I love social media and all the opportunities (and fun) it brings. And because I love to share the love, and my mission is to make a difference (one starfish at a time), here are my favourite social media tools.
Freebie Alert!
Most of these tools have both free and paid versions, so you can start with the free option and see how it works for you Then upgrade if you think it’s necessary. It’s sort of like trying a cupcake before buying the whole cake.
Hint, if you’re a small business, a lot of the time you won’t need to upgrade.
Disclaimer: we are not affiliated with these tools, we just love them.
Cupcake #1: Canva
We’ve mentioned Canva before, in Nine free things to help you with your marketing, so hopefully you have already discovered it.
Canva helps you create beautiful, fun, standout images for your social media posts. You can create Facebook posts, Instagram posts, blog banners, social media page banners, infographics and more. The reason it’s one of our favourites is because there are so many templates, photos, icons and more all set up for you to use. And the copy this design option means you can create posts etc that are consistent with your branding.
Also Canva has options to animate your social media templates. How cool is that!!!
As with most tools, there’s a free version and a paid version. We use the paid version, but for most small businesses the free version should be all you need.
Cupcake #2: Bit.ly
Bit.ly is such a cool little tool. It turns those ugly, long, chunky url links into something short and funky. And it gives you information on how many people click on the link, where your traffic comes from and when people clicked.
So you might have something like https://starfishm.com.au/three-reasons-to-use-email-marketing/ and turn it into http://bit.ly/emailisdabomb.
Again, Bit.ly has a free version and a paid version. We think you'll only need the free version (we do).
Cupcake #3: Later
Later is a scheduling tool. It saves us a bucketload of time. While predominantly an Instagram scheduling tool, you can also use it for Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, X (formerly known as Twitter) and LinkedIn.
We love it because there’s a visual content calendar, so you can see how your posts will look like on your Instagram feed. And you can schedule to stories as well as your feed. And, with scheduling to your feed there’s no manual approval required at the time of posting (although there still is with stories).
Later also gives you some good analytics to help you find the best time to post and understand how your content is performing.
And finally, it has Linkin.bio (although you may need the paid plan to access it). Linkin.bio lets you link individual Instagram posts to websites, and you can add multiple links in one Instagram post. Pretty cool, huh.
Cupcake #4: Facebook Scheduling
While we’re on scheduling, if Facebook is the only social media platform you are using for your business then you really can’t go past their scheduling tool.
It’s easy peasy to use and means you can save time by creating all your business page posts for the week (or month) and scheduling them rather than having to post them individually at the time you want them to appear.
Bonus cupcakes
And just because I love to share the love and the cupcakes, here’s a couple of the other social media tools I use:
- Missinglettr. A tool that turns your blog content into 12 months of social media posts. Good for sharing your content on Facebook, LinkedIn and your Google Business Page (and other platforms too).
- All the free stock image sites. Refer to number 8 of our Nine free things to help you with your marketing.
So there you go. My favourite social media tools – ones that allow you to have your cake and eat it too.
I'd love to know what your favourite social media tools are. Do you use any of these? Are there others that you prefer?
And if you need help with your social media let me know. I'd love to help you.
