Latest Trends in Small Business Social Media Tools

Everybody seems to be on the Internet or in the Internet cloud and they are there doing everything from conversing, to shopping and, most importantly, it is to these mediums that clients use to find businesses, products, and services that they need. This is why many small businesses have come around to recognizing the power of social media for the advertising and marketing of their brand/business. Nowadays, almost every small business has a website. Many more have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a YouTube account, perhaps a company blog, or even an Instagram account. Now, with all of the social media sites, it seems like you need a crew just to manage them and make sure your message is clearly recognizable, relevant, and thought-provoking. What is happening now that is trending is that small businesses with a social media presence are looking to capitalize on their social media presence for their smallest or largest marketing campaigns. This is why a second phase of social media marketing strategy usage is occurring to address all the potential multi-tasking nightmares of properly managing your social media platforms. Many are turning to social media management tools, programs, and apps to make their marketing campaigns more efficient, cost-effective, productive, and designed to reach as many potential clients as possible.
With the positive effects of social media marketing becoming more and more apparent, most small businesses have started working on a social media marketing strategy.
One of the main aims of social media marketing is to stay relevant to your audience. This might be harder for small businesses as they have more to juggle, in terms of handling tasks. Social media tools and apps can help reduce the stress of multi-tasking and keep your social media activities consistent. Below are social media tools for small business to help make your life as a social media marketer easier. This month’s Business Corner editorial provides an overview on some of the latest social medial tools for small businesses.

RiteTag
With a social media management toolkit like RiteTag, managing you social media across multiple websites becomes a breeze. This app is best for your Twitter account because it enhances all of your tweets with just one click. After you have created a tweet, just click on your RiteTag program and you can instantly add images, hash tags, GIFs, and even customized call to action messages(CTAs), those specifically designed to maximize marketing messages, across all of your shared links. Another neat feature of RiteTag is that it lets you manage and analyze tweet hash tags with a variety of features. For example, it will display recommended hash tags, which ones are being the most used, what are the hottest trending hash tags at any given moment; it also lets you know which ones are not that well-liked.

DrumUp
More and more, content curation is becoming a must for small businesses working with social media. Content is any and all information that can be posted. Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing cataloging, and managing information relevant to a particular topic of interest. Think of what a museum curator might do and you can get an idea. They are responsible for knowing everything there is about an exhibit (particular topic of interest) and knowing about every artifact, which created it, how it is cataloged, what it is related to, etc. It can be a daunting task and there are services that provide content curation if you are dealing with a lot of content. Even if just the amount for you, a tool like DrumUp is fantastic for managing your social media presence on many accounts. The app is equipped with a number of cool features and functions. For one, DrumUP will send right to your dashboard the latest content based on your list of keywords. It also provides content recommendations, feeds, scheduling, and re-posting. There is a feature that lets you add feeds from which to get more content. This becomes useful in marketing campaigns because it will make you sound knowledgeable if you were able to post content mixed in with relevant content from other sources. Then you can schedule posts with a single click or plan it out for your specific needs. When you are doing your scheduling, DrumUp will even suggest a list of relevant and appropriate hash tags that you can use in conjunction with your posts, again to maximize your company’s social media presence. You can even set it on autopilot and it will repost your content over a given time period so that your queue is never without content to post. That means you are constantly getting your brand out there.

Canva
As everyone knows, a picture speaks a thousand words and that’s why images and visuals are an excellent way to attract someone to your social media and your special CTAs. The problem is, most small business owners and managers don’t have nearly enough time in the day to be sitting down to create detailed eye-catching visuals—of your logo for example. This is exactly what Canva is perfect for. It’s one of easiest apps out there that makes designing creative high quality images to accompany your social media posts. It is there to help you easily transform your ideas and concepts into visuals and images. With Canva, you can create images with quotes, conversation bubbles, custom icons, stickers, among others. It has some more powerful tools also like features that will enhance your images and visuals even further because it comes equipped with an amazing set of filter and effects, along with the ability to rotate, straighten out, crop, and resize images just like you do with the Paint function on MSWord. And, what’s more, just in case you are too busy to start from scratch, it comes loaded with a ton of customizable layouts that can be changed to suit any occasion.
These are just a few of the latest social media trends. Look for more descriptions of others in the future.