We all know the big social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, etc. Let us introduce you to some up-and-coming or lesser-known tools and companies that can be extremely useful in maximizing your community engagement and social media brand. In particular, when you are a solopreneur, freelancer, or small business owner, having tools to streamline your social media presence and brand that are timesavers can help turn your social media into a marketing machine! The important thing is that these tools make your life easier and get your brand out there to the right people.
Buffer is a scheduling tool for Facebook and Twitter, which lets you program the times for your updates to be posted. Now you won’t be chained to a desk! It makes it all so simple. This tool is a great for small businesses and startups where employees wear a lot of hats (and the to-do list each day feels never-ending).
This tool is a great time saver as well as a generally good streamliner. It auto-posts on both Facebook and Twitter, tracks new fans and followers, and provides stats on how many times content has been shared and retweeted. Bonus: It also recommends the best times of day for you to post things based on your engagement data. (Umm… awesome!)
This tool not only is fun to say, but is really useful as well. An Instagram competitor, it lets you modify your photos with filters and overlays and then lets you share them on Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and Twitter with the click of a button. There’s also a BeFunky gallery where you can display your best images. The basic account is free but paid premium accounts are also available.
Branch helps boost engagement by encouraging high quality conversation on social media sites. To boil down how it works, grab something you see anywhere on the web, talk about it with anyone (you email people via Twitter) and then publish it anywhere. Try it for longer conversations that don’t fit in 140 characters.
Ghost is a great alternative to WordPress. Built specifically for creating a blog, the tool is both mobile-friendly and free! The mission of Ghost is to make blogging as easy and accessible as possible.
This tool allows you to share content with a specific group, which can be super valuable when you connect with clients vs. your teammates (as well as family vs. friends). The tool includes personal cloud storage for each user as well as the ability to aggregate content from other social sites. But the site is very careful about privacy, so don’t worry about anything being leaked.
This crowdsourcing tool allows people to ask questions and get answers fast. When you log in you are immediately given the opportunity to ask for an opinion or give an opinion in various categories (art, music, a piece of clothing, etc.,). If you’re not the one in need of the opinion participate by providing one…with your thumb. Vote with a thumbs up, thumbs down or neutral.
Pagelever is a tool that gives you detailed analytics around your Facebook brand or business page that goes beyond Facebook Insights. This is really insightful for looking at brand pages. It provides charts you can use for presentations and reports and is very good about alerting you to Facebook updates (which are frequent as we know.)
Image credit: Skillcrush
