Recommended Resources
There are a lot of social media tools out there. It can be overwhelming searching for them and spending time learning them. So, I've pulled together some of my favourite online tools to save you time and help you succeed online.
Let's dive in!
Now let's dive in!
To help you, I've broken the resources down into three groups, depending on your needs.
The Minimalist Socialite, for small business owners or people just starting out.
The Serious Socialite, for those who want to step up their game a little.
The Freelance Socialite, for freelance social media managers who want to stand out from the crowd.
Some of the links on this page include affiliate links. That is, you or I may receive a bonus if you join up to the service using these links, but you will never pay more than other people (and I never promote tools that I don't recommend and use myself).
The Minimalist Socialite
You’re a small business owner or start-up, or maybe you’re just starting out in social media, but you want to look professional and see results.
More importantly, you don’t have a lot of time to spend creating gorgeous images or finding great content
These tools can get you started, save you a tonne of time and still give you a professional image.
Also grab my free Social Media Masterclass: What to post, how often to post and how to grow your audience
Scheduling
Buffer. Their free plan allows you to set up 3 social profiles (ie Twitter, Facebook and Instagram). Great for small businesses and people wanting a free tool to get started.
Content Creation Tools
Grammarly prevents grammatical mistakes, not just spelling errors, but typos. It stops me putting my electronic foot in my mouth all the time! It’s a Chrome extension that checks your typing while you’re on Facebook, or while you’re creating a new webpage – anywhere online.
PostPlanner helps you find, plan and post great content.
They help you find content that’s already proven to be popular, so you’re more likely to get more engagement, clicks and likes when you share it. It also has a scheduler to help you manage your posts.
We love the content finding side of this tool, but don’t use the scheduler as it doesn’t give us full control over when we’re posting. But if you’re just starting out it’s a great option and saves you having a scheduler as an additional tool.
MissingLettr helps you grow your blog the right way.
This tool turns each of your blog posts into a 12-month social campaign, which is then dripped out to your social channels. Each campaign is designed to engage with your audience and drive traffic back to your site.
All you have to do is review and edit the campaigns, and they’ll take care of everything else. Use this link to 50% off any plan for the first three months.
Easil is your DIY Design secret weapon. A drag-and drop tool that helps you create visual content so fabulous it looks like a pro did it!
Create everything from social media posts (perfectly sized to Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook) as well as posters, flyers, Gifs, and more. Easil has loads of templates to make life easy and is great for beginners and advanced social media managers.
Easil gives a great, crisp look to their images. Here's a sample of what you can create in Easil.
Canva is a great design tool that saves you wondering what size an image should be, provides heaps of cool templates and even allows you to create animations. Here's a couple of images created with Canva.
The Serious Socialite
You want to step it up on a notch on social media. You post regularly and have a good online presence, but you want to put a little polish on what you produce. Here's a few tools to help you do just that.
Scheduling
Check out a range of paid schedulers. There are loads out there and it really comes down to personal choice.
I love Sendible. It's is a beautiful scheduling tool that’s super easy to use and creates gorgeous reports at the click of a button. Great for small businesses.
If Sendible doesn't suit you I recommend checking out a couple of different tools, taking up the trial offer, and discovering what features you like and want, and what you can live without. Here's a couple to check out:
Loomly. A great scheduler for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter that comes with a free trial.
Agora Pulse has a variety of useful features such as social engagement, publishing, listening, reports, and team collaboration.
HootSuite has probably been around the longest (since 2008). Personally, I've never liked the interface, but a lot of people love it.
Content Creation Tools
In addition to Grammarly, PostPlanner, and MissingLettr mentioned above, be sure to play around with these great tools
Easil is my DIY Design secret weapon and has a free trial. It's like Canva but has a nice, crisp look to the images.
Both Easil and Canva have recently added animation to their bag of tricks, so you can create Gifs in both of them. Here's a couple of examples, so you can see how they differ.
Animoto allows you to make great videos easily. You can use their templates and images or import your own images or videos. It’s super easy to create professional-looking videos, fast. And you can change the ratio from landscape (for Facebook) to square (for Instagram) at the click of a button.
It's a great tool because you can pull in photographs or video snippets to create a video. Here's one I created earlier, as they say in the classics, to give you an idea.
The Freelance Socialite
You're a freelance social media manager and you need some things to help you stand out from the crowd. Here's a couple of extra things you need in your arsenal!
Scheduling
Sendible is my preferred scheduling tool for social media managers. It’s got a great interface and fabulous features like Canva integrated into the system!
I give clients access to log into their own dashboard and see what's scheduled. This saves me double-handling by sending draft posts for approval and before scheduling them, but allows total transparency with clients.
Be sure you take them up on their offer of free training during your trial – it will blow your mind what this tool can do for you!
Content Creation Tools
The one thing that helps me stand out from the competition is the ability to make videos. Facebook loves video, and so does Instagram, so as a freelancer you need to be using them for almost every post.
You can do this quickly and easily by creating Gifs in both Easil and Canva. I find them as quick and easy to create as an image, but they're more popular as posts.
Animoto is another tool I consider essential. You can pull in photographs from clients, or use stock images, or explore their online video library.
Biteable is a great video animation tool with plenty of templates to choose from. You can import your own images and video or use their built in templates. This tool allows you to create animations - a bit like cartoons - as well as regular videos.
Wave Animation is another great video creation tool. It has templates and a library of stock videos that you can pull together to tell stories, create messages and really move people! Here's an example of what you can create with Wave.
Ready
To learn more
Contact me today.
Phone: +61 401 718 454
Email: cate (at) sanesocialmedia.com