Six of the best apps to improve social media for your business

If you want a couple of hard unshakeable facts about how to market a business, here they are:

1. The vast majority of businesses (including your competitors) have some form of social media presence.

2. These days, you can find an app to do pretty much anything - including social media.

The above should come as both a motivation and a comfort. Firstly, a business that holds back from social media marketing is more than likely going to be a business that falls behind the competition. It will be a business that misses opportunities and fails to reach its true potential.

Those are good incentives, all in all!

Secondly, although ‘being on’ social media and actually ‘doing it well’ are two very different things (more of that later), there’s plenty of help out there for you to make sure you get it right.

From real-life humans providing a variety of services to a multitude of apps; there are skills and tools for hire that are simply too good to ignore.

You’ll find apps to help you create and curate better content; apps to help with social media marketing, and apps to make the management of it all much, much easier.

It would be an impossible to try and cover all these apps in one short blog post. It’d need to be an e-book at the very least and that’s not the point here. These picks are a selection - six of the best – not the best six, necessarily.

The idea is that you take a look at these apps.

And then you take a look at some others.

And then you work out which ones will work best for you.

At the very least, this will give you a good idea of what’s available.

Apps to help you create great content

You need to be consistent with social media and you need to engage with your audience. It's called social media, remember.

But, at the heart of it all, you need to be creating great content.

So, what does it take to keep creating high quality new content consistently? Well, along with a healthy slice of commitment, you need a range of skills too.

Social media platforms are visual platforms. Images and videos grab the most attention. This means that social media marketers really need to combine several disciplines these days.

You need to take photos and shoot videos, edit and design, and write copy too.

Now, that might seem can quite daunting, but there are plenty of tools to help you out.

What’s more, it’s easy enough to download a range of apps to a single device - essentially transforming your smartphone into a hand-held all-in-one production studio.

Several apps are worthy of honourable mentions, but the first pick is…

1. Create

Create is an awesome iOS app that’s superb for creating designs and graphics that will demand attention from your audience.

Stickers, logos, you name it… Create can create it.

2. Canva

Canva is a staple for many a marketer. This app creates professional-looking designs and graphics. So much so, you wouldn’t believe they were actually created by an amateur.

Last but not least in terms of recommended creating tools is:

3. Over

Mixing things up with the type of content you post is crucial for any social media marketing strategy to be successful. Over enables you to turn the mundane into monster content!

With more tools and features than you can shake a stick at, this is one app that you’ll use over and over again. One of the many strengths of Over is its flexibility… and the fact it’ll make you look like a Photoshop maestro, even if you’re a complete novice!

Apps to help curate great content and stay on top of things

No man is an island and no person or business should be expected to do everything on their own. This is where content curation comes in. Curating useful and engaging content to share with your online community should be a key aspect of any good social media strategy.

However, staying on top of things and keeping your finger on the social media pulse can be a challenge. After all, you can’t spend all day on social when you’ve got a business to run!

So, take a look at these great apps to keep ahead:

4. SparksFly

This app is very clever AI in action. SparksFly makes it a breeze keeping track of the topics, keywords, and influencers that matter the most to your business and your audience. The app is a super-efficient time-saver, and it’s super-easy to share content straight to your social feeds too.

Speaking of feeds, you also need to try:

5. Feedly

Feedly does a similar job to SparksFly. It makes keeping up-to-date, relevant and on-point much less of ongoing challenge. It also simplifies the process of selecting the best content to share.

Apps to help you manage your social media

Creating and curating great content is all very well; but doing it day-to-day and week-in/week-out is another thing entirely. Whether you’re a business owner or a marketer looking after a range of clients’ social media accounts, the management of it all can be the biggest challenge sometimes.

But, fear not, there are apps to help with managing everything as well. In many ways they are much of a muchness, each with their own pros and cons.

Buffer has flexible pricing but no connection to LinkedIn. Hootsuite is good for analytics but most of its most useful features come at a cost. Similarly, Sprout Social is pricier than many, but it offers a really useful inbox feature that handily collects notifications, mentions and messages in a single place.

It’s about deciding what features you definitely need and the ones you can do without. But it’s an app that goes under the radar somewhat that is the final selection on the list.

6. Drum Up

Drum Up allows you to manage unique content from multiple social media accounts. A massive bonus is a feature that recommends content for you to share on your profiles. This overcomes the challenge of having to curate or create relevant content on a daily basis.

This list really is just the tip of the iceberg, but whether you are a marketer who manages social media for clients or a business owner marketing your own social media, it’s good to know that there are a massive range of tools to choose from that make things easier.

However, it’s also worth remembering that ease and efficiency are all well and good, but it’s the effectiveness of your social media presence that really counts. You need a strategy and goals to aim for if you want to really make an impression with social media.

You need to know where you are, where you want to be and how you’re going to get there. Get in touch if you want to kick-start the social media strategy for your business.