8 Social Media Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Social media marketing can be a struggle for many small businesses. They must split their time and resources between multiple social media accounts on top of balancing other marketing and business activities.

Thankfully, there are several social media management apps that can help small businesses simplify their social media efforts.

This article lists 8 social media marketing apps, instructions on how to effectively use them, and how to apply them to your social media marketing efforts in order to increase reach and engagement.

1. DrumUp

DrumUp is the ultimate content curation and social media publishing app that you can use to schedule content publication on your social media channels.

DrumUp offers keyword-based content curation and RSS feeds for you to find relevant content to share with your social audiences. 

Use the following instructions to set your content publishing schedule using DrumUp:

1. Set up your keywords and RSS feeds to curate fresh content relevant to your business. RSS feeds are web feeds that allow applications to access and display content. Using your blog's RSS feeds, you can automatically pull your blog's content into organized feeds within DrumUp, from which you can directly share to social media accounts.
2. Add all of your social media posts to labeled content libraries. A content library is essentially a folder where you can store your social media posts for easy reuse in the future. This folder can be used to store both past posts that you intend to reuse and drafts of posts that you wish to use in the future.
3. Use the “1-click schedule” or “auto-posting” features to schedule posts to multiple social media accounts attached to DrumUp at your desired frequency.

DrumUp keeps your social media accounts active, your fans engaged, and your social media marketing managed without much of a time investment.

2. TagBoard

Social listening is the ability to tune into the conversations on social media that present opportunities to earn new customers, create a favorable view of your brand, or earn extra exposure for your brand.

Edelman's Trust Barometer 2017 states that regular people are more influential on social media than companies or their employees.

Using social listening tools like TagBoard allow your company to identify social media advocates for your company, or users who mention or promote your brand using their own social media accounts.

Using social listening tools, you can monitor your desired key terms and topics and even curate user-generated content to use on your website, blog, or email marketing content.

Instructions for using TagBoard:

1. Set up keywords for TagBoard to monitor.
2. Determine which results to use as social media posts to inspire your community of customers and fans.

The best advocates today aren’t brand-related; they’re regular people from the audience – your customers and fans. Use tools like TagBoard to identify and leverage those users.

3. Canva

To make the most of your content assets, you need the ability to improvise, like quickly turning reviews into visual quotes or questions into engaging posts for your social accounts. Visuals are great for social media marketing because they engage users and convey important messages.

Canva is one of the best tools for creating visual content. The ease of use and stock visuals make improvisation effortless.

Using Canva, you can quickly place text over diverse image-based backdrops, based on your application and requirements. The wide range of canvas sizes the tool stocks also allow the images you create to be optimized for any use-case.

4. FAQFox

FAQFox is a content research tool that lets you search for questions mentioning words of your interest across multiple domains.

One way to create strong social content is to research questions and topics that interest your target audience.

Use FAQFox to run keyword research on websites and blogs popular with your target audience to get a sense of the questions that they are asking.

You can use this information to format your social media and blog content to address the concerns of that audience, making your content instantly more impactful.

5. ViralContentBee

The huge volume of content available to social audiences make being noticed near impossible without smart and thorough content distribution strategies. Just because you create exceptional content doesn't mean you will get the reach and engagement that you deserve.

ViralContentBee is a content distribution system that assists content creators in increasing exposure for their messages across social media.

The tool uses social networks and the principle of mutual benefits to distribute content. To increase exposure for your content, you simply have to share other users' content.

By sharing other peoples' content, you also get another great source for content curation, among the posts that other people share on the platform for distribution.

6. SimplyMeasured

Effective social media marketing is impossible without performance insights, because you can’t refine a strategy you can't measure.

SimplyMeasured is a social media analytics tool that offers free data reports of fan activity, demographics, and page engagement, which are useful in monitoring your social media marketing efforts.

Use SimplyMeasured’s reports to identify the performance of your content. Understanding your most effective content allows you to replicate its success and re-format your content to improve its effectiveness.

7. InkyBee

InkyBee is a relationship-building tool that helps you share relevant content with potential brand ambassadors.

To make a big impact on social media, you need to build relationships. Randomly sharing can only get you so far. You need an engaged community to build a huge customer base through your social media.

You can use InkyBee to find well-connected people in every niche and study their social media activity. With insights into their behavior, you can put your best foot-forward when initiating exchanges with them.

8. Cyfe

Cyfe is a customizable analytics dashboard that maintains an overview of your social media marketing efforts.

It can be easy to forget about the bigger picture when you focus daily social media tasks. For instance, many social media managers focus on follower and engagement metrics but fail to notice trends in fan feedback that can help transform their marketing.

Cyfe widgets help social media managers monitor different metrics on a single dashboard and identify trends using the overview.

Cyfe has a host of existing widget options, such as Facebook page overview and top posts to choose from when building your dashboard. With Cyfe, you can combine web, email, advertising, and social media reporting in graphical form in one place.

Use Social Media Management Apps to Improve Marketing Results

The right social media marketing apps can help a business manage social media marketing efficiently without the help of a social media agency. 

Social media managers can use these apps to schedule posts in advance, manage their content better, create better graphics, monitor the performance of their social media pages, and glean insights into what they can do to improve their social media marketing results.

Small businesses should use this list of apps to help transform their social media marketing.

About the Author

Disha Dinesh is Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media marketing trends. Her other interests include listening to progressive music and watching 90s sitcoms.