13 Unknown Tools to manage your brand’s social media on your own

As a local business owner, you need to manage so many parts of the business on your own. You need to manage everything from customer calls to production to delivery and in many cases location logistics, staff, packaging etc.

In this situation, it becomes hard for you to manage marketing, especially social media marketing. And due to the present circumstances, social media has become the undisputed No.1 marketing platform for brands in 2020 (Check out my article on why now is the best time to market on social media). So, as a local business missing out on social media is just not an option at this stage.

 So, I’m sharing 13 unknown free tools that you can use every day to manage your social media like a pro to make your work so much easier.

 Look out for the secret tool used by all successful Instagram pages. You will start using it immediately!

 But before we start, I’ll like to share a basic rule for social media management that is overlooked by local brand owners most of the time: Always, and I mean always plan your management on these three steps:

●    Plan - Make an exact plan for your page based on your goals, USPs, budget, campaign ideas and results of previous campaigns

●    Create - Create your content according to the plan

●    Improve - Add extra elements to your campaign to make it look professional and stand out from the rest. You can also use this step to analyze the results of your campaign to see where you can improve on in the next phase.

 Most businesses skip the plan step and many times never go through the improve step. So, please never skip these steps and always go in this order. To make things easier I have divided the tools into these three important steps. If you already know any of these tools, do scroll down and read the rest, I’m sure you will have a takeaway from this article that will help you immensely.  

Plan

Facebook/Instagram Creator Studio

Facebook released Creator Studio in 2018 to make the process of scheduling your posts so much easier and also included amazing insights into your page and your followers. Creator Studio works for both Facebook and Instagram and it is extremely useful if you plan your content once a month. You can schedule your complete campaign once and the Studio will automatically take care of posting for the entire month (or even longer).

 Creator Studio works best on its computer site but also has a mobile application. It also allows you to go live on your laptop with some cool live features to push you to use it. This is a must-use tool if you’re struggling to make time for social media as it is made specifically to make the work of people like you easy.

 Don’t worry! The link to all the tools is available at the end of the article!

HubSpot

When you go online in search of a Social Media Management tool you will find too many of them all with costly subscriptions promising to transform your social media presence and will use big words about their AI and analytics and all that which will leave you confused. Believe me when I say for local businesses HubSpot is the best.

 To start, it has a free subscription for up to 3 social media accounts, which is perfect for small businesses. It allows you to manage and post in multiple social media platforms at the same time which is very useful when you have accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook etc. and need to manage all of them. You can comment and reply to comments on your posts and manage Messages from all your accounts in one place.

 You can even search through your messages using keywords and assign different people to handle different parts of your account or for different queries based on keywords from Messages. And to be fair they have some amazing analytics on your posts for a software that is free. All in all, you get a wonderful tool which will handle all your social media accounts in one place for no cost and will give you enough analytics to help you analyze and improve your content.

 If you need any help with creating your account and going about the software feel free to get in touch with me and I will help you out!

 Bonus Point: Check out MobileMonkey for some cool Messenger automated chatbots and Messenger based ads. Messenger marketing is being underused presently but gives you an extremely high success rate!

 Both links are added at the end of the article!

Create

Canva

Canva is a dream come true for business people and marketers who do not know to design using software such as Photoshop, Indesign, Corel Draw etc. Canva is an online, free design tool with thousands of templates for all kinds of possible design requirements from pitch decks to Facebook posts.

 All you have to do is make a free account and choose a template of what you want to design such as a Facebook cover, Instagram story etc. The template is going to already be in the exact required size. When you have selected your template, you will find an array of resources from icons to illustrations to images which you can search and pull and drop on to your design. You can change the colours, add shapes and cool fonts and make your creative look efficient. Canva will save you a ton of time and money and make your page look professional. 

 Links to all the tools will be available at the end of the article!

Unsplash

Unsplash is a free tool for high-quality photographs that are copyright free and credit free for professional use. I personally love the quality of the photos available on this site. You can find photos relevant for your designs and it can be of great help to turn a normal looking creative into a cool, branded looking one.

