5 FREE Tools to Make Your Social Media Presence Better
5 FREE Tools to Make Your Social Media Presence Better
Why do you need to be on social media?
Social media is more than a client acquisition tool. Meaning even if you’re not getting new clients via social media, it can still do a lot of other things for your brand. It will help you stay top of mind to people who follow you. It can act as a tool for potential clients to get more in-depth information about how you work, who you work for and what your brand personality is about. It can be a way to connect with possible collaborators and a way to help people see you as an expert in your field.
Growing social media takes commitment, time, energy and consistency. These 5 tools can help you see the kind of returns on your commitment that help improve your business.
The Best 5 Free Tools to Make Your Social Media Presence Better
Unsplash
Canva
Scheduling apps.
Stories. Stories Stories Stories.
Engage with your audience.
Unsplash - Free, quality, anti-stock style photos
Stock photos are notoriously expensive. Learning photography skills is time consuming (and often, also very expensive). So, curating collections of free quality stock photos to use in your social media is a great way to avoid these expenses. They even have pre-curated collections for you to browse through. There are other free stock photography services out there, but none as expansive and easy to use as Unsplash. These photos are “royalty free” which means you can use them for your business without having to reference the artist (although, it’s nice to share some love!), and you can use them for business without infringing on copyrights.
2. Canva
You can look like a graphic designer yourself with Canva. Canva is a tool that lets you create graphics without This site lets you create graphics for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter. Any social media you’re on. They even offer mini-courses to teach you how to make the most out of your content. They have free and paid versions, but the free version of Canva has worked just fine for me.
3. Scheduling Apps
These you have to be careful with. You don’t want your content to come off as staged, but it’s also extremely useful for solo-entrepreneurs to be able to batch social media work. Once you’re in the groove of planning and writing your social media content, often times you can get into a flow of it. These tools are also a great way to ensure that your content is cohesive. Here’s my favorite:
Facebook - just the scheduling tool built into facebook.
Instagram - Planoly. You can save hashtag groupings on here, create stories from templates, and see what your feed will look like before posting.
Pinterest - Tailwind is a paid app, and I haven’t actually started using it myself, but I still think it deserves a place on the list. It even has the ability to tell you the best time to post your content! That’s something the rest of these scheduling apps have yet to do, and can be really useful.
4. Stories. StoriesStoriesStories.
Don’t let it hurt your feelings if your Instagram feed engagement is down. That’s actually the norm these days. But you know where people are engaging with brands? On stories! So get onto your Facebook and Instagram stories. If you’re comfortable, going live or doing Instagram TV is great for your engagement as well.
Stories are meant to be ways for people to be more engaging and “real” than the pre-planned feeds on Instagram or posts to your pages on Facebook. You have a lot more freedom with stories since they’ll only be around for 24 hours. You don’t have to worry about being perfect. Just showing up!
This tip feeds directly into our last step to making your social media presence better...
5. Engaging with your audience.
On Instagram, Facebook and Twitter you should never post something and forget about it. That’s the danger of the scheduling apps mentioned in #3. Make sure after you post something that you’re responding to people who ask questions or make comments. This will help boost your discoverability on social media algorithms. Beyond that, engaging with people helps build your brand! People are more likely to engage with a brand that actively engages back. So unless you’re Kendall Jenner with how ever many million (billion?) followers she has, you should be engaging with people on your social media.
Don’t wait for people to engage with you, go on to your dream clients’ (remember this exercise?) social media channels and engage with them there! Be authentic, no copy and pasting “Beautiful 👍🏻” in the comment section. Be real about it. Share useful or interesting insights. Don’t be shy!
