Social media marketing is arguably one of the fastest-growing industries nowadays. Regardless of your location around the world, nearly every company, government office, organization and institution you know has a social media account, and behind it, there is a manager.
The job of a social media manager is wide-ranging and exhaustive. They oversee campaigns over several different platforms including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. They create and curate content, manage teams, program schedules, and drive community engagement based on strategic data analysis.
Social media managers carry a heavy weight on their shoulders, but luckily there are a bunch of tools available to them. Creating an arsenal of apps to alleviate workloads and optimize performance is key to leading a successful online campaign. Here are five we consider essential to get you started.
1. Hootsuite – Free trial (Android and iOS)
The classic all-in-one solution for social media managers, Hootsuite is (you guessed it) a suite of tools that check all the boxes regarding campaign management online.
Engagement, post publishing, analytics, insights, campaign driving, ads, and impact analysis are just some of the features that you get with Hootsuite. It integrates social strategies across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Unfortunately, gone are the days in which Hootsuite was a free hub to manage just your Twitter account. There is a 30-day trial period free for individual use and teams, but afterward, you have to pay depending on the plan you choose.
2. Pocket – Free (Android and iOS)
Content is the driving force of your posts regardless of the platform, and Pocket is an app that helps you find and keep engaging publications handy at all times.
You can create collections for different brands and themes if you manage several campaigns, and save all the posts you find to read later offline. Just put them in your Pocket and then, through apps like Hootsuite, you can repost them or use them as the base for a new publication.
3. Canva – Free (iOS)
Canva is there for all your graphic needs and visually-driven campaigns. It is a free graphic design platform, which has only landed on iOS so far but offers dozens of options even beyond social media.
For instance, there are your usual ready-to-go templates for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter posts, banners, and headers, but you can also create presentations, covers, and invitations with the tools available in Canva.
4. Slack – Free (Android and iOS)
Look no further to solve all your team communication issues: Slack is the app that makes your life easier going above and beyond. Free to use with enterprise options available, the platform is way more than just a messaging service.
Manage teams and streamline communications between groups organized into channels, which can all be englobed in an overarching organization where all are present. Slack also has support for hundreds of chatbots that increase productivity and work performance.
5. Cloze – Free (Android and iOS)
Your mind never stops racing as a social media manager, and you need a place where to keep everything carefully jotted down and organized, as well as someone to remind you of events that you could inevitably miss. Cloze does both.
Emails, calls, files, notes, messages, calendar events, and social activity, of course, are all centralized in this personal assistant. Easily manage your contacts, meetings, and even your personal life with Cloze, a tool that learns from you and automatically adds items to your Agenda based on your habits and routine.
