With over 5.17 billion social media users worldwide, social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok offer golden opportunities to engage with potential customers.
If that isn’t enough to convince you that social media marketing is worthy of your time and effort, consider these statistics:
- 87% of sellers say social selling is effective.
- Worldwide social commerce sales are forecasted to reach 8.5 trillion US dollars by 2030.
- 61% of organizations engaged in social selling have experienced revenue growth.
Despite all the potential that social media has to grow your business, effectively managing several social media presences can be daunting for solopreneurs who often are already juggling many responsibilities.
Crafting engaging content, posting consistently, and analyzing performance metrics are tasks that require time and expertise which many solopreneurs lack. To help with that, we’ve curated a list of our five favorite apps for streamline and make social media marketing easier. Read on to discover how these apps can transform your social media strategy.
Edit Images with Photoleap
Did you know social media posts with relevant visuals boast 180% higher engagement than those without? The moral of the story: The visuals you post on social media need to be relevant to your target market. One of the easiest ways to ensure this is to edit your photos to boast an aesthetic that resonates with your followers. This is where Photoleap by Lightricks comes in handy.
This app is a game-changer for solopreneurs, offering a quick and easy way to edit your social media visuals. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive AI-powered features make it a breeze to use, even for those without extensive photo editing skills.
The one-stop photo editor makes transforming photos you’ve taken from your smartphone into professional-looking social media content effortless. For instance, with just a few taps, you can easily:
- Revamp the mood and style of your images
- Remove your image’s background
- Erase an object from the visual
- Enhance image quality
- Colorize photos
All the above makes creating an enhanced and consistent brand aesthetic painless for solopreneurs who lack photo editing skills.
In addition, the app’s intuitiveness empowers you to edit photos for your social media content to a standard that would otherwise take hours using traditional photo editing software. Needless to say, you can then refocus your precious time on other revenue-generating tasks.
Create Graphics With Canva
Over half of marketers say visual content is essential to their marketing strategy, so adding an intuitive online design platform to your marketing arsenal is invaluable. One such option is Canva, a solution that provides everything solopreneurs without design experience need to craft professional-looking social media graphics and logos.
With this web app, designing social graphics is as easy as dragging and dropping elements onto a template and then resizing, cropping, rotating, and editing them as you like. You can also use Canva’s smart features, such as its color palette generator, to help ensure consistency in your designs and make them look more professional and polished.
As we’ve already hinted, Canva unlocks access to hundreds of fonts, icons, images, and social media templates available for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and so on. So, rest assured, a full suite of tools is available to help you transform your vision for your social media graphics into a reality.
It’s also worth mentioning that you can save designs to reuse and modify at a later date. Again, this helps guarantee consistent branding across all your social media channels.
Plus, if you’re looking to scale your business and build a team in the future, Canva’s collaboration features make it easy to work with colleagues and clients. So, depending on your business plan, knowing that Canva can scale with you as your brand expands might be reassuring. Best of all, you can get your hands on a wide range of Canva’s features for free, making it an excellent option for solopreneurs who are mindful of their budget.
Schedule Your Posts with Buffer
Buffer provides a comprehensive solution for efficient social media management.
It offers a host of easy-to-use features that allow solopreneurs to plan, publish, and analyze social content across multiple channels, including Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.
Buffer’s centralized dashboard is extremely clean, making overseeing all your social accounts easy without unnecessary distraction. This also means there’s no need to waste time flitting between hundreds of tabs in your internet browser to manage each of your social channels anymore.
Go Live with Be.Live
As many as 7.6 billion hours of live content were consumed in Q3 of 2023 alone! So, if you’re looking for a compelling way to engage potential customers on your socials, live video could be the way to go. One solution that simplifies this process is Be.Live.
Put simply, Be.Live is a cloud-based live streaming platform specifically designed to help brands host medium to large-scale online events across various social media channels.
As mentioned elsewhere in this article, consistent branding is key to social media success, so there’s tremendous value to be found in the multitude of tools By.Live offers to help you brand your live social videos.
For example, the platform makes it easy to upload a static or animated logo for all future broadcasts. This makes your videos look more professional and boosts brand recognition. You can also use it to automatically aggregate viewer comments to the video pane, or to edit your live videos and repurpose them after the broadcast is over.
Mention
Last but by no means least, we would be remiss in compiling a list of social media management apps without mentioning a social listening tool.
One of the most well-known in this field is Mention. This robust online tool is designed to help businesses and solopreneurs monitor their online presence (and that of their competitors). More specially, Mention makes tracking brand mentions across various platforms, including social media, news sites, forums, and blogs a breeze.
Not only does this come in handy for tracking and managing your brand’s online reputation, but it also makes it easy to keep an eye on what your target audience says about your competitors.
Couple the above with the detailed analytics Mention provides, and you’ll quickly get a clearer picture of your brand’s impact and sentiment online. Armed with this information, you’re better positioned to generate and publish social media content your audience wants to see, which should pay dividends in engagement.
Ready to Streamline Your Social Media?
After reading this blog post, we hope you have a better idea of some of the best tools available to help you streamline your social media efforts.
To recap, here are our top five picks to make social media marketing easier, as well as what we think each app is best suited for:
- Photoleap – best for quickly editing and enhancing photos taken on your smartphone to ensure a consistent brand aesthetic on social media
- Canva – best for creating professional-looking social media graphics for a variety of channels
- Buffer – best one-stop social media management app
- Be.Live – best for managing live video streams across your social media channels
- Mention – best for social listening
