Behind every great social media, manager is a bevy of resources to assist in content creation, publication, and observation.
Shareable, engaging content doesn’t just appear out of nowhere! Social media managers are masters at discovering and creating likeable social posts – I should know… I am one!
As a social media manager at a relatively small digital marketing agency, I am in charge of writing posts, creating graphics, and monitoring accounts.
In my Chrome browser, I have bookmarks upon bookmarks of sites I use to create the best content for my clients. Here are just a few of my favorites:
Content Creation
My clientele includes a wide range of industries, from trucking to healthcare professionals to jewelry and beyond. But, my print journalism degree didn’t exactly prepare me to discuss at length the process by which soil aeration is used to improve turf drainage. I am not an expert in real estate or family law, but my clients are.
So, how do I find information about these industries?
Google Alerts
Want to know when a certain word or phrase shows up in a news article or web page? Just set a Google Alert for it, and you’ll get an aggregated list of your selected term sent to your inbox every day! Easy as pie!
Alltop
Alltop is another free tool to use to dig into all the top news about a particular area of interest. You can use it to quickly find out what’s trending in almost any industry.
Twitter & Facebook
You can use your own personal social media platforms to follow big news agencies, niche markets, even businesses that are similar to your client. Create Twitter and Facebook Interest lists to compile all of these sources into an easy-to-browse format.
Graphics
Not everyone can be a graphic designer in their spare time (I am not), nor is everyone proficient in Photoshop and Illustrator (I am amateur at best). But social media platforms are so visually based, that you’ve got to have graphics to even compete with everyone else in the business.
That’s why I am so glad this next resource exists.
Canva
Canva is a free, totally user-friendly graphic designing platform on the Internet. There are so many really cool features, that I’m just going to list them for you:
– Nearly 50 already-sized canvasses to use (including optimal sizes for Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, & Tumblr), plus the ability to use custom dimensions
– Free and premium ($1 each) customizable layouts
– Upload your own images or grab them from your Facebook album or Google Drive
– Free and premium ($1 each) grids, frames, shapes, lines, illustrations, icons, photos, charts, and more
– Free and premium ($1 each) backgrounds
– TONS of fonts (all free)
Publishing & Monitoring
Say you have 5 clients, and they each have 3 social media platforms that get 2 posts per day. Hold on, let me get out my calculator to do this math… That’s like a million posts per week. It’s impossible to LIVE POST all of that. No one wants to do be constantly writing and posting ALL day. To quote a wise woman on YouTube, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
Here’s what I use for scheduling my clients’ social media posts, as well as how I monitor and engage with each platform.
Hootsuite
This is a social publishing and scheduling platform that offers bulk uploading of content and easy account monitoring. You can add in multiple client accounts, create social streams, and even create analytics reports (paid pro-account).
Hootsuite allows you to favorite, reply, like, retweet, share, +1, comment, etc, without leaving to go to the native platform, which is super convenient.
Nuvi
This is a pretty exciting tool to use, because it offers real-time monitoring of key words – not just tags or @ mentions. Want to know when anyone so much as types out your business’ name in a post or article? Nuvi will find it, as well as measure its sentiment. AKA you’ll know if someone’s talking smack.
Like I mentioned before, those are just a FEW of my favorite tools to use (and I use them EVERYDAY).
They make my life as a social media manager so much easier. Thanks, Internet.