This is one for the social media managers and digital marketers of the world. If you work in social media marketing, whether you manage organic or paid channels, or manage multiple accounts, we completely understand the need for efficiency and accuracy in an increasingly demanding role.
If you’re part of a large marketing team or you’re a team of one, we hope our list of FIVE essential social media marketing apps will help you, create, schedule and analyse your content.
Get efficient with your social media marketing with these 5 essential apps:
- Ads Manager: Amend your budgets, copy and images whilst on the move.
- Trello: Collaborate with your team or dump your fantastic ideas for future posts.
- Canva: Create social media graphics quickly and easily with great Canva templates.
- Google Analytics: Understand how your website traffic is interacting with your site.
- Grammarly: Not just for spelling, check your grammar and review synonym options.
Let us delve a little deeper…
Meta Ads Manager
Yep, one that you might not think was useful or even possible from your smartphone or other mobile devices. We’re spending less and less time at our desks and are needing to work more and more whilst on the move.
That’s where Meta Ads Manager comes in…
Adjust budgets, update copy and upload images or videos for your Facebook and Instagram campaigns all from the efficiency of your smartphone.
Download on: App Store | Google Play
Trello
The ultimate project management tool for social media marketers. It’s never easy to plan your social media marketing strategy, especially when you’re collaborating with a number of colleagues and influencers.
Share your ideas, concepts, thoughts, and your innermost secrets (well, maybe not that far) onto a board and share them with team members and even clients. Tag each other in comments and create handy colour-coded labels to help keep everything organised.
Get started on your next social media marketing plan with Trello, here >
Trello is ideal for keeping track of your social media projects and campaign progression, or to just have somewhere to pop your upcoming post ideas to collaborate with your team on.
Download on: App Store | Google Play
Canva
Canva is a free graphic design tool that helps you create anything from social media graphics to stories, feed posts, thumbnails… the list goes on.
Canva’s extensive repository of templates is easy to navigate and even easier to update with your brand colour palette, imagery and more. Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, there’s a template for EVERYTHING.
Ideal for all types of content, let Canva take the stress away from creating that perfect post. Use the drag and drop design tool to go from Windows Paint level (or worse, PowerPoint), to professional and captivating social media graphics.
Download on: App Store | Google Play
Google Analytics
This one should really be number one, in terms of importance, can it get any bigger or better? Google Analytics is for everyone, from seasoned pros to the daily dabbler.
Understand how your social media campaigns are driving traffic to your website. Understand how your target audience is interacting with your site and see LIVE data on who is on your site RIGHT NOW.
Google Analytics offers six really useful reports on social media:
- Overview report
- Quickly check how your social media campaigns are converting and get an overarching view on general performance.
- Network referrals
- This report helps you to see which individual networks are performing best and giving you the greatest engagement.
- Landing pages
- Here you can quickly check up on your engagement metrics for individual URLs. For example, see how many views a particular landing page has received in a specific time frame.
- Conversions
- This report helps you to take a look at any conversions via social media, along with their monetary value. A great report to see if your ROI (return on investment) is performing.
- Plugins
- This report is taken from the social share buttons that you have on your website. Here you can see how often those share buttons are being clicked and calculate which ones are most popular.
- Users flow
- This is a great one, take a look at how users interacted with your site. You can see where they entered your site, then see how they have travelled through your pages. Allowing you to see where they came from and where they left.
When combined, all of these reports offer us social media marketers a great overview of how our specific social campaigns are performing. Allowing us to make adjustments to those that aren’t doing as well as we hoped and to create reports and case studies from those that do!
Utilise Google’s ‘Insights’ tab to get snapshots of what’s happening with your site(s) or delve deeper into your data with one of Google’s many reports. Any SEO or web developer worth their salt will tell you that GA is where it’s at.
Download on: App Store | Google Play
Grammarly
Typos and grammatical errors are a social media marketer’s worst nightmare. Not only will our fellow human beings find it annoying and potentially unfollow our social media channels, search engines like Google and Bing frown upon poorly-written content.
We know even the perfect speller can make an easy mistake, especially when rushing to get that last-minute post out!
So rid yourself of that risk by letting Grammarly do that last sanity check for you. It will fix spelling errors, suggest grammar improvements and provide you with synonym options to help your copy flow.
Download on: App Store | Google Play
Our final thoughts
Something we haven’t mentioned so far is that all of these apps are FREE. Yep, download and use for zero charge whatsoever. Like many things in life, if you want to use super-fancy, upgraded features then there are charges or subscription fees.
There are also many other options to these apps and the list doesn’t stop at just 5 essential apps. There are more, loads more. If you agree with our list, or have your own suggestions, tell us! We’d love to hear from you.
Head over to our social media channels here: Instagram | LinkedIn
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Want to read more?
Check out our other social media-related blogs below:
How to analyse a social media campaign >
Beginner’s guide to LinkedIn marketing >
Get in touch…
We’re Patch, a digital and social media marketing agency in Kent, UK.
At Patch, our approach to social media management focuses on quality content and engagement levels to help our clients build an engaged following by providing value.
Get in touch to find out more and get started on that winning social strategy with a team of industry experts!