Posted by The next time you meet or e-meet a Social media manager, I really hope you don’t ask them that one question they get a lot — “Umn, you get paid to post on social media?” 😶
Social media management has morphed into a role that requires a variety of skills and is not a straightforward job of posting content and responding to the community. This list of tools they use will blow your mind to know Social media management is beyond just that.
It’s got a lot to do, right from strategising for each social platform, creating original content, repurposing some, posting at the right time, staying updated, keeping an eye on trends, looking back and forth at analytics, figuring out other things, and basically know everything in the social space.
All of this and more while battling social media algorithms. Sigh! 😅
Let’s get to the list already?
I’m sure this will help you and I both to explore these tools and up our content game doing everything with 10x better productivity!
1. Canva
The good thing about Canva is, there’s a lot an SMM can do with and without a budget for great social media content. Also, it’s most helpful when your Graphic designer is slightly tight on bandwidth.
They have a set of templates, designs, images and texts that help you create content specific for each social platform and this could also be videos, animations, collages and infographics too.
Similar tool: Snappa
2. Lightroom
The Lightroom mobile app, as well as the web app, lets you edit images making it prettier and eye-catching! They also have free presets and a guided tutorial that helps you edit images.
Here’s an image I edited using their guided tutorial within a few minutes.
Similar tool: Snapseed – iOS / Android
3. Instasize
The Instasize app by its name tells you that it is extensively Instagram focused, to edit content for both — Your feed as well as Stories.
You can use their filters, resizing options, text, background and other editing components that are available on the free version and it is all that you need to create pretty images for your feed like the one below in about 4 or 5 steps! ⚡️
Similar tool: PhotoGrid – iOS/ Android
4. Lumen5
The best part of Lumen5 is you can put together a few images, text and music into videos with the help of templates that are readily available based on the social platform you’re publishing to.
If you opt for the paid plan you can explore the brand presets feature that allows you to save a theme, fonts, video transition and background style.
You can apply all these to your videos to maintain that consistency and save some time.
Similar tools: Adobe spark & Crello
5. iMovie
iMovie is a great place for beginners to start as it’s free, unlike other video editors that could cost a fortune.
You can cut and edit videos, music, and graphics without changing any of the original files.
The only boo off here is that iMovies is restricted to iOS.
Similar tool: WeVideo
6. CloudApp
CloudApp is super helpful to create quick clips, videos, images, screencasts and, marked-up images that are mostly shared by SMMs on social platforms that have character limits, as a shortened link on a blog post.
These files are then saved in the apps cloud storage as a simple link that can be shared with others.
It could be your freelancing designer, author, illustrator or anyone from your team?
Similar tool: Loom
7. Evernote
Finding a good note-taking app is just like finding your happy place or peace corner where all your thoughts flow.
In the midst of multiple things on your mind, it is important to park all your thoughts at one place so they don’t get lost and also come handy as and when you’d look back.
That’s where Evernote plays a super important role in organising information and also makes clean To-Do lists.
Similar tool: OneNote
8. Trello
Trello helps in organising and is one of the best ways to manage and go about your projects. You can create checklists, add your team, labels to colour code, pick and drop cards in the list and organise your work for free.
Your team can update each of their cards individually, keep a tab on due dates and strike off tasks that are completed!
Similar tool: Asana
9. Medium
Medium is one of the simplest writing tools and is most SMMs favourite for how clean it is, with not a lot of distraction on the font, you can only turn text to bold, italics, subheads (two levels) add links, create lists, highlights and blockquote.
I like medium because one can’t change the font, add colour, underline or insert tables on Medium. It’s that clean 🙂
10. Grammarly
Imagine you made a boo-boo and only realised it after the post goes live? 😱
It does happen to the best of us and this is why it’s always nice to have Grammarly installed or added as an extension to your Chrome browser.
All you have to do is to copy-paste the text into Grammarly’s Editor and let it do its magic, highlighting your unhyphenated words, punctuation flaws and all of that you thought was perfectly okay while putting things down from brain to doc!
11. Bitly
Shortened custom links automatically seem more clickable than a long text. And its an edge above the rest if you opt for the branded custom link that Bitly offers.
SMMs use Bitly to track the effectiveness of blog posts or while launching a cool affiliate program
It truly does help in identifying which content performed well especially when you’ve created a campaign and want to measure & track multichannel campaigns.
12. BuzzSumo
It’s one of those tools that act like that secret agent. It drops truth bombs and reveals what content works and what may not.
On BuzzSumo’s free version, you can look up for the search for the most shared content, top influencers, and track content that shows high performance which helps you analyse your flow of content and strategies accordingly!
13. Paper – Dropbox
Paper helps you to write, edit and collaborate in real-time free of charge.
You can add comments to texts and share the files.
Multiple users can view/ edit text while seeing each others’ changes instantaneously.
It also has cool templates like — Brainstorm, Meeting Notes & Project plan that saves you the extra effort of building that format from scratch.
Similar tool: Google Doc
14. Unsplash / Pixabay
There’s nothing better than having a community-driven platform that allows you to pick stock images, and use for your social media content, Pixabay and Unsplash are great free options and alternatives to Shutterstock and Stock.
Pixabay additionally also has royalty-free videos, vector, illustration and also music.
15. Crowdfire
That post you saw published at 5.30 pm on the weekend? It was definitely not an SMM at their keyboard hitting that Post Now button.
The secret is out! 🗣
SMMs use a social media management tool that helps them schedule posts for the future and a lot more. Crowdfire’s best features that help SMMs are —
Analytics
Gives a detailed view of how your social accounts have been performing. You can select the date range from the dropdown or simply pick a range of your choice for a maximum of 90 days.
Analytics is available for your Twitter, Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Instagram business accounts.
Report Builder
This feature helps create custom reports to look back at Social Media ROI.
It can be your daily/ weekly/ monthly/ report to present at a meeting or share with your team.
Mentions
This feature tracks your social mentions, fetches them within Crowdfire.
Once fetched, you to respond using GIFs and Emojis, Archive/Close conversations and also assign messages to members from your team.
Calendar view
The Calendar view is a bird’s-eye view of all the posts you’ve scheduled for your Social accounts throughout the month.
With the Master calendar feature, you can view posts for all your social accounts, drag and drop posts and also quickly edit if you think you’ve missed something.
Social listening
This feature helps you know who is talking about you, your brand mentions on social media and around the web to be able to analyse them.
You can add keywords and compare how you’re doing vs your competitor.
Bonus: With all those tools they use, the tasks they strike off and other little things that don’t make it to the To-Do list, it’s important for them to stay sane for their creative juices to flow!
That’s when this app comes in —
Calm App
This app is most SMMs favourite and go-to tool to find their calm.
For a mind to function and keep the creative juices flowing, managing stress, anxiety, sleep pattern, productivity, exercise, and physical health.
Their sleep Stories, breathing programs, masterclasses, and relaxing music is everything that makes most SMMs the extraordinarily creative persons they are 😄✨
Similar tool: Headspace
That’s it, folks!