One hundred years from now, when historians are asked what they labeled as the biggest breakthrough in human development following the turn of the millennium, chances are that their answer will be the rise of social media.
What began as an avenue for individuals to connect with one another has evolved into an intricate entity in which businesses can market their brand messaging to mass amounts of people. Now, the big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram have become mainstays in nearly all marketing strategies.
As fun and interactive as social media looks on the surface, its use for branding purposes can actually be quite difficult without the proper resources. Here are three tools to incorporate into your social media efforts to help maximize your own ROI.
Social Jukebox
Social media marketing is truly a job that never sleeps. Therefore, it’s a wise move to leave the actual task of posting to the robots.
Enter Social Jukebox. This platform allows you to create engaging social content at your convenience, then set a schedule for your material to be posted at the most optimal times. Once you have crafted a number of posts, you can insert them into the “Jukebox” and let the automated system handle the rest. After all the content in the jukebox has been posted, it works like an hourglass in that it simply turns over and recycles the posts.
When the burden of posting has been lifted, your social media team has more time to focus on valuable tasks like creating stellar content and personally engaging with the users.
Social Jukebox has five tiers of pricing to choose from in regards to the size of your business or extent of your campaign. Find the one that fits your needs and leave the monotonous tasks to the machines so you have more time to focus on building a unique social presence.
Canva
A big side effect of the skyrocketing popularity of social media is that the stream of information moves at an incredibly fast pace. For that reason, the name of the game is capturing attention at first glance. And that can happen quickly: According to research, our brains can identify images seen in as little as 13 seconds. This is why visual content is so vital to social media marketing.
Now, not all business owners or social media managers are graphic designers by trade. Luckily, Canva is an exceptionally user-friendly tool that allows you to create a wide variety of authentic visual content. From generic images and invitations, all the way up to full presentations, Canva offers a plethora of compelling templates that give you everything you need to create posts that will catch users’ eyes. Additionally, there is an extensive library of pre-created visual effects at your disposal.
With the drag-and-drop function, you can easily add new elements to existing images like fonts, colors, filters and more. Canva also has an app for the iPad so you can design on the go whenever creativity strikes.
The best part is, this platform is free. The only time you would need to pay is if you wanted to use a premium image. These go for $1 apiece.
Creating top-notch visuals for your posts is essential for engaging new and existing followers. With this tool, you don’t need an in-depth education in graphic design to do so.
Mention
Crafting the perfect post that results in high levels of engagement is the most difficult task in social media marketing. That is why the most effective campaigns do not start off with posting right out of the gate. Gaining traction on social media involves a great deal of listening to what users are talking about, then strategically joining the conversations with relevant content.
Mention is a great social media monitoring tool that enables you to track every aspect of your company, competitors, campaigns or industry as a whole.
With this resource, you can select specific keywords or brand names pertaining to your business. From there, you will pick up on real-time insights as to what the hot button issues are within the industry so you can create the most relevant posts.
Additionally, Mention helps you pinpoint the best influencers to target. Influencer marketing is essentially the process of partnering with prominent figures within a certain community to talk about your brand or campaign to their many loyal followers.
When you select keywords to target, Mention will show you the people using them with the largest followings and engagement levels. This function gives you great context for who might be a primary candidate for an influencer campaign.
Mention is a one-stop resource that gives you everything you need to learn how to craft the most compelling posts relevant to your target audience.
Social media is a world that is evolving at an incredible rate. Strategies that worked one day may be obsolete the next. The most important thing you can do to prepare is equip yourself with the best tools to ensure your campaign is well-planned and executed from A to Z. 
Pratik Dholakiya
Pratik Dholakiya is the co-founder of E2M, a digital marketing agency, and Preceptist, a content marketing agency. He regularly speaks at various conferences and events about digital marketing issues. As a passionate mar...
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