Social Media Tools For Business 2016

Are you looking to streamline your social marketing efforts in 2016?

Is social media eating up most of your day at the office even though you use publishing tools like HootSuite or Tweetdeck? Your business needs your time on social media but more importantly, your business needs your time on the front lines.

Are you are still struggling with photoshop to come up with cool visuals or are you having trouble engaging your audience?

These can be frustrating times, especially if you are attempting the daunting task of social media by yourself.

Luckily, it’s 2016 and you have access to more social tools than ever before for anything from creating quick videos, to cool graphics to analytics. With that said, it also can be an intimidating for the right tools for your business.

That’s why we’ve prepared this super short list that we swear by and use everyday in our social marketing efforts. (these are the only ones you really need) Best part is, they are user friendly and can shed more light on a problem than an LED flashlight.

1. Canva
   
   Not a photoshop guru? Have a hard time putting together engaging and unique images for your social accounts. Then you’ve just met your new best friend. Canva is like the app version of photoshop with all of the tools you need and none of the ones you don’t.
   
   It makes editing photos, creating highly appealing images and even infographics. With a template based interface, you can get professional, formatted looking visuals for social media and going in just a few minutes and the best part is, everything is already sized correctly for each platform.
   
   
   
   
   
   

2. Buffer & Hootsuite
   
   Buffer is an awesome tool for scheduling created and curated content and also makes it easy to share others work with an integrated share to buffer button once installed on a browser.
   
   You can also use Buffer for alerts on anything that goes on within your social community and your platform. Buffer also has it’s own integrated image creating app called Pablo that is half decent but I don’t recommend it.
   
   If you are familiar with HootSuite but haven’t integrated into your social publishing efforts, you need too. You can use it to schedule posts and also monitor your social conversations and engagement from one single dashboard. This is probably more user friendly of the two meaning you don’t have to tinker with it too much before use, it’s pretty straight forward.
   
   A good example of the Buffer dashboard from Jeff Bullas..
   
   
   
   

3. Brand24
   
   A relatively new tool on reputation management, Brand24 provides the user with information on what is being said about you and your brand in real time. It not only makes it easier to ensure you keep engaged with your audience, but it also gives you an idea on potential sales opportunities. Not only that, but you can use this tool to get awesome insight on your competition. Using Brand24 is pretty simple, with a structured search mechanism being the forefront of its usability.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   

4. Edgar
   
   Sometimes you post awesome content and it doesn’t get the response you thought it might have or it was highly successful and you want to save that content and use it again. Meet Edgar. Edgar helps solve that content dilemma by putting your content into a categorial system and makes the task of hunting down that awesome blog post a breeze. Your audience may have a better shot at seeing your content this time around.
   
   Curating content has become amazingly popular on social media and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s relevant. Curating is simply taking a slew of amazing content within your niche or community from influencers or not and creating your own unique content for your audience.
   
   
   
   
   
   

5. Sprout Social
   
   Sprout makes analytics easy with a simple dashboard interface displaying everything you need to see on a daily basis. They run real time reports on any metric you want to track and are especially helpful in determining your target audience. If you are doing a lot of paid advertising on either Facebook or Instagram, to put it quite simply, you need Sprout. 
   
   Sprout is also one of the best all in one publishing, scheduling and team building engagement platform for social media on the market. It’s a bit pricy at $59/month but at the end of the day, you’ll be glad you invested in it. If you get one of these tools for social media, this is the one I would recommend. 
   
   Hopefully these help you out on your search for more time being spent in real life other than the digital world.