simple social tools

Ten Simple Social Tools (You May Not Have Heard Of!)

Alex Jones 7 years ago

Every digital marketer knows the potential social media holds for content promotion.

What isn’t talked about, as much, is the fierce competition for the rewards a successful social media promotion can bring. It’s Commodus level gladiator stuff!

To get the best results you need to be the best. But even the best need a little help. So we’ve highlighted these ten essential tools to help you make the most of your social campaigns.

Ten tools you need for social media activity

1. Ad Espresso

Facebook remains an incredible platform to promote your content. The best way to maximise the potential of your Facebook advertising efforts is to test a number of different visuals, ad sets and targeting.The problem with that is the set-up time. To keep creating what is essentially the same ad with a minutiae difference can be very laborious. Ad Espresso takes this side of social promotion out of the equation.

Its system allows you to create thousands of variants of your Facebook ads and easily test all the versions across your target audiences. It also saves your work and preferences so they can be reused for future campaigns.

All this coupled with its analytics hub and optimisation systems make this tool very powerful and very useful to any social promoter.

2. Photoshop

Obviously Photoshop is not a niche tool and we expect the majority of people reading this will not only have heard of it but also used it in some way or another. However, we can’t stress enough how important an image manipulation programme can be for your social promotion efforts.Not only because there are recommended image sizes for each social platform but for the actual editing of the visuals. Whether that be adding text to create mini infographic snippets or fully-fledged edited masterpieces.

Another benefit is that once you get your head around the system it is simple to use. So, if you’re constrained by time and want to get your content out ASAP, you don’t have to bother a designer and can get on with it yourself.

3. Pixabay

When social promoting, an often “own goal” is using images that you don’t own or have permission to use. Hence finding high quality free images is a difficult task. So we would recommend using a site such as Pixabay that has more than 380,000 free photos, vectors and art illustrations available to download and use.For a much wider and larger database of images to use we recommend Shutterstock, but you must be a paid member to download these images.

4. Canva

Sticking with the photo theme, Canva is an online design centre with templates and tools that will help create the perfect social-ready designs.Canva’s mission statement is to make design simple for everyone. It says it takes care of the boring bits so you can spend more time creating. This includes a huge database of different features you can add to your designs including more than 1,000,000 fonts.

If you’re not confident with Photoshop or want a cheaper alternative, this is the one for you.

5. Hootsuite

If you’re using multiple channels to distribute your content you’re going to need to manage them all effectively and efficiently. If you use each platform from its dedicated site it is easy to forget or overlook one especially if your promotion is heavily cross-platform.Now there are plenty of social media management tools out there but Hootsuite is one of the market leaders and allows you to focus your efforts when managing a project, working with clients or scaling your organisation.

Moreover, it also has an impressive analytics suite that allows you to see and consume your campaign’s data so you can create comprehensive reports to assist with future promotions.

6. PR Newswire

Social media promotions can often be taken to the next level with a successful PR campaign to support it. This means that people from different, and sometimes larger, communities can engage with your content by letting influencers give it coverage.PR Newswire is the largest and most detailed news and content distribution network in the world. It allows you to send press releases to its network of more than 200,000 media outlets and 8,000 websites.

This kind of coverage can be invaluable if you want a more rounded promotion effort. The downside is that this coverage comes at a price, as you will have to be a member to submit. However, if you are planning on multiple campaigns throughout the year, adding this into your budgeting could prove to be a shrewd decision.

7. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP allows companies to widely distribute their content and messages by creating a network of people that share, tweet and post-company related messages and content.It is increasingly coming to organisations’ attention that their workforce is an untapped resource in terms of social promotion. More often than not, and especially in the digital marketing space, a company’s employees will be in a social community relating to the content that company is producing. So, by getting them to share can give it a real boost in the initial stages of promotion.

Here at Zazzle we have the “blog post” alert, which will have gone off approximately two minutes after this was uploaded, where we just let everyone know a new post has gone live. But if your company is more spread out or larger, then GaggleAMP is the solution.

8. PowToon

Thanks to the increasing popularity of Vine and YouTube, video content is as important as ever on social media. However, video production can be tricky and expensive to organise.PowToon offers a solution. It lets you create animated videos you can use on a wide range of platforms including social. You can sign up for free and it offers plenty of handy how-to tutorials to help you when creating your masterpiece. Good luck, Kubrick!

9. Taboola

Content distribution sites, such as Taboola, have become increasingly popular with people who have content to share and they can be brilliant in assisting social promotion campaigns.By spreading your content onto influencer pages you are increasing the numbers of people who will digest, connect with and potentially share it. The latter is where the value in including sites such as Taboola into your promotion strategy lies.

Achieving these social shares from people not necessarily in your community will create another separate social buzz independent from the one you have created from your channels.

10. Social Card Previewer

When sharing your URL on their platform, a social network analyses your page’s content to decide what information to display in a nicely styled preview card.

Through the use of metadata we can explicitly tell social networks what content to use, tailoring page titles, images and call-to-actions to each audience. If you don’t take advantage of metadata you risk letting social networks make the decision for you.

What can the tool do?

We have created a handy tool which emulates social networks to quickly preview the social metadata on a URL and allows you to switch between each platform, visually testing your content and identifying which meta tags are in use (and any that are missing!).

Get the Social Card Previewer

Open Graph is possibly the most widely supported metadata protocol by Facebook and Google+.  Twitter also recognises Open Graph but prefers its own card specification, making it important to test your page has all the relevant information. Test your social channels now by clicking on the button above!

Social meta tag preview tool screenshot

There We Have It!

So there are our ten tools to help you get ahead in the competitive coliseum that is social media. What must be remembered is that different campaigns may require different tools. To know what to use for what campaign will take multiple testing efforts and trials.

If your brand is serious about social media, make sure you download our guide on making a real business out of social media.

Good luck, gladiator!

Stay in touch with the Zazzle Media family

Sign up for our monthly newsletter and follow us on social media for the latest news.

Our website uses cookies for various purposes and to enhance the site’s functionality. This helps us understand how you use and interact with the website.

Settings Accept Cookies