If you can’t beat them, join them. Whether or not you like social media, you can’t deny its importance when it comes to building your brand, engaging your audience, and more. Nearly 3.5 billion people use social media across numerous platforms. Your business needs to be in the mix.
You likely already engage in some form of social media marketing, but if you are starting to notice that it is taking up and more and more of your time and not necessarily resulting in more and more sales, listen up. Social media marketing does take a lot of work, but it isn’t work that you have to do on your own.
There are plenty of tools to boost social media engagement, and better yet, a lot of them will also help save you tons of valuable time that you can then re-invest into other parts of your business.
Gone are the days of one way advertising. Social media needs to be social, and the better a job you do, the more traffic and sales you will find will result from your social efforts. These tools will help you with everything from post planning, to scheduling, image creation, influencer marketing, hashtag selection, social listening, and more. Let’s see who made the list.
Naturally, a big part of your social media is your own content, but a great way to fill in gaps and ensure you’ve always got interesting content going out on your channels is to share other content that is relevant to your industry. The problem with that is, finding the right content that fits your audience and that is likely to actually result in increased engagement can be incredibly time consuming.
Instead, you can use PostPlanner to help you find awesome content that is already performing well on social media. Find the best content, schedule it, and see how it performs! PostPlanner can handle all of that if you want it to (or you can simply find the content and then use another tool to schedule it if you already have a preferred tool).
We like PostPlanner because of how much time it will save you. When it comes to content marketing, the majority of your time should go towards developing your own quality content, not searching the Internet. PostPlanner takes over that role for you, and allows you to schedule those posts at optimized times to help even further the potential for engagement.
The past few years has seen a major increase in live video. People love it! It is a great type of content to incorporate into your social media marketing strategy, but let’s face it, it isn’t always convenient. Instead of finding the perfect time to record your live stream, why not pre record it and stream it at the optimal time? You can do that with OneStream!
Research shows that people will watch a live video three times longer than a pre-recorded one. Instead of live streaming at 2am when you finally have time to record, you can use OneStream to produce quality ‘live’ video content, and then schedule it to stream at a better time.
We recommend scheduling your live videos for various times in order to see what results in the best engagement rates. Maybe your audience is comprised of night owls and they want to watch your live video at midnight! Or, perhaps you find the best results posting around 7pm when people are home from work, or 12pm while they are at lunch. You won’t know unless you try. OneStream makes it far easier for you to try out various times without having to actually stream live at those times. Record your video at a time that is convenient for you, and stream them whenever you want!
OneStream connects with most of the major social media platforms that have live video capability- including YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
We have discussed If This, Then That (IFTTT) in the past when we rounded up our favorite marketing automation tools. It made our list again for social media engagement tools because it is so useful, quick, and best of all- free.
Part of what makes social media marketing so time consuming these days is that there are so many different platforms to keep up with. A tool like IFTTT helps make it easier to keep all of your platforms updated with recent posts. Previously, we discussed the ‘recipe’ that will share your Instagram post on Twitter to look like a native post (instead of that annoying Instagram link that no one clicks on). The result? Better engagement without having to spend any more time!
Another recipe we like (as shown above) will upload your Instagram posts to an album on Facebook. This is a quick and easy way to share your content on multiple platforms in order to maximize your engagement potential without having to manually upload your photos to numerous places. One and done! We love a good time saver, and IFTTT is just that.
Control all of your social media platforms from one central location using SocialPilot. We love how easy their scheduling tools are, and best of all, they have a convenient mobile app so that you can schedule your social media while on the go.
If you’ve got a social media team, you can also more easily add them to your account so that they all have access and can schedule postings, monitor engagement, and more. We particularly love the collaboration features that SocialPilot has. Instead of drafting social posts in another location and waiting for approval, then moving them into your scheduler, you can handle all of this in one location. Schedule posts, mark them for approval, and once approved, easily get them scheduled.
One of the best ways to boost social media engagement is to, well, engage more. Sounds obvious, but it is another one of those things that can take so much time that it often gets ignored. Manually seeking out mentions of your brand on social media would take hours, but with a tool like Social Searcher, it does all of that work for you, so that your time can be spent strictly on engaging your audience as they are discussing your brand.
