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The Ultimate Checklist to Select Social Media Tools for Your Small Business

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Social media is one of the most effective marketing platforms for your small business.

The Ultimate Checklist to Select Social Media Tools for Your Small Business

Through social media, you can connect with your audience, build trust, and turn them into loyal customers. Furthermore, your business will gain more profit and scale up.

However, it’s almost impossible to get these results on social media without using the right social media tools. This can be a major headache for most small business owners.

You want these results but you also want to avoid throwing your money down the drain on unnecessary tools. How do you pick the right social media tools to help your business grow?

In this blog post, discover the ultimate 12-point checklist to help you select social media tools for your small business:

1. Your social media goals

You have to define why you want to engage in social media activities – and the objectives that you want to achieve.
Some common goals for social media campaigns are:

  • Raising brand awareness
  • Boosting your customer engagement
  • Providing customer service
  • Generating leads for your business
  • Driving traffic to your website
  • Making more sales

Why Do You Need to Specify a Social Media Goal?

First of all, it will give your campaigns a focus and help you to create an effective strategy. In addition to that, you’re able to understand your needs to select social media tools.

2. Set your budget

Every business must spend according to their means to ensure survival and growth. So, inside your marketing budget, you also need to define how much you want to spend on social media.
Usually, your social media budget will consider elements such as:

  • Personnel cost
  • Content creation cost
  • Cost of tools

The reality is that some social media tools can be costlier than what you planned for your entire social media budget.

And the truth is, you need to be prepared to invest more than you might’ve wanted to initially. Because even if these tools cost you money, they can also help you save – and make – more money.

The right tools save you a lot of time and by provide you with better, more powerful tools to effectively sell online.

3. Cost of tools

You need more than a single tool for various aspects of your social media campaigns. Some of them are social media management, content creation, curation, and others.

After making a list of your preferred tools, you need to ask yourself:

  • Does the total cost fit into my social media budget?
  • If your answer is no, then see if you can find a similar tool that is just as good and has the features you need.

Otherwise, you might need to look into investing more than you initially planned for; and, where possible, leverage free tools.

For example, some tools, like Buffer, offer a free plan – however, there’s only so much that you can do with the free plan; the question you need to ask yourself is whether the features you get for free are enough for your needs.

4. Scheduling features

For a small business, a single person may be in charge of all your marketing efforts. This makes it difficult to catch up on all the profitable marketing activities.

Meanwhile, it’s impossible to get results on social media without the consistency of updates and engagement.

With scheduling, you can create social media content for a whole week and set them to go live at different times of the week.

You need to consider if the scheduling feature of a social media tool you select can meet your posting needs; for example:

  • If you post a lot of content, then you need a tool that allows you to set up automated queues
  • Likewise, if you post a lot, then you might also save a lot of time if you had bulk uploading options
  • If you’re active on Instagram, then look for tools that support direct publishing
  • If you share a lot of media content, ensure you can also schedule videos/GIFs, etc. and that you have a media library to upload them all for ease of use

5. Social media platforms supported

If you run a small business, you only need to focus on a few social media channels to optimize your resources. And these are the channels where your ideal audience hangs out.

After all, these are the channels that will be responsible for the majority of your results.

After deciding on the channels to go for, you need to ensure that your social media management tool supports them.

This will save time, cost and help you to manage your social media accounts on a single dashboard. For instance, a tool like Agorapulse allows you to create your post and send it to all your social media accounts once.

Agorapulse

To get more important details on picking a social media management tool for your small business, you can check out this guide.

6. Engagement features

Marketing on social media is a two-way street. Apart from sharing great content, you also need to interact with your audience.

When you do this, you build trust and a stronger relationship. Ultimately, these bring in more sales down the line.

When you select social media tools, ensure they allow you to like, reshare, and reply to comments from the dashboard. This will save you the time and stress of logging into your different social media accounts to engage with your followers.

Plus, look for any extra features that can help, too; for example, some tools allow you to save replies so that you can respond faster to people and others allow you to create automation to respond automatically to certain users.

7. User experience

A social media tool should help you save time and improve your campaigns. But if the dashboard is so complicated you’re unable to carry out the basic tasks, then it will waste your time rather than save it.

Your social media management tool, in particular, will be a big part of your day-to-day life and something that will help you every step of the way.

Because of this, it’s essential that you’re very comfortable using it – and the best way to find that out is to try their free trial just to see if it’s the right fit.

8. Content creation

It’s simple, without great and regular content, you lose followers and more opportunities to engage with your audience.

To get high engagement for your content, you need to add visuals to your written content. Majorly, these include:

  • Images: motivational quotes, ads, promotional posts, etc
  • Videos

Instead of spending hundreds of dollars to hire designers, you can spend a fraction of that on social media content creation tools. And you get professional visual content that your audience will love.