 It also does away with the need to have photoshoots at times as you might find relevant pictures already available.

 If you do not find a relevant picture you can also look at alternatives: Pexels and Pixabay which include other resources such as illustrations and graphic vectors too.

 Bonus Tip: If you want a Google Images alternative which gives you free transparent png images(logos, borders, effects, etc) check out PNGKey!

The Noun Project

The Noun Project is a free online icons inventory which has something for everyone. When you design or create content for social media you will realize you need transparent icons to make your creative look better and they are the hardest to find.

 The Noun Project does not just have icons for everything but different variations for everything you search for, which makes it easy for you to find the exact icon you want.

 The Noun Project has a premium subscription but you can download a free version with the same quality but you will need to credit the designer in your final design.

 Even if you do not use icons in your design yet just check out the website and you will see why they are useful.

 Bonus Tip: If you already have an illustration, icon or picture and want to remove the background to make it transparent use removebg. It is extremely accurate and works like a charm.

 All links at the end of the article!

YouTube Audio Library

YouTube Audio Library is a free tool by YouTube which allows you to download copyright free and credit free music and sound effects.

YouTube has made it very easy for us to get good quality music and effects for our videos. You can search according to genre, mood, instrument and duration which is extremely useful.

The reason why I have added this is for you to get some kickass music for your videos without worrying about copyright pulling your video down but there’s one more really good reason why.

You can search through the sound effects and find an appealing one and use it as your brand jingle. Just a two-second sound that shows up when your logo comes up or at the end of all your videos will increase the recall ability of your customers. Audio branding is underutilized but extremely effective. And you can get a free jingle without having to invest in musicians and studio space.

Spark AR

Have you gone through Instagram and seen brands use cool Instagram Story Filters to increase engagement and brand awareness and wished you could too? Well, you can with Facebook’s very own Spark AR software!

Facebook released an Augmented Reality Software, Spark AR for free to help marketers and designers directly make AR filters an upload it into Instagram to be used by users all over the world.

This software also has a free library of 3D elements which will help you create your own filter(very very useful!). It is not very easy to do but is learnable with some effort. You can download the software on your laptop but you will require a decent processor for it to run smoothly.

 AR Filters are expected to become huge so the faster you adapt to this, the better it is for your business. Do contact me at any time if you need help while learning how to use it and I will be more than willing to guide you through it. 

GIPHY

I’m going to teach you guys a way to make your custom gifs available on Instagram for the world to use! This, when used well, can be a very effective brand awareness strategy.

 All you have to do is make a free account on GIPHY and apply to become a creator channel or a brand channel. Once you get accepted you will be verified and will be ready to make gifs for Instagram. The verification process will not take very long and is very easy to do!

 Get your GIF designed using a video making software or an online gif maker and upload it into GIPHY. And in just a few days your gif will be available on Instagram and in every other outlet, GIPHY is available at for everyone to use! Use it on your story a few times to get the word out and watch how it increases engagement and awareness!

 Don’t think twice about contacting me if you need help at any point!

PlaceIt

PlaceIt is a must-use tool for apparel companies that cannot afford photoshoots and/or print their apparel on-demand. PlaceIt gives you professional-looking photo and video templates of models posing with apparel. All you have to do is upload your design and choose the colour of your apparel and you will get your product on a model and ready to post on social media!

 PlaceIt is a paid tool but if you are in this industry this will save you a ton of money and will give you good returns in the long term. The subscriptions are very affordable too!

 All links at the end of the article!

Analyze

Gbox

GBox is arguably the biggest secret of many successful Instagram pages and it is the biggest tool I will be showing you in this article!

 GBox calls itself the one-stop Insta toolkit and it is exactly that. Gbox is an app that offers you a tap.bio page which you would have seen on the bio of many famous pages. A tap.bio page gives you a page to put all your links into one place as you will have multiple things to show your customers but only one link allowed on your bio. It is very useful for many companies.

