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Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
As a Social Media Agency, we know first-hand the multitude of tasks that comes with managing the content creation process for several social media channels. Our team is divided into departments in order to produce high-quality work with a quick turnover and an exceptional success rate which is possible when everyone is working within their own zone of genius. The mistake many business owners make is putting the work of 5 different departments on the shoulders of one social media manager.
Finding a social media manager that is excellent at copywriting, graphic design, video/photo editing, analysing data and reporting, influencer marketing, paid ads campaigns as well as being up-to-date with the latest trends, has a passion for social media and is also tech-savvy and super organised is never going to be sustainable. You will require an expert team to make this happen successfully long term.
This is why we have created this list to help business owners streamline their processes using automated tools and software to help enhance their workflows without the overwhelm. We have tested over 100 social media tools, some great and essential to our business whilst others have been a complete waste of money.
Here are the social media softwares that we've tested and approved by us that we know will improve your social media team’s output.
This is the most important step in social media marketing that is the downfall for many businesses. If you don’t have a systematic approach when marketing your business on social media then there will be a limit to how successfully your strategy can be implemented. Your content marketing has to be run like a machine in order to best optimise your strategy.
This is where you have one shared location where your team can access strategy, testimonials, hashtags, imagery, passwords, key dates, key metrics, previous content and you can map out the yearly calendar in terms of organic campaigns, paid campaigns, email marketing and PR campaigns.
Our team uses and highly recommends Asana as an end-to-end project management system. Asana enables us to manage multiple projects, with everyone on the team having their own task lists and they even have a free plan for you to trial before committing to a pain plan.
This is an essential tool we recommend for anyone running an active social media account. Many clients have challenged us on using automated social media scheduling tools as many social media “experts” have claimed that it negatively impacts your reach. We have put this to the test when posting manually for a month and posting using a scheduler for a month on several occasions and the conclusion is always the same. Your reach is determined by many factors including time of posting, the day of the week, copy, content type, hashtags used etc your social media scheduler does not make a difference.
We use our social media scheduler to ensure that the skeleton content goes out no matter what and you maintain a level of consistency which is vital for social media success - this removes the limit of only being active 9-5 pm during weekdays. It also allows us to collect a myriad of data to help us effectively improve our strategy. However, it does not eliminate the need to post manually - as you will always want to add to your content to make the most of reactive marketing campaigns or to share hot topics in the moment or campaign orientated content.
The best software for social media scheduling in terms of managing many different brands and accessing in-depth data is a paid social media scheduling software called Sprout Social, which we use daily. The best free software in order to visually view your social media calendar we would recommend is Planable.
With regards to Pinterest, we would recommend using Tailwind as a separate paid resource as it will be the quickest way to boost your Pinterest marketing efforts.
The best platforms for those who are specialised in graphic design has to be the industry-leading suite of Adobe products as not much else compares. However, if you are not to an advanced level and need a way of creating your social media graphics we would recommend signing up for the free version of Canva and using their endless list of templates for your social media designs. The paid plan is also great if you want to use all of their advanced features.
96% of consumers increase their online video consumption, with 9 out of 10 social media users saying they wanted to see more videos from brands (In Video, 2021). We would advise hiring a videographer with capabilities to create long-form videos as well as short-form video in different formats to suit the social media channel of your choice.
However, if you want a way for your team to make videos and know how to edit we would recommend learning how to use paid platforms such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere especially if you are editing content for Youtube which tends to be longer. If you wish to keep it straightforward and create simple video edits, short reels or TikTok’s then we would again recommend using the video tools in app or you can use Canva’s free video creation tools and templates or if you prefer to use an app then we would recommend InShot.
For the best photo editing functionality, we suggest you look into Adobe’s suite of products including photoshop and lightroom. We haven’t really found an app or software that matches up to that level yet!
92% of consumers watch videos with the sound off and 50% rely on captions (Verizon & Publicis). So it’s super important that you optimise your social media content for best performance not only to be inclusive but also to cater to the 92% of people who watch videos with the sound off.
We recommend using Kapwing if you want to transcribe videos quickly and easily as their auto captions are very accurate and simple to edit. Otherwise you can add automated captions for free in-app on Facebook and Instagram but they aren’t always the most accurate transcriptions and there is no option to edit to correct them.
Grammarly is an essential tool for anyone writing social media captions which has both free and paid versions. This tool can also help support any member of your team who has learning difficulties which cause problems with reading, writing and spelling. We’d always recommend having another set of eyes proofread any social media content before going live to ensure it is on brand and free of any typos or grammatical errors. We use a 3-step proofreading process within the Wholehearted team to make sure every single post we write is spot on.
The potentially most powerful way to do hashtag research is actually free and in-app. Manually visiting the hashtags that are relevant to your brand which are under a certain frequency threshold as well as the content being used within that hashtag actually being of a high quality. Looking at your competitor hashtags and what’s working for them as inspiration to then curate your own unique set of hashtags to test. Testing is crucial to continually improving your hashtag strategy and finding the winning combo (which will be constantly changing). We visit our hashtags at the end of each month and take note of our best performing hashtags for the month ahead.
If you don’t fully understand how to research hashtags, and wish to use software for this we would recommend to try Flick or Hashtagify
You should be constantly monitoring your competitors best performing post as well as your own best performing posts on a weekly or monthly basis. As well as looking at your external environment and looking for hot topics that you can talk about. To find the best trending content ideas Answer The Public is an excellent resource or utilising Google Trends or Pinterest Trends is also a good way to go.
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