If you are still manually tracking mentions and tweets, spending hours to find good content to share with your audience, and cropping images the old-fashioned way (or not bothering with social media images’ sizes at all), then it’s time to say goodbye to these outdated rituals of social media management. While you may already be familiar with some of the larger names in social media marketing – like Buffer – making social media marketing easier doesn’t stop there.
There are countless social media tools and apps competing for your time and money, but you can’t buy them all, and you don’t need to settle for a product that doesn’t work for you. Here are five of our favorite free social media marketing tools. We use them every day, and we encourage you to add these to your toolbox as well.
1. Landscape by Sprout Social
Resizing your images for social media is no longer a hassle, thanks to this useful free tool. Landscape is a powerful image resizing tool, which is designed to help social media marketers, content creators, and business owners develop a standout presence in an increasingly visual social world. This tool offers the simplest possible method of producing multiple image sizes optimized for your social media profiles, messages, and campaigns.
2. SmartBribe
If you are using lead magnets on your website, SmartBribe will allow you to obtain more shares via social media. First, identify your most popular existing lead magnet (ebook, newsletter, video course, etc.). Then, set up a SmartBribe to give something away in addition to the free offering on the “Thank You” page. SmartBribe will allow you to offer this additional item to people if they tell their friends about you. Once your visitors tell their friends about you (via Twitter and email), they’ll receive the bonus from you.
3. Notify
Notify.ly is a free tool that allows you to set up notifications for your website or startup name, your competitors, or events and topics that you are interested in. It is integrated within Slack, which is an excellent tool to remain in touch with co-workers in real time. Notify.ly defined itself as a platform that “allows startups and entrepreneurs to get real-time push notifications whenever their name, brand, industry, blog post, review, or URL gets mentioned anywhere on the World Wide Web.”
4. Social Graphic Templates by Canva
With Canva, you can effortlessly design a well-branded visual content for your daily social media posts or generate a professional-looking header for your social media pages, all in just a few clicks and drag-and-drops. Check out this awesome collection of pre-made social media templates which you can use for your designs!
5. Quuu
Content curation is a time-consuming but necessary ritual, especially for online businesses. You can’t afford to run out of a constant stream of your own content, and user-generated content can be hit or miss. There are a variety of tools available to help you with this process, but Quuu takes a unique approach. It uses real people (Quuurators) to find the content you want. All you need to do is to select relevant categories that matter to you and your audience. Quu will send hand-curated content directly to your Buffer account, and then you can go to Buffer to manually curate and schedule posts. Quuu takes just a few minutes to set up, and then it runs itself on autopilot, saving your valuable time.
What’s your favorite social media marketing tool? If we’ve missed something, share your favorites in the comments below.
