7 Technological Social Media Tools That Can Help Small Businesses

Small businesses starting out in the industry are already limited with their resources for marketing. With a small or no budget, small businesses typically don’t start out with a marketing team or any promotional tools. But, what can help small businesses launch their marketing campaigns, is utilizing social media platforms. Social media is typically free, with the exception of paid social media advertising. However, small businesses can utilize these free or inexpensive social media tools to help launch your campaigns. These tools assist throughout the whole process including target market research, analyzing competitors, setting goals, content creation, deploying your social media campaigns, and analyzing your metrics and engagement.

Researching Customers and Competitors

#1: SocialBakers

Socialbakers utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) to understand audience behavior on social media platforms. Before you can start creating or publishing content, businesses must find ways to research their target market and how consumers look for relevant, online content. Personalizing social media content to your audience will ultimately drive engagement. Socialbakers lets you learn about your audience and their most common keywords they use in search queries.

#2: Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a four-in-one social media marketing platform that can help you with social engagement, customer care, and social advertising. Small businesses in a competitive industry can utilize the tool’s Insights feature that monitors competition and market trends. Finding the top keywords in your industry will assist the marketing team or social media personnel by publishing content that matches those keywords commonly searched by your target market.

Setting Social Media Goals and Analyzing Metrics

#3: Buffer Analyze

Setting social media goals prior to deploying social media campaigns will help track and analyze your ROI regarding your social media efforts. Small businesses who are entering the social media game, it is crucial to have SMART goals and being able to measure them over time. After setting your goals, Buffer Analyze measures your online performance on each platform, while also giving you the tools to create informational, yet visually appealing reports on your metrics. Buffer Analyze also shows recommendations to grow your reach, engagement and sales that align with your initial goals.

Content Creation

#4 Canva

Canva is a great, easy-to-use online tool that provides even the less tech-savvy content creators with a way to produce images, graphics, and infographics for all social media platforms and content type. They provide thousands of templates based on topic, social media platform, type of content (such as post, profile picture, posters, etc.), theme and more. This social media tool is also free, which is a benefit for small businesses with a tight budget.

#5: Venngage

Venngage is another content creation tool that is free for anyone to use. Venngage specializes in infographics that audiences find more appealing over text information. Presenting, otherwise boring data to online audiences, with a creative, colorful infographic will drive more engagement. Infographics are mobile friendly as users typically consume digital content with easy-to-read and simple text and graphics. Data that is long and written out typically receives less engagement or click through rates.

Deployment of Social Media Campaigns

#6: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media tool that helps social media marketers with a variety of things. But mostly, Hootsuite is known for its scheduled content publishing feature, where you can schedule a post (with text, images, videos and links, etc.) and set what time, day and what platforms the post will be published on. This is especially helpful for small businesses who do not have someone monitoring and publishing content constantly. Brands can maintain a strong social media presence by scheduling an infinite amount of posts ahead of time while monitoring each “streams” once posts go out.

#7: Khoros

Khoros is another social media tool that assists in content automation, but also helps manage customer responses. This marketing software helps all businesses, especially small businesses, with connecting with customers effectively. A part of deploying your social media campaigns is focusing on engaging with your audience during and after the promotion of the campaign. Khoros will help your engagement by utilizing their communities to help interact with your customers better and provide more information.

There are an abundance of online social media tools that will assist in your business’s promotional efforts. By establishing social media goals and objectives, your business can find the right tool that will maximize your ROI. Even with a small budget for marketing efforts, small businesses can use these all-in-one tools to promote social media campaigns and increase the overall brand awareness of the business.