Social media marketing has long surpassed the stage of being either novel or optional, and is now firmly grounded as a necessary tool for small businesses across Australia and the world.
Thryv Australia reports that almost 8 in 10 Australians are active social media users, which means that many of your audience members can be found across popular social platforms.
Yet that’s not to say that social media posting or building a social following are simple or easy jobs, as they can take significant time, investment, and sheer creativity to maintain. That’s why it is vital to arm yourself with tools that will help you to manage your social media accounts and stay one step ahead of the competition.
Here are the top five tools that can tackle social media marketing for small business.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the biggest names in social media marketing. It is a digital tool focused on social media scheduling, posting, and management, allowing you to stay on top of multiple social platforms within a single tool.
It is also highly scalable, meaning you can add others to the management team to help you stay on top of posts, and it includes the Hootsuite Academy, an online learning platform that offers courses to upskill yourself and your team when it comes to social media marketing.
White Pages Connect
White Pages Connect is a multi-platform tool, allowing you to not just stay on top of your social media platforms, but of your apps, directory listings, search engines, and maps all at once.
For social media, White Pages Connect includes a social media scheduler so you can plan and prepare your posts ahead of time. It also allows you to load images and information across multiple networks, and it facilitates responding to reviews on sites such as Google and Facebook.
Digital marketing is a multi-faceted, moving beast, but White Pages Connect keeps it tame and firmly under your control.
Unsplash
Twitter has famously reported that tweets with images enjoy a 35% increase in retweets, whereas Buzzsumo suggests that Facebook posts with images see 2.3 times more engagement than those without.
Yet if you’re stuck for professional-level photos and don’t wish to spend half your marketing budget on expensive stock photos, Unsplash is an excellent source for exceptional free photos you can use on your blogs and posts.
Revive Old Post
Revive Old Post is a WordPress plug-in that will get the most use out of your old blog posts, without you having to go back through them all and post them manually.
It takes posts from your archives and automatically shares them at a schedule that you decide, and includes an image from the blog as part of the post. This can help to reduce the workload of sharing new content, and maximise the value you get from older content. 
This tool works across the major social platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, making it easy to share older posts with newer audiences, and is fully customisable so you can write your own descriptions, titles, hashtags, and tags if you wish, pick out posts you don’t want to share, and track your clicks through Google analytics.
Canva
There’s no doubt that visually appealing images and designs catch the eye, but that’s not much help to those with little design knowledge or Photoshop skills.
Canva is a tool that will help anyone become a designer. You can create beautiful visuals for your social media posts, which is especially useful for highly aesthetic platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.
It offers countless design elements and tools, with pre-made templates to get you started and provide a professional finish. Best of all, it’s completely free.
White Pages Connect is one of many useful tools in your digital marketing toolbox. Discover the full product suite here and get in touch with any questions.
