The Best Content Creation and Management Tools for Social Media

Creating and managing social media takes time, and creating good social media content while making sure that it is effective and gives your high returns takes even a lot more time. But the good news is with the right tools, you can save a bunch of time and create epic pieces of content in minutes and ultimately make your life as a social media manager or small business owner much easier. 

Whether you are looking for content inspirations or you’re looking to create awesome infographics, or you’re looking to track hashtags for your social media strategies, or anything else in between, here are a few tools that you can use to really improve your social media marketing efforts. 

Content Idea Tools

When creating content for social media, it is important to have great ideas that will translate to effective posts. One of the best tools for content inspiration is a website called AnswerThePublic.com. It is a free tool that visually shows you queries from Google and presents it to you via a categorized image.

For example, if you type in the keywords “Instagram” into the website’s search bar and click the “get questions” button, the website will give you all the possible content ideas in visual formats. You will be able to see a wheel of keywords related to your topic which are organized into different categories such as questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals and related. 

By typing in just one or two keywords, AnswerThePublic generates hundreds of results which can be used as reference for your content ideas. 

There are also other tools you can use online to get inspiration from when it comes to thinking of content ideas for your social media pages like Pinterest, GoogleTrends and Quora. 

You can even use unconventional platforms like Usenet newsgroups where there is a community of users that may possibly be discussing niche topics related to your business. From there you can gather information on what your market likes or join in the conversation to see what other ideas you can get inspiration from.

Design Tools

Sometimes posting pictures alone on social media is simply not enough to attract and convert your audience, so it is really important to create content that stands out whether it means sometimes having to create infographics, or making memes for Instagram or creating video content. One of the tools that can help you with that is Canva. 

Canva has become a popular design tool for a lot of users because it offers hundreds of templates, images and illustration assets, and dozens of fonts and text styles. Canva makes it easy for you to create unique, high-quality images that are good for sharing on social media or even your blogs. 

Once you’ve chosen your template or layout, you can use the resource library to drag and drop different elements of your preference, you can add or edit text and adjust core settings like fonts, color, image filters, opacity to make your graphics. 

Another design tool is animake.com. It is a tool for creating animation videos and it does it exceptionally well. You can make all kinds of animated videos like whiteboards, vertical infographic presentations, you name it, they’ve got it. This tool has the largest collections of animated characters, properties, icons, charts and maps for you to use.

For those who want to create GIFs, you can use ezgif.com. You simply have to upload several images on ezgif and it creates a gif out of them. You can then change the size and play with animation settings to make sure that it is perfect for you. 

Stock Images & Videos

Once in a while, you may find yourself in a situation wherein you will have to use stock images for your social media especially when you do not have any creative assets to work with. If you are stuck in that situation, you can check out pexels.com.

Pexels provides high-quality and completely free stock photos. All photos are nicely tagged, searchable and you can easily filter the pictures through orientation, size and color. 

Another website is unsplash.com. Unsplash has a massive collection of not only high-resolution photos but they are also free for use. Their team really prioritizes high-quality images and new amazing submissions that are featured as best photos on their homepage. 

When using stock photos, however, you have to remember that it should be relevant to the content you’re posting, consistent with your branding and should be unique enough to catch the attention of your audience. 

Scheduling Tools

A scheduling tool enables you to manage your social media accounts through a variety of publishing and scheduling features that allow you to do effective and efficient mass posting.

With the right scheduling tool, you can save a ton of time and produce a balanced mix of content across all social networks to engage with your audience at the right time. 

One of the best tools for that is Buffer. It has both a website and a mobile application that allows you to schedule content to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn from just one dashboard. Buffer allows you to create a present publishing schedule for each social account so content can always get published at the most optimal time for each social channel because it is very important for the post to be seen at the right time so that they can get the most reach. You can also customize your tone depending on which social network you will be posting at. You can change the tone, hashtags and other elements to fit the channel you will be using. From your calendar, you will be able to see your scheduled posts so you can easily see what’s upcoming for each of your social media channels. 

Analytics Tools

Being a social media manager is not just about posting beautiful pictures on Instagram. That is not enough. That is why it is essential to invest in social media analytic tools that can help you keep tabs on the progress of your marketing strategies. 

One of the best tools on the market for cross-channel social media analytics is sproutsocial.com. 

The great thing about SproutSocial is that you can quickly organize and share your data with presentation ready reports which come with both templated and customizable report options. That means you can truly understand the metrics through the various ways it is generated and customized.

SproutSocial also has an Advanced Listening Tool feature that allows you to get valuable data from demographics, campaign performance to consumer sentiment. SproutSocial can give you a fast, user-friendly way to discover and display social insights. 

Whatever requirement you might have throughout the whole social media management journey from content creation to analysis, there are tons of tools available online for you to choose from. You can get inspired to create better content, improve the look of your social media posts, be more efficient with how you do your posting and gain insights into whether what you are doing on social media is effective or not.