You’ve just started your small business journey and want to establish a presence online, but you don’t have a big budget to pay for social media tools to get started. That’s not a problem! There are many great tools out there that are free. Here are our three favourite social media tools to get you started.
1. Canva
Great graphics are essential for social media posts and Canva is the easiest way to create them without any design experience necessary. It’s an intuitive program and there are an amazing amount of tutorials available online to help you accomplish whatever you’re looking for.
The free plan gives you everything you need to design graphics for social media posts or websites, PDFs for informational booklets or flyers, amazing presentations that help you standout, and so much more. You get access to thousands of photos and graphics, as well as free templates. While it won’t give you the same capabilities as Photoshop, it will more than meet the needs of most small business owners.
After using it for a few months you may find yourself wanting to access some of the Pro images, graphics, and fonts. You can either pay for them per use, or upgrade to Canva Pro. Pro offers some great features like the Background Remover and the ability to share directly to your social media accounts from Canva.
2. Trello
Trello is an all-round amazing app for small business. As a Kanban-style, list-making app, it’s an awesome visual tool for organizing your business, managing projects, tracking tasks, and collaborating with your team. There are many ways you can use it, but the one we want to focus on is using it to plan your social media.
What makes Trello so great for social media is that you can set it up however you like. We typically use one board per brand. Within the board, each week is a list, and each card is a post. You can upload your graphics, write out your captions, make notes, and have other team members review it. Posts can easily be moved around if the schedule changes.
Using Trello makes it easy to search for specific posts, a great feature if you’re looking to re-purpose previous content or figure out when you last posted it. It keeps all your posts centralized and will make your life so much easier, and we’ve barely scratch the surface on what it can do.
3. Meta Business Suite
There are so many social media scheduling apps out there. Some are free, some cost money. For the most basic, easy-to-use, straightforward tool, use Meta Business Suite. For posting on Facebook and Instagram, this one this is the place to start.
With Meta Business Suite you can post to both platforms, create newsfeed posts or stories, get optimal posting time suggestions, and schedule your posts in advance. When creating the post you have the ability to tailor it to either platform, meaning you can add hashtags for Instagram, or tag a business on each platform. There’s very little learning curve with this app compared to many other social media tools. Switching between different accounts is also super easy.
Meta Business Suite also gives you access to the Ads Manager, insights, your messenger, and more.
The biggest downside to this tool is that it’s limited to Facebook and Instagram. If you need a scheduling app for Pinterest you should look at Tailwind, or for Twitter look into TweetDeck.
With these three tools the process of creating and scheduling content is simple. Plan out your posts in Trello and write the captions. Head to Canva to create stunning graphics for your post and save them in Trello. Then use Meta Business Suite to schedule your posts for the week. Now you can focus on the other important parts of running your small business.
Get help with your business social media and content creation needs. At Deep Woods Marketing we specialize in helping small business owners share their story and get thri business out. Reach out today.
