2.8 billion people were using social media in 2016, and that number continues to grow daily.
Nearly 50% of people have interacted with a brand or company on social media, too.
Social media is a powerful tool that any marketer can leverage for their benefit.
When 88% of companies in the United States are using social media, it’s almost impossible to stand out.
Growing your following on social media has become a laborious task that most people give up on.
It takes months if not years for most brands to accumulate a social following (unless you’re already famous).
And most companies post boring content that doesn’t get them fans, followers, or shares.
But if you want your content to take off, or your brand to see consistent month-over-month growth, you need to grow your social presence.
Not only is social media an incredible tool to drive traffic to new content on your site, but it’s also a form of social proof.
For example, if you’re looking to advertise with an influencer, you’re likely looking at their follower or fan count, right?
You want to see how many people interact with that influencer.
Social media success is a great indication of the success that a brand has. Most often the more followers a brand has, the more successful they are.
With that said, here’s how to gain more fans, followers, and shares on your content with these six social media marketing tools.
1. Canva
Now, I’m sure you’re probably thinking, “Neil, you know Canva isn’t a social media tool right?”
It might not technically be designed solely for social media. But I’d like to think they made it for people like me.
Busy business owners are stretched thin as it is.
We don’t have time to open up Photoshop and spend the next hour creating a new blog-post image.
However, we also can’t spend hundreds of dollars for graphic designers to do it from scratch, either.
That’s where Canva becomes handy. It’s the perfect tool for adding images to your content.
It allows you to create awesome designs within just minutes of being on the platform.
Images are crucial on social media. In fact, infographics are shared and liked more than any other content type:
And that’s not all:
Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets on average.
The point is pretty simple.
Using images with your social media content strategy will get you more fans, followers, and shares.
That’s not my opinion. It’s a legitimate guarantee according to the data.
If you’re posting a new article on Facebook or Twitter, you can easily create a new cover image.
Just create a new account on Canva and select their Facebook template:
You can create a template for all of the most popular social media sites from LinkedIn and Tumblr to Facebook, and Twitter.
Best of all, each of these templates is already the exact dimensions you’ll need for the specific platform. So you don’t have to worry about cropping or pasting anything at the last second.
Next, you can scroll through dozens of these pre-designed templates:
You can adjust each of them to match your brand’s colors and style, too.
You can even adjust them further by mixing and matching different elements:
You can upload photos, use preset icons, and even insert charts to create beautiful images that are guaranteed to drive more shares.
Easily create nice-looking images to accompany your content in just a few seconds:
Remember: Don’t share content on social media without images.
Use a simple tool like Canva to quickly add a new image to each post in fewer than five minutes.
2. Meet Edgar
Meet Edgar is a social media management tool that “manages itself.”
Have you ever noticed that industry experts regularly reshare their content?
For example, they often take content that was published two months ago and reshare it every month.
Reposting evergreen content is an excellent way to extend its lifespan. It will also get more shares on your best work.
Plus, social media accounts will inevitably face follower churn.
That happens when your account loses and gains followers. Resharing a popular post will reach more new followers who likely haven’t seen that content yet.
Thankfully, Edgar does all the work for you. A round of applause for Edgar!
Edgar will automatically share evergreen content for you at specific times when your social engagement is the highest.
It will also categorize your content by topic and match it up to the demographics that have interacted with it in the past to share it at the right time for that subject.
It essentially targets your social media posts like you would when running ads on Facebook!
After that, it restocks that post back into your update cycle to repost at a later date.
That means you have to do nothing. Edgar will post all of your content for you!
Plus, you can sign up for a free two-week trial to test it out. You don’t have to give away any credit card information:
It also works on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That means you can use the same base of content and republish it three different ways to get the most mileage out of your work.
You can also split up the scheduling for each channel.
People check LinkedIn at different times than others might on Twitter. The publishing frequency is also vastly different.
So you’re able to cater to the preferences of both audiences to give each exactly what they want when they want it.
3. Buffer
Buffer is one of my favorite, if not my all-time favorite, social media marketing tools.
The reason is that it’s pretty much the easiest social media tool for scheduling content.
Instead of waiting for your blog post to go live each day and then heading to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to schedule it, you can schedule it all at the same time with Buffer.
You can schedule content months in advance so that you rarely have to add new content on your own.
On top of that, it will optimize your best posting times to get you more engagement and shares.
I use Buffer to batch my social media posts.
Here’s the process I use.
Once a month, I’ll spend about an hour at the beginning of the week to load all of my content into Buffer.
All of the scheduling dates and times have already been pre-determined.
That way, I don’t waste precious hours on scheduling when I could be meeting with clients. Instead, it automates my posting schedule for me:
It also gives me detailed analytics.
For example, I can see which posts are resonating with my followers and fans the most.
I can then take that information and use it to either:
- Repost the content that’s working
- Or stop posting the content that isn’t.
And their Chrome extension makes it easy to add new content to my publishing queue.
For example, if I’m browsing a new blog post that I just uploaded or one that I found and I liked, I can easily share it straight from the page:
Click that little icon to pull the post’s data automatically. So you’ll get the featured image and a trackable, shortened link:
It does all the work for you!
Now, you can choose to schedule it, add it to your queue, or post it immediately:
Pro tip: Use Buffer to schedule your social posts weeks in advance to put your strategy on autopilot.
4. Quuu Promote
Quuu Promote is an incredible tool that will help you increase the shares and engagement on your social posts.
It can also help you grow your fans and followers fast.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
Typically, tools that will “do the work for you” sound too good to be true.
