Eager to step up your social media game but overwhelmed with planning, creating, and posting content? These 10 free tools are game changers for assisting you and your business when it comes to creating and scheduling engaging content for all your social media platforms.
Content Creation
1. Canva:
Not to exaggerate, but Canva may be our favorite tool out there. They have an amazing free account option (and an even more incredible paid version). Compared to other more technical platforms, Canva is a very user friendly way to design graphics and marketing collateral.
Some of their standout features include:
Different sizing options. You can search by sizes such as “Facebook post” or “Instagram story”. You never have to worry about dimensions again! If you want, you can still customize your size by pixels.
Free graphic and image options. While some of their graphics are only accessible through Canva Pro, they have a huge library of searchable images and graphics to make your posts pop.
Animate your posts. With simple animations, you can create delightful video posts to step up your social media game.
2. Animoto:
Seamlessly create professional-quality and captioned videos for social media with Animoto. Engaging video content is all the rage with TikTok and Instagram Reels, but it can be time consuming and tedious. Using a template or starting from scratch, this site is a wiz at making marketing videos look professional.
Free stock images
It can be difficult always having professional quality images for social media content. Thankfully, there are resources such as Unsplash and Pexels that have great free content... just don’t forget to give credit to creators where credit is due!
3. Unsplash:
“The internet’s source of freely-usable images. Powered by creators everywhere.
4. Pexels:
“The best free stock photos & videos shared by talented creators.”
Post Scheduling
Facebook has been evolving their offerings, and we love Creator Studio! It is a great way to organize and analyze your Facebook and Instagram pages. It is free as long as you have a business page. You can connect your Instagram account in Creator Studio to see insights for that page as well.
With Creator Studio you can:
Schedule Facebook and Instagram posts
Analyze the performance of your previous posts
View your inbox and respond to Facebook Messenger messages, Facebook comments, Instagram comments, and Instagram direct messages/story mentions
Access copyright-free music and sounds. This is a gold mine background music or sound effects for videos that you can use free and legally!
From Business Suite, you can:
See a quick overview of your business, including updates, recent posts and ads, and insights. You can also create an ad from this page.
Schedule Facebook and Instagram posts.
If your business has a Commerce Account set up, you can access this from Business Suite.
Facebook Business Suite is similar to Creator Studio, with a few different functions. Facebook Business Suite was made to make business management and communication simpler. Because of this, the content creation and metrics are more restricted, but responding to communications from your customers is easy. Creator Studio was made to create and manage content for stories, videos, and feed posts with more in-depth metrics.
7. Hootsuite:
Though Facebook Creator Studio has taken our hearts for Facebook and Instagram scheduling, it would not be fair to not include a veteran of the social media planning and scheduling game.
With free and paid versions, Hootsuite is another great resource for managing all your social media platforms in one area. Contrary to Facebook Creator Studio, Hootsuite is a good home base for planning, creating, and scheduling for all social platforms.
A content calendar is an all-encompassing spreadsheet that will hold your social media schedule (and life) together. It is not an online software, but it is still an essential tool to keep your social media organized. Complete with color-coding, labeling, link holding tabs, and more, this online content planner is sure to keep your posts in check.
Upon first glance this process can look a bit overwhelming, but with some guidance from this blog or from us, you’ll be ready to crank out content for months on end!
Other:
9. Linktree:
Another great resource to include in your Instagram bio is a Linktree link. An Instagram bio only allows one link, but why choose between your latest blog post, company website, or contact page when you can have one link that connects your audience to all of your content.
Note: Think about your business goals and your audience. Is it important to provide the links to content for your audience or to drive traffic to your website? If traffic to your website is important, we recommend creating a landing page on your business website that provides links to content of your choice. If you need an example, check ours out here.
10. Bitly:
Have a long URL but want to include the full link in your bio, graphic, or email? Bitly is a URL shortening service and link management platform so you do not get stuck with all the chaotic hashes and slashes of lengthy URLs.
While social media for your business can be time consuming, it is essential to maintain customer relationships and loyalty. Done correctly, it can even bring in new customers! If you are looking to dive deeper into your social media, reach out to us! We would love to talk through your goals and help you achieve them. In the meantime, happy posting!