For example, tools like Canva allow you to create all of your social media imagery by yourself, easily, with access to hundreds of templates and images to use:

Canva

9. Content curation

For some platforms like Twitter and Instagram, you need to share a lot of content. This is where content curation tools come in. They can help you find great content in your industry to share with your followers.

With this, you can keep your social media accounts active and satisfy your audience.

If you need more content for your pages, then you should find a content curation tool. A tool that does this well is Quuu as the content is vetted by human beings before they’re recommended for your accounts.

10. Analytics

The accurate way to track your social media performance is through your analytics. Of course, the metrics you track will depend on your social media goals.

You should check that your social media tool provides the metrics you want to track from your social media campaigns. Some common metrics businesses track on social media are:

  • Impressions
  • Reach
  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Clicks
  • Conversions

Being able to track these metrics will give you an idea of how successful your campaigns are. Furthermore, it will guide your strategy for future social media campaigns.

See an example from Sproutsocial:

Sprout Social.

So take a look at your social media goals, make a list of the metrics you’d need to track in order to accurately measure your social media success, then look for tools that can provide that information for you.

Ready to Select Social Media Tools?

When picking social media tools, you need to understand how those tools can help your business bring in more customers.

Go through this checklist to make your own list of features that you need to have; then, you can use that to focus on the tools that are most relevant to you and find the ones that offer the features you need.

By doing this, you can improve your productivity on social media and generate better results.

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Lilach Bullock

Speaker; Social Media and Online Marketing Expert at LilachBullock.com
Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.
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Comments

  3. This is a great blog that covers all the major points of social media marketing. I highly agree with you on this blog. I have experience of 6 months in social media marketing and this blog is quite helpful and informative. Thanks for posting the blog.
    Rajat would love you to read ..What is Online Marketing?My Profile

    Reply

  6. Many thanks for the post. I have a small business of production, for manufacturing and exporting of Jute, cotton and non-woven bags.
    This article will help us to develop our business.

    Reply

  12. social media has great impact on any website or blog .social media can enhance your site and blog within short time.

    Reply

  13. Canva has definitely changed my life! I didn’t realize until recently that I can even create social media posts with it. Life changing experience!

    Reply

  22. For SMBs with little to no expetise or budget those tools can definately be useful for establishing a continous social media CI/design and not annoy people with some quirky layouts. But: as nice as those designs look, as generic are they. And at some point your customers will notice that. So it’s just a temporary thing IMHO to get the online marketing train rolling and if you want to take off, you better evolve.

    Another thing: When it comes to design and content tools, there’s like every other week a new suite/toolset – and everyone tries to underbid everyone else. Even if no one like to really go beneath the 9,95 bar permanently.

    But when it comes to tracking solutions and how to secure and prove your success/failure, you really have to get the big money out. I love sproutsocial, but it’s not even as close as cheap as any content creation/pruning/nurturing/… tool. In SMBs I often experience that those low-priced tools are really popular, BECAUSE you can’t track anything. So everyone can avoid the “Well, what did we really achieve?” situation for months… till the sh** hits the fan. 🙁

    Reply

    • Hi Flo, thanks so much for taking the time to leave a comment 🙂

      While I do agree that a lot of these very-easy-to-use social media design tools have some generic templates, I do also think that you can create some quality content with them. And sometimes, even a simple design can look great.

      Yes, SMBs can be quite reluctant to invest in more expensive tools! Even though they definitely should, especially when it comes to analytics, as you said. The more you know about your results, the better equipped you are to improve them!
      lilach bullock would love you to read ..Promo.com: the effortless way to make effective short videos and gain customersMy Profile

      Reply

  23. Excellent article, helps me a lot. The best way to spread our business is promoting in the social media either through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

    Reply

  24. I agree with the comments above about Canva being the best tool for content creation on social media. I had a query on paid social media tools and whether it’s worth investing in them. Do they provide significantly high value as compared to free tools? Thanks for this article. It gave me some perspective on social media marketing in general.

    Reply

    • Thanks so much for your comment 🙂 Agreed, Canva is amazing 🙂

      I’m a big believer that it’s worth investing in certain types of tools for your business; it depends on what you need and what you’re looking for. It’s only worth investing if it actually saves you time and/or has extra features that you can’t get from a free tool; and, perhaps just as importantly, if you’re willing to learn how to use the tool and make the most of it. So if you do invest in a tool, do a demo, watch videos and check out the Help pages, explore features – you need to really know a tool to get real value out of it.

      Hope that helps 🙂
      lilach bullock would love you to read ..Promo.com: the effortless way to make effective short videos and gain customersMy Profile

      Reply

  27. Great article.Content is also the main thing.It’s simple, without great and regular content, you lose followers and more opportunities to engage with your audience.

    Reply

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