It’s no secret that social media is a powerful source of potential income for ecommerce. With 45% of the planet flocking to social media for the latest deals and steals, you’ll be missing out if you aren’t marketing your business on social media. Social platforms can enhance many aspects of your business, from increasing brand awareness to driving up conversions and more.

The key is to use social media correctly. You’re competing to gain the attention of your targeted audience along with billions of other creators, businesses and products, so implementing premium branding, captivating captions and expert imagery is a must! The thought alone can be intimidating, but with the right tools in your toolbelt, you’ll have the best chance at succeeding no matter which social platforms you choose to tackle. 

So let’s talk about the top social media planning tools you can use to take your social media management skills to the next level!

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Social media tools can help with the automation of your posts and content. While not every action on social media can be automated, it’s a great start toward taking a back seat while your preplanned content does all the talking. 

But why should you automate your social content? It all depends on your personal social media needs. If you’re a business with multiple target audiences, you may want to automate posts to reach all audiences without adding more work to your plate. Or you may want to automate quick responses to clients who have generic, easy-to-answer inquiries about your products.

Whatever your needs are, there are some great tools out there to help with post automation. For Instagram, you may want to check out a tool called Planoly. Planoly allows you to schedule your content weeks in advance, plan Instagram captions, plan hashtags and much more. It’s great for any business looking to get a jump on its Instagram grid creation. 

For Facebook, tools like Hootesuite and Facebook’s own scheduling tools will allow you to schedule out a variety of different posts such as blogs, photos, videos, links back to your products and more. It’s also important to mention that these tools give you the option to schedule content at the time and date of your choice, making it easy to stick to any posting schedule you may already have in place. 

If you’re a business that utilizes Pinterest, you may want to check out Tailwind. Tailwind is an amazing tool that allows you to both create your own Pinterest content to schedule as well as schedule out repinned posts to your created boards. You can also schedule posts to multiple boards at once with intervals that spread them out on your calendar, which makes filling up your boards a breeze!

Our Top Planning Picks: 

Social Photo Editing Tools

Since social media is such a visual-centric industry, you want to make sure the content you’re posting is eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing and punchy enough to grab attention. Like we mentioned before, you are competing with other creatives, so you want your brand’s images to be able to hold their own on a social media feed. 

No matter the social media channel you prefer, editing tools can help you take your content above and beyond. And the best part — you don’t have to be a design professional to create some amazing images for your social channels. 

Application-based photo editors like Snapseed and VSCO are great tools that can enhance any type of content. Apps like this are great for businesses and creators that either are always on the go or enjoy having the versatility to edit images on their phone. They also offer an extremely user-friendly interface, turning any user into a design expert and hosting a wide variety of tools to edit photos to their best potential.

If you’re also looking to create posts for Instagram or Facebook Stories, you may want to look into using an editing app tailored to that format. Apps like Nichi and Unfold offer similar content editing options but format them to the dimensions that a story post would take on. Think of these apps like a collaging tool — you can drag and drop images, text and stickers to create the social post of your dreams!

Our Top Editing Picks: 

Social Media Reporting Tools

Last on the list, but definitely not in order of importance, is reporting. Checking the analytics on your social media posts can tell you what’s working to increase brand awareness and conversions and what isn’t. It’s the data that you can use to enhance your social presence and hopefully bring in more revenue in the future, so you want tools that can extract data to the best of their abilities.

Google Analytics should always be the first tool any business utilizes. With its in-depth data tracking and custom report options, there’s no tracking goal you can’t set up to analyze. Google Analytics is perfect for businesses looking to track revenue, cost of ad spend, audience behavior and much more. And for anyone who finds the platform intimidating, Google offers many tutorials and certifications to help you become an expert at data analytics.

However, if you’re looking to shop around for other reporting tools, we also recommend Keyhole. This is a tool specific to social media management, and it tailors all of its data tracking around those needs. You can create custom data reports, integrate your social media channels to set up tracking, add in team members to get all hands on deck and much more. This is a great tool for anyone looking to home in on social media analytics rather than the bigger picture of website analytics.

No matter your data needs, there are always reporting tools out there that can give you the power to manage your own analytics.

Our Top Editing Picks: 

Our last tip is to not let the massive size of social media audiences scare you away from creating something great for your business. Do your research, select and utilize the tools that work for you, and get on your way to smarter social media planning today!

Happy Growing!

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