It doesn’t look great to respond to a tweet or Instagram comment 16 weeks later once you find it. Social Searcher helps you keep on top of social media conversations so that you can respond quickly. This is great for both positive and negative engagement. Negative comments are going to happen and that is okay, as long as you handle it! A tool like this makes it easier to ensure no comments are slipping through the cracks.
Social Searcher can also help you with various audience insights to help you craft your perfect social media strategy that is sure to please your specific audience. Social Searcher can help you find the right hashtags, the right time to post your content, and even which platforms you should be focused on.
We already discussed live video, but we couldn’t stop there. Video marketing in general is incredibly popular, especially with regards to social media. Video is consistently the type of content that gets the best engagement. So, if you are looking to boost your own engagement, get started with video!
Wave.video is a really cool tool that can help you easily put together social media video, even if you have no video creation experience. You can choose from their library of stock video, upload your own video content, and add other features like text, icons, and filters to help your video stand out. Best of all, you can easily use their platform to optimize your video for different platforms- including Instagram and Facebook Story formats, as well as Facebook Cover video.
Their template collection can also help you get started if you are unsure about how to get started, or if you simply want to crank out content quickly to start sharing on social. This is a great tool to help you get started with social video. You no longer have an excuse not to try!
Wave.video is the best tool for creating social video, and Crello is our choice for best tool for creating all other visual social media content. Easily choose what type of image you are looking to create and start creating right away. Crello has all the right sizes for content on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and so much more.
Their easy to use builder will save you so much time when building the perfect social media image. Pull in your own image or choose from their collection of stock images which includes a large selection of free images as well as paid images.
Crello also has a really great template section that will help you create stunning social media visuals in no time at all. If you don’t have, or can’t afford, your own in-house graphic designer, Crello will help ensure you still get excellent social media imagery that will boost your engagement rates across the board.
One of the best ways to organically boost your social media engagement is to make smart use of hashtags. Hashtags can introduce your content to new people and help you build up your audience without having to spend a dime.
Hashtag Tracker is a great hashtag marketing tool that will help you research and locate the right hashtags that you should be using based on your brand and audience. Their tool is simple to use- type in one hashtag and click search to see how well the hashtag is performing on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in real time.
Regularly check in with this tool to see if you are still using the right hashtags, or to see if there are some new ones you should be including as well. It’s easy to go overboard with hashtags, but keep in mind that more isn’t always better. A recent study found that Instagram posts with 9-12 hashtags received the most engagement.
Are you really looking to boost your social media engagement and overall presence? Look no further than the powerful world of influencer marketing. Study after study shows that working with influencers is a great way to build your brand and presence on social media. In fact, research shows that over 90% of marketers who have tried it found it to be effective.
If you have no idea how to begin, you need a tool like Influential. It uses AI to help ensure that your brand matches with the perfect influencer that has an audience that will be similar to your own. Working with the wrong influencer is a great way to waste money and time. Instead, why not harness the power of AI to ensure you are connecting with just the right person?
Influencer marketing isn’t just a passing trend, it is here to stay. Don’t miss out on what it has to offer your brand! Use a tool like Influential so that you have peace of mind your campaign will be successful, and so that you don’t have to spend your own time trying to track down and connect with the right influencer.
Finally, if you are new to social media, or simply want to draw more attention to your channels, sometimes you have to step off of social media in order to do so. By using web push, you can alert your audience that you are now on Instagram (for example) or to promote a certain social media post, such as a giveaway.
This is a great way to increase your presence on social media and get people interested in the content that you have to offer there. Consider creating a series of campaigns when you first create a new social channel that will alert users what they have to look forward to. Will you have live streams? Share new products? Host giveaways? Let your web push audience know so that they will have a great reason to head on over to your social media platform and follow you.
Or, consider utilizing our Zapier integration in order to directly send out your social media content via web push in order to really give your subscribers an idea of the type of content you are sharing. It’s a great, quick way to spread your social content with your web push subscribers.
To improve your social media engagement you’ve got to stay active at (almost) all times, post quality content your audience enjoys, connect with the right influencers, respond to feedback, and more. It’s not an easy, or quick, job. Thankfully, these tools to boost social media engagement will help you achieve better results in less time. What’s not to ‘like’ about that? Pun absolutely intended.
What is your favorite social media engagement tool? What do you find helps you out the most and saves you the most time? Let us know!
Are you looking to get started with web push to help advertise and promote your social media? Get started for free with Aimtell, or learn more about web push by reading our Beginner’s Guide.