9 free tools to create & manage social media content
Once you’ve got a killer digital and social media marketing strategy in place (if you don’t have one of those – let’s chat) creating, curating and coordinating content for your preferred channels is easy with the wealth of free and low cost options available to help you bring your strategy to life.
Here’s our top 9 free tools you need in your marketing stack to help you create and manage digital content.
Creation
These days it’s relatively easy for small and medium businesses to create their own marketing material in house (though we always recommend you get the experts in when it comes to crafting your brand and primary messaging, look, and feel). Everything from Facebook & Instagram posts through to proposals and presentations can be created and downloaded with the help of these handy apps.
Canva – With a raft of templates and designs available for you to draw on for inspiration, Canva allows anyone to easily create social media and marketing material for a range of platforms and functions.
Adobe Spark - A free online and mobile graphic design app, Spark allows you to create beautiful and professional graphics AND video on your desktop, laptop or iOS device.
Adobe Premiere Rush – So this one isn’t actually free BUT it is a great low cost option ($14.95/mo) for those wanting to incorporate more video content into their digital strategy. This app makes it easy to create great video stories on your desktop, laptop or iOS device.
Curation
One of the things I recommend many of my clients incorporate into their digital strategy is to share content relevant to your audience from external sources – reposting or sharing images/articles and content from complementary outlets. These tools make it easy for you to curate content digests for yourself to help you stay up to date, discover new content on particular topics, and automate the sharing of that content on social media.
Google Trends – Stuck for ideas on what to share, or what to see what everyone is talking about? Google Trends lets you see searches that are trending in real time, but also let’s you search for trend information on specific topics.
Flipboard – A nifty tool that lets you create your own personal digital magazine by combining posts and updates from various social channels and news sources.
Quuu – Quuu let’s you specify which topics you’re interested in and when you want them posted to your social channels. You can manually approve content, or you Quuu can do it for you (all curated content is reviewed by a human before it’s posted!). It’s available in both a Free and Paid plan depending on the functionality you’re after.
Coordination
So you’ve got the strategy and have started to build a bank of content for your audience to engage with, now you need an easy way to manage how you share and monitor it across your various platforms (if you’re not sure which platform/s you should be across, let’s chat). These tools make it easy to visually plan out your posts, schedule updates in advance, and monitor their performance.
Trello – This free web and mobile based application is great for managing virtually anything. Create lists, assign users, set tasks – Trello can be used in a number of ways to visually organise your digital content from idea through to posting. Check out their “Digital Posting Schedule” inspiration board here.
Later – This is a great desktop and phone app to help you Schedule, plan, manage and track your Instagram posts. The free version lets you schedule and monitor up to 30 posts on one profile for Insta, Twitter, Facebook & Pinterest, with the paid plans adding in features like scheduling videos and stories!
Plann – For those looking to create a meticulous Instagram feed, Plann is an Australian app that lets you visually plan your Insta feed so you can see how everything looks before you post.
While these tools help you to create, curate, and coordinate digital content across multiple platforms, it’s important to make sure you’re not posting for the sake of posting. The content you create, and how and where you share that, should be carefully considered as a part of your broader digital and marketing strategy and aligned to your business goals. If you want help to craft a digital marketing strategy that supports your broader business goals and helps you to connect, engage, and inspire your audience, let’s chat.