We have all struggled with the fact that Instagram captions do not divide into paragraphs which make our captions look shoddy and we end up using full stops to hide our hashtags lower down the caption. But now, Gbox has a space adder tool which allows you to make your post captions into proper paragraphs and use the enter button like it is supposed to be used. It has a video splitter and a grid cutter which splits your videos into equal parts to post and divides your picture/graphic into equal parts to get the perfect looking grid. It has some cool fonts to use for Instagram stories an automatic hashtag generator which generates hashtags based on your picture/graphic.

If you have a picture that is too big and will get cropped out when you post it you can upload it into the app and it will make a no-crop version which is ready to post! You can also make carousel cuts to your graphic/picture perfectly. They also give you an automatic repost tool directly from the Insta app and a Gbox keyboard to post multiple images on your story.

To top it all it also gives you some cool filters for your pictures.

 All of this for free! Free.

 All links will be added at the end of the article!

Fonts Keyboard

Have you seen people use cool fonts on their Instagram stories which are different from the standard few that Instagram gives us? I’m going to show you a convenient way for you to use them too!

Download the Fonts App from the Play Store (there are too many options on it, I will link the right one for you to download below) and it will automatically give you a keyboard which you can turn on by selecting Fonts on the ‘Change Keyboard’ option that will show up in your notification panel when you have the keyboard open on your Instagram story.

The keyboard will give you a string of fonts that you can choose from directly from your keyboard as you type on your Instagram story. I personally do not like this feature very much but if you use the right fonts for the right kind of posts it will make your stories look really great!

Bit.ly

Have you seen links that you get and find online usually read like this: bit.ly/somerandomcodehere? It looks neat and makes for a short shareable font. You can make your links like this too!

 Bit.ly is a service that allows shortening any link you want to share using their prefix bit.ly and then a random code. The cool thing that a lot of people do not know is that you can customize the random code after the slash too! You can use this option to make a cool custom link which can be shared and becomes easy to remember because of the universal usage of bit.ly!

 Start using this feature now to give that professional edge to your brand.

RapidTags

This is a very useful tool for Youtubers especially but can be used by Facebook users too. When you upload a video on YouTube it allows you to add unlimited tags which will determine what searches your video will show up on. Rapid tags automatically produce the best tags to add for your video based on your title.

 Just copy and paste your title onto this service and it will automatically produce the most relevant tags based on the analytics that it has which is pretty accurate and you can copy all of them at once and paste it into the tags column. Not only does it save you time but it also makes your tags more accurate and helps grow your account faster.

 If RapidTags is down you can use Keyword Keg as an alternative.

 And as I said earlier this can also be used for Facebook videos!

 Bonus Tip: To see the tags used by other youtubers on their videos use the VidIQ Chrome Plugin!

These are the 13 unknown tools that I really wanted to share with you guys. If you learnt at least two new tools today please comment on this post so I know I’m actually helping you out. And if it doesn't spoil your feed please consider sharing this article on your account so you can help me reach more people and try and give them value too!

 Drop-in your email ID here and I will send you my next articles: ‘How to know your social media manager is doing a good job?’ and ‘Mistakes local businesses are making on social media now!’

Check out my previous blog post about why this is the best time for local businesses to market on social media here. Do comment and let me know what else you want me to write on!

 My media service agency DamnSort Media has a special offer to help local businesses post covid-19. Check out our services and our offer if you have the time. I would love to work on your brand's social media.

All the links you need!

Facebook Creator Studio

Hubspot

Bonus Tip: MobileMonkey

Canva

Unsplash

Alternative: Pexels, Pixabay

Bouns Tip: PNGKey

The Noun Project

Bonus Tip: Removebg

YouTube Audio Library

Spark AR

PlaceIt

GIPHY

Gbox

Fonts

Bit.ly

RapidTags

Alternative: Keyword Keg

Bonus Tip: VidIQ