However, this is one rare case where you can believe the hype.
They’ll promote your content without it showing up as an ad. That way, you don’t have to worry about running into ad-blocking technology.
They’ll then also help you share content with the right people.
Your content will get placed in front of the very people who will love or share it.
Essentially, Quuu Promote will take your uploaded content and will share it across tons of different social platforms.
It sounds spammy. But the sharing is done by real people who are interested in your niche.
That means that you’re driving tons of targeted traffic and fans to your content. You should also see the shares rise quickly, too.
It’s a great way to start to build up an interactive follower base on your social platforms because it does all of the outreach and engagement work for you.
You can get started quickly by making a free account:
Once you’ve made a free account, you can buy credits to start promoting your posts.
You can easily import data from a live blog post on your site. Simply type in the post’s URL on the promote bar to get started:
Then, fill in the details for the various social platforms you want to share that post on.
Next, hit promote, and your content will be reviewed. Then it will be shared by hundreds of relevant bloggers in your niche.
For example, check out this one shared on Content Marketing:
It got over 1,200 shares and netted 325 clicks to the post, and it drove high follower counts.
Quuu Promote is an excellent way to build your base and share your content with more fans on social media.
5. Feedly
Have you ever wanted to automate your content curation?
Curating content is a vital piece in any social-media strategy.
Over 50% of marketers who curate content say that it’s increased their brand visibility, thought leadership, followers, shares, and leads.
Feedly is a great tool for automating your content curation. I use it every single day to curate content from industry experts and instantly share that content from Feedly to my Buffer schedule.
Feedly helps you automatically gather tons of helpful articles based on topics, industries, and companies to get the latest content in the same spot.
That means you can save tons of time!
Instead of checking into a bunch of random industry blogs, you can check your Feedly to see what content is trending:
To get started, create your free account and start setting up your feed. You can search for people you like to read about, like me!
Simply click “Follow” to add him or her to your feed.
You’ll get their last few articles at the beginning to catch up on. And then you’ll start receiving their latest content as they publish it.
Pretty soon, your feed will look something like this:
Once you click on an article that intrigues you, you can add notes on that article and highlight sections to clip for a social media post.
Or, you can share with that handy little Buffer icon:
You can even share it directly on your social platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.
Feedly helps me generate tons of content ideas.
Browsing the latest news across tons of sites only takes a few minutes.
I can catch up on the latest trends. And I can use that inspiration to come up with ideas that I’m also experiencing.
However, Feedly also helps me curate awesome content from other people.
So here’s one of my best tips for automating your content curation.
You can grab these RSS feeds and input them directly into Buffer.
Buffer even shows you how easy it is:
Then you can use Buffer’s scheduling controls to determine when that stuff goes out.
Let’s say that I publish a new post, for example.
That post will pass through the feed based on whatever Feedly Collection the site is added to.
Next, you can have it moved directly into Buffer’s queue using tools like Zapier.
Buffer shows you what a breeze this is, too.
You’re literally ‘feeding’ Buffer in this scenario!
The content you’ve pre-selected based on specific blogs will be sent from Feedly into Buffer, which will then send them out to each network at the exact right time.
6. Crowdfire
Crowdfire is another great tool that helps you manage your Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook accounts from the same dashboard.
You can manage your followers and non-followers, and even automatically nurture new fans with targeted messaging.
Crowdfire will help you decide which content is most relevant.
It helps you sort out your top-performing pieces to share on your various social media channels.
To get started, simply create a free account and select your topic or niche. For example, I chose content marketing:
Then it will automatically give you content ideas based on the topics that you select:
Next, you’ll start to see a list of different ideas.
Just click “Share” on any of the content pieces to load them into your queue:
You can also add keywords and relevant hashtags to your account.
That helps Crowdfire automatically monitor them for you.
When it finds good stuff that hits the mark, it will provide you with opportunities to engage with potential followers:
Plus, you can track other competitors or related accounts to yours, and Crowdfire will compile lists of target followers for you to engage with:
That means it will automatically scout out potential fans for you to interact with to quickly grow your following!
Once you acquire new followers, you can have automated direct messages sent to them to nurture them or send them a CTA:
The options with Crowdfire are nearly limitless.
If you don’t have the time to go out and scout followers or nurture every follower that you gain, you can automate everything on their platform.
Conclusion
Billions of people are using social media every single day. And that number is continually rising.
The potential is massive. But so is the competition.
Almost half of the people using social media interact with brands daily.
Social media is a fantastic tool that you can use to share content, engage with fans, and build a bigger audience.
But considering that almost 90% of companies are on social media, it’s challenging to get a user’s attention.
And growing your following or posting daily is a time-consuming effort that most people don’t want to do.
It can take years to accumulate followers and build a brand-aware audience.
But thankfully we can automatically schedule, nurture, and follow up with new posts and fans with tools like Crowdfire, Edgar, and Buffer.
We no longer have to sit on social media and spend four hours a day just on tweeting!
There are tons of different tools we can utilize to automate our processes and grow our fans with less effort, too.
Try using Canva to develop high-quality images to enhance engagement, or using Quuu Promote to get your fan base started.
What’s my favorite tactic? Use them all together!
Create excellent posts with Canva. Use Feedly to help pull in additional content.
Push both of those into Buffer to get scheduled content.
Use Meet Edgar to reschedule the best stuff. And use Quuu Promote along with Crowdfire to get your content into the hands of people who will love it the most.
What are your favorite time-saving social media tools that bring in extra results?
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