What does it take to manage and grow your social media account? A lot. There is a common misconception around social media is that the only device you need to post on social media is your smartphone. Although a smartphone is a critical device in a Social Media Manager or Social Media Agency’s arsenal, there are social media planning apps and social media business tools you should incorporate into your strategy not only for growth but for planning and strategic purposes, too.
Our team here at LTM Digital subscribes to a number of different business tools for our social media agency that helps our Social Media Managers get the job done and get it done well. Here are our top social media business tools for social media managers we believe are worth looking into for your business.
An important foundation of a strong social media strategy is developing a social media content calendar and planning content ahead of time. Doing this creates consistency in your posting schedule, saves time, and helps you to take your time to plan your content and create a winning strategy. Here at LTM Digital we are big advocates for planning content ahead of time, and we love using Planoly to manage our client’s content for Instagram. Planoly has both an app and website and allows you to plug content into a private Instagram grid. By doing this you can see what your content will look like at a glance and swap out images to fit the aesthetic you are looking for. Planoly is free for one platform, but if you have multiple accounts, you can upgrade for a monthly rate. With Planoly, you are able to auto-post for the days you are unable to post directly from your phone. However, we suggest posting directly from your phone as Instagram prefers users to engage with their app directly.
More Information on Planoly: http://share.plano.ly/ltm
Slack
Slack is an excellent communication tool for teams. Slack has been a great business tool for our social media agency even before the covid-19 pandemic for keeping in touch with our internal team and our clients. Whether you are a team of two or 200, Slack is great for sending quick messages to a team member. It works a lot like chat messaging, but better because you can attach documents and links. This tool also allows you to set discussion topics that work like group messaging surrounding a particular topic or project. Our team at LTM Digital believes Slack to be more efficient than email because there are times when you need an answer to a question quickly or shoot over a link. Think of Slack as an efficient, work-friendly text message or direct message conversation.
Google Drive
All of our clients’ social media content is also stored on Google Drive, specifically Google Sheets. Although we use Planoly to plug content for the month, we typically use Google Sheets to prepare the content and have internal discussions within our team before adding the content into Planoly. We set specific columns and rows for images, captions, dates, and hashtags. Using this tool for our content planning allows us to plan, clean up errors, and see at a glance before we schedule our content. We also have a version of our content calendar on google sheets available for download. Click here for more information.
Overall
These are the top business tools for social media agencies that our team uses daily for communication, planning, and content strategy. Panning ahead of time to ensure your content is intentional, valuable, and creates a relationship with your audience.