Name: NI Parcels - Courier Services
Brand: NI Parcels
Rating: 4.9 (3451 reviews)

Implementing a strong social media strategy can be difficult and time-consuming.

The reason any small business should implement a social media strategy is simple – to drive traffic to their business website and drive brand awareness. It’s understandable that it can sometimes feel impossible to stay on top of it all.

Thankfully, there are plenty of social media tools out there to make everything much easier. From scheduling posts, to gaining insights into your audience and more: here are 6 useful tools that will make social media marketing easy.

1. Analytics

Analytics is available in many shapes and sizes across a variation of social media platforms, for example – Facebook insights, Google Analytics and Twitter Analytics. When used appropriately, analytics can be a goldmine of information allowing you to see what is working in your marketing and where you have room to improve – which is undeniably important for a small business growing their online audience.

You will be able to see yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily summaries (varying across each platform) allowing you to draw up comparisons across any given periods. Analyzing this data allows you to experiment on your social media marketing techniques – particularly in the beginning, it’s all about trial and error and finding out what works for you and your brand. Paying attention to analytics is the best way to know first hand whether your marketing is working.

2. Buffer

Buffer is a content publishing platform, letting you publish and schedule content to your social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and recently, Pinterest. Being able to schedule your social media content saves you from worrying about being on hand all day to publish content when you can be getting on with other tasks.

Buffer also features analytics for each of your individual scheduled tweets. This allows you to monitor how well your scheduling strategy is doing, as you will be able to see how many users viewed the tweet at that set time of the day, how many favourited the tweet, how many retweeted, how many replied and how many clicked on any links that may have been included – so you can keep a close eye on it and experiment with your scheduling to see what kind of strategy works best for you.

3. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a fantastic way to stay on top of all of the activity going on on Twitter. Twitter is a very fast paced social media platform and information can be easily missed on your feed – it’s sometimes near impossible to keep up with it all. TweetDeck allows you to catch all of the activity in one place. You can make individual columns for your general feed, your mentions, lists and more. This tool is particularly useful if you are monitoring hashtags – such as hashtags relevant to your brand or Twitter chat hashtags. TweetDeck will also allow for scheduling, so you’ll have another separate column for your scheduled tweets.

4. Canva and PicMonkey

Canva and PicMonkey are the perfect tools to use for creating eye-catching images and micro-content to publish to your social media profiles. Visual posts generally receive a higher level of engagement – as much as 18% for click-through rates, 89% more favourites and 150% more retweets – so with these two tools combined you can effortlessly put together your own visually appealing images that speak to your brand. Both tools are user-friednly and easy to navigate. With Canva having set dimensions for Twitter, Facebook ads and more, as well as pre-made text formats, it’s pretty quick when you get the hang of it.

PicMonkey gives you all of the features you need for editing images without the complicated layouts. It essentially removes the need for a small business to make the investment in Photoshop.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is the perfect brainstorming tool for when you are thinking of creating content for your brand. The most challenging thing with creating content is trying to work out what kind of content your audience perceives as valuable and how you can go about creating it for your own brand. BuzzSumo allows you to analyze the best performing content for any niche. You can search for the topic you want to create content around and see whether these topics interest your audience, as it shows you sharing stats across different social media platforms. This will also allow you to identify what kind of content does best on which platform – so you will have a good idea of where your focus should be.

6. Social Bro

Social Bro gives you an in-depth analysis into your Twitter community in order to drive your Twitter strategy more efficiently. Social Bro has numerous features on offer, such as best times to tweet reports (which you can send straight to Buffer), hashtag monitoring, insights, analysis of competitors, it allows you to see who your new followers are, who your inactive followers are, who is not following you back and much more. The strategic use of Social Bro can optimize your Twitter usage in many more ways than what is available on Twitter alone.

Reviews

As well as social media is it good to show potential customer that you are trust worthy online, a good way to do with is collect reviews. You can do with Facebook if you are a local business or with platforms like TrustPlot. My Baggage our sister company collects reviews regularly and it now has over 2,000. This helps buyers trust you especially when ordering online.