Five Free Tools to Help You Keep Track of Your Social Media

Photo Credit: Jason Howie

As an entrepreneur, balancing your social media strategy and channels isn’t always your top priority. Social media and online marketing can be time consuming and often the one thing that seems to be pushed to the backburner when determining your priorities in starting and developing your business.

Although social media isn’t always the top priority for business owners, the importance of managing and maintaining an online presence is key to developing your brand’s image, and getting your name out there. Especially since social media is relatively free to use, it’s an excellent marketing tool to utilize in any stage of your business development.

These tools offer free options that will not only keep your budgets happy, but also allow you to easily manage, monitor, and develop creative content quickly and effectively.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a tool that allows you to monitor your social media feeds by tracking what people are talking about usingkey words, or hashtags. Hootsuite also allows you to pre-schedule your social media content as far in advance as you’d like, allowing you to stop worrying about posting on a daily basis. With the free version of Hootsuite you can connect up to three different accounts, and if you need more than that, Hootsuite offers budget-friendly options that give you more features such as analytics to track how your social media channels are doing.

Feedly

Feedly is a tool that allows you to easily aggregate news for you to conveniently share on your social media platforms. Nobody wants to follow a brand that only talks about themselves, so Feedly is a great tool to find news and information around your industry that your network would be interested in. Feedly is not only available on web browsers but also on Android and iOS, allowing you to easily find and share information when you’re on-the-go.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool that keeps everything you’re looking or on Twitter in one place, and that allows you to pre-schedule and monitor your feeds. With TweetDeck, you can easily customize your Twitter experience to exactly what you want to monitor, and also pre-schedule your tweets in advance to help cut back on time.

Piktochart

Piktochart allows you to create attractive visuals to use throughout your social media channels. If you have some interesting or cool information and data to share, but don’t know how to present it to your readers, Piktochart can help. This tool allows you to develop stunning infographics with easy-to-use, premade templates. Once you enter in all the information you want, all you have to do is save the file and share it through your social media networks.

Swayy

Swayy is a tool that creates a personalized and visually appealing dashboard for you filled with content that matches what you’re tweeting about and what your audience would be interested in reading. Simply connect some (or all) of your social media accounts, and Swayy will pull keywords from your profile and suggest content in a variety of platforms such as, video, articles, or infographics that you can easily share with a click of a button. You can also choose to share the content you find later, by pre-scheduling the content to go out on your social media networks whenever you want!

These tools can help you not only stay on top of your social media channels but also excel in the social media space. Building a social media presence doesn’t have to consume all of your time. Taking some time to implement and learn the above tools can help save you time in the long run!

To download a free eBook on social media for entrepreneurs from BDC, click here.

Written By: Lauren Marinigh, Social Media & Content Creation Coordinator, Futurpreneur Canada