Social Media Tools & Tips

Tushar Kanwar hand-picks tools and tips to help you create the necessary social media toolkit to set you off to a great start.

- Tushar Kanwar

No matter the size of your business, making the decision to be on the social media bandwagon is the easy part these days. If you run a small business though, one thing that you probably don’t have a lot of is time, and picking the right set of tools to manage your social media is one of the hurdles faced by firms when going social. I have known many people who were hung up on evaluating tools unendingly…only to have weeks pass without any significant progress!

Social Mention

socialmention.com

The right place to start is to figure out what people are saying about your brand—one way conversations rarely work, right? You do this by listening not only to your audiences but also to the social web at large, and social mention lets you do just that; monitor news sources, web sites, blogs/ microblogs and a lot more for key terms that may relate to your brand or industry segment. The tool also associates the sentiment (positive/neutral/negative) related to the mention and who/what the source of these mentions were. This tool gives you a high-level view of how your brand is perceived, providing you direct insight into opportunities where your brand can engage with individual influencers to set right misconceptions or quell rumors before they gain traction. As this is a free tool, you can start using it from day one with no additional outlay.

Canva

canva.com

Studies show that visual content added to your social posts can significantly improve user engagement. To cook up such powerful images, try Canva. It’s a drag-and-drop graphics editor that comes packed to the gills with pre-sized social media templates and a large library of graphics (both paid and royalty-free) and fonts. The intuitive interface lets novices get started quickly, and there are free tutorials to master advanced concepts.

Buffer

buffer.com