to know about. Lucky for you, you landed in the right place, and we’ll share the apps that can make your life easier by doing the following:
- Saves time
- Streamlined
- Helps with research
- Integrated across other apps
If you’re a social media manager, content creator, or small business owner, these apps are guaranteed to streamline your workload.
Answer The Public
Let’s start right at the beginning. Research.
It can be difficult to research content ideas when creating a social plan. You could be posting up to 31 times a month, how do you keep generating fresh ideas? The answer is Answer The Public. They describe themselves as “an untapped goldmine of content ideas”, and I completely agree.
Answer The Public is a search listening tool, it listens into autocomplete search engines like Google, then presents every useful phrase and the question people are asking around your keyword. It’s a brilliant insight tool that you can use to plan not only blog topics but social media topics too. As it uses data from Google, you can answer the questions that your customers are asking, and it allows you to keep your finger firmly on the pulse.
Chat GPT
The artificial chatbot, Chat GPT developed by OpenAI, burst onto the scene in November 2022 and is a natural language processing tool powered by AI that allows you to have human-like conversations. Chat GPT can assist you with many things, such as emails, essays, code, and more importantly, social media marketing.
So, let’s allow Chat GPT itself to explain the benefits of using the software to assist with your social media marketing.
Disclaimer: This section is written by Chat GPT.
“Using Chat GPT for social media marketing can bring several benefits to businesses. First and foremost, it can save time and resources by automating the content creation process. With its ability to generate human-like text, businesses can create engaging and personalized content at scale without having to invest significant time and effort into writing it themselves. Chat GPT can also help businesses improve their engagement rates by generating content that resonates with their target audience. Additionally, it can assist businesses in generating new ideas for social media campaigns or content themes. By using Chat GPT, businesses can streamline their social media marketing efforts and focus on other important aspects of their business.”
Okay, back to a human!
Here are some productive ways you can use Chat GPT, without having all of your work written by AI.
- Generate content calendars
- Find relevant hashtags
- Find relevant influencers
- Product promotion ideas
Google Sheets
If you aren’t using Google Sheets for content planning and strategising, then you have been living under a rock. Social media content plays a crucial role in achieving your business goals and connecting with your audience. By keeping a content plan in Google Sheets, you’ll be able to strategically map out your content calendar, outline key brand pillars, and keep a target audience profile all within one sheet. Essentially, your entire social media marketing strategy can be kept within this one document. Nice and concise, and the rest of your team can collaboratively also work on the document.
“Fail to plan, plan to fail”
But I get it, starting a document from scratch can be a little overwhelming, especially when planning an entire strategy. So, we’ve made it easy for you. Click here or on the image for a FREE social media strategy template.
All you have to do is make a copy of the document and add it to your own Google Drive.
Capcut
There’s no avoiding the current rise of video content within social media, we’ve actually written an entire blog about how the algorithm is adapting for video here. If you have never worked with video before, the thought of learning yet another skill might be a tad overwhelming.
You’ve probably only ever heard of more advanced video software editing such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe Rush or Final Cut Pro, but, Capcut is probably one of the industry’s best-kept secrets. Accessible through a browser, desktop or phone app, Capcut is a user-friendly, social media platform-focused video editing app that supports all the TikTok/Instagram Reels features such as:
- Speed changes
- Stickers
- Filters
- Effects
- Music
- Text -to-speech
And most importantly, it’s completely free!
Here at Pixel Kicks, we’ve been utilising Capcut for social media videos for a while now, and we all find it easy, accessible and efficient.
Canva
I’m pretty sure you’ve probably heard of Canva by now. But I couldn’t just leave it out as it’s such an important tool for social media content creation, and for good reason. It offers a user-friendly platform that provides access to a variety of design elements, customisable templates, and collaboration features, making it an essential tool for creating visually appealing and engaging social media content.
Even if you don’t have any design experience under your belt, you can easily use Canva’s pre-made templates, which are specifically designed for channels such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, to create high-quality designs with minimal effort. Gone are the days of attempting to use Illustrator or Photoshop, it’s become quick and easy with Canva. When you’re running a business busy or a social media department, this is a definite quality of life improvement.
Milanote
There are a lot of great visual workspace platforms available right now, and they’re great for creativity, collaboration and productivity. But, I’ve found that Milanote works particularly well if you’re working on creatives and social ad campaigns.
Milanote is you guessed it, a visual workspace which allows you to begin with a complete canvas or insert templates to get you started. You can drag multiple different widgets onto your board such as:
- Text cards
- Bullet points
- Images
- To-do lists
- Links
- Videos
- Audio
- Colour palettes
And so much more! You can even draw over anything on the board and insert arrows to emphasise a particular part of the document.
As I’ve already mentioned, we find it incredibly useful for planning our paid social media ads. It allows us to insert the client brief, conduct our audience research, create shot lists, mood boards, and add plenty of ideas, all in one place. The best thing about it is that our team can collaborate easily, ultimately streamlining our workflow.
DashThis
Whether you are a social media manager or a small business owner, monthly reporting and data tracking is an essential part of social media marketing, as it provides valuable insights and information that can be used to improve campaigns and optimise strategies.
With all of the analytical tools which are native to their own platform, reporting can become quite the mess, especially when you’re trying to pull everything together for a client, or just evaluating your own work. DashThis is a reporting tool that pulls analytical data from multiple sources and combines it all into one integrated dashboard. It’s an effective and efficient way of presenting reports and visualising data for social media marketing campaigns.
Having all the data pulled through each month automatically is life-changing, and can save you so much time. Being able to customise the report and select different widgets to showcase specific matric and KIPs, enables the report to be tailored to each individual client. Which, of course, we know that no campaign is one size fits all.
Now that you’ve discovered all of the industry’s secret apps, I hope that you can take some of these away and apply them to your own workflow to make your life easier. But, if you’re still struggling with the amount of work, why not take a look at our social media services?
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