10 Free Social Media Marketing Tools for Your Small Business

Marketing yourself and staying relevant is especially important during the next few months.  While people are focusing on staying safe and isolating, small businesses are struggling most of all.  Turning to Social Media Marketing may be the solution to engaging with customers when you can’t speak to them face-to-face.

Social Media Marketing is by no means a new concept; many small businesses rely on this cost-effective method for establishing an online image, building relationships with customers, improving SEO and most importantly, increasing leads and conversions.  This is why businesses employ marketers to tackle this (some would say) overwhelming task. However, we understand that as a small business owner it might not be possible to employ a marketer, and in fact many entrepreneurs undertake this role themselves!  So, if you are a small business owner who wants to start marketing yourself on social media, this blog post is for you.

Here are some of the most useful (and FREE) tools that you can use for creating content, managing SM Marketing and accessing analytics that will make the idea of Social Media Marketing much less daunting!

Content Creation

Great, you’ve decided to take on your own social media marketing…but what do you post?  Whether you want to share a quote, product information, useful tips or photos, you will need to package it in a way that engages your customers and is share-worthy – in other words, your posts need to be nice to look at!  Luckily, there are numerous free tools out there that can help you very easily transform your information for social media.

1. Create infographics with Easelly:

You don’t need to know how to use Adobe software in order to create an engaging and informative infographic.  If you have information that you want to share in an appealing format, Easelly is the way to go!  Easelly is a simple (and free) infographic maker that lets you visualise your reports, presentations, product information, statistics, processes, timelines etc.

The great thing about infographics is that they can get you more shares and traffic on social media, because people tend to engage more with visually appealing content, and this can increase your sales and boost conversion rates.

2. Videos on Animoto:

As we know video gets more likes and shares than other content. Animoto allows you to create and edit videos with its drag-and-drop video maker.  They offer templates for creating share-worthy videos and you really don’t need to have any experience to use this tool.  You can use their free account to make videos that will stand out in the social feed.

3. Design…everything…with Canva:

Posters, Logos, Presentations, Flyers, Cards, Infographics, Business Cards, Brochures, Wallpapers, Certificates, Letterheads, Newsletters, Calendars, Social Graphics…I’m not even going to try and finish the long list of templates that Canva offers its users.  This easy-to-use online design platform requires no design experience and best of all, they offer a free account option!

Social Media Management

When you opt to take on Social Media Marketing for your own business, you don’t want to spend hours going from one social media platform to the next just to post the same content.  Managing your Social Media Marketing and being able to automatically schedule all your posts across multiple platforms at once will free up the essential time you need to conduct your business.  The following tools can help you with this:

4. Hootsuite:

Hootsuite offers a free plan that’s not too basic:

• Manage 3 social media profiles in one place
• Schedule up to 30 posts to be published whenever you want
• Free Hootsuite Platform Training
• Online Help Centre
• Integrate some basic free apps into your Hootsuite dashboard

The free plan doesn’t however provide analytics and reports, something that you can get with the Professional plan.

5. Zoho Social:

Zoho Social’s free plan includes:

• Manage 1 brand
• URL shortener
• SocialShare browser plugin

Analytics Tools

If you want to see who your followers are and gain insights into which groups you need to target, you’re going to have to sign up for analytics tools.  While most paid social media management tools (Buffer  , Loomly  etc.) include analytics and reporting features, many of the free accounts do not.  So, if you are in need of some useful insights, these free analytics tools are for you:

6. Facebook Analytics:

This free analytics tool will provide you with in-depth comprehensive reports on who, where and how many people interact with your content.  Facebook Analytics can also be used if you run a group on Facebook, which is great!

7. Twitter Analytics:

Much the same as Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics is a free tool that lets you measure the performance of your Twitter campaigns.  You’ll see the amount of comments, likes and retweets your tweets are getting.

8. Instagram and TikTok Analytics:

Analisa.io has a free basic account which provides profile and hashtag analytics for both Instagram and TikTok and will show you things like engagement rate, like rate and comment rate etc.

Other Useful Tools

9. Shorten those bulky links with Bitly:

Use Bitly if you tend to share a lot of links on social media that are long and bulky and you need to shorten it to make it more user-friendly – think Twitter with its 140 character limit.  Bitly offers a free account and what’s more, they even include some analytics reports with the free account!

10. Run Facebook competitions with Agora Pulse:

If you want to engage your current followers and get your brand out there to attract new followers, a social media competition is a great idea!  Facebook Timeline Contest by Agora Pulse is a free tool for running sweepstakes, quizzes and photo contests directly on your Facebook Timeline.

There are other tools like Shortstack, Wishpond and Vyper that arguably provide much more functionality across all platforms, but for these you need to have a paid account.

TOP TIP: If this is something you want to pursue; you can sign up for a free trial period on any of these sites.

Hopefully this post shed some light on how to start marketing your small business on social media!  There are many MANY other tools out there – some of them free and many of them not.  But the aim of this post was to share some tried and tested tools that won’t cost you money and that you can easily make use of for starting your Social Media Marketing journey.

Our team at Designerneeded are always available to help and advise you if you find Social Media Marketing for your business too daunting, just email us at info@designerneeded.com and we’ll be in touch!