Social media is one of the most powerful ways to increase brand awareness, thought leadership and send traffic to your website. However, like any other marketing effort, social media is not something you can just ‘set it and forget it’. In order to stay ahead and breakthrough the online chatter in B2B social media marketing, it is crucial to provide value to your followers with high-quality unique content (accompanied by stunning visuals) and remain consistent in your efforts – one of the hardest aspects of social media. To help you achieve both of those goals, below are a few terrific tools that will simplify your social media marketing.

Content Resources and Curators

  • RSS Feeds – we often talk about our two favorites, Feedly and Flipboard, in our blog as tools to research and find content. Since content is a large part of your social media strategy, it’s important to stay inspired and up-to-date with the latest and greatest industry news.
  • Pocket – I recently came across Pocket, a free social bookmarking tool, and instantly fell in love. Their browser extension (available for both Safari & Chrome) makes it super easy to save my favorite articles that I either don’t have time to read or would like to reference back to at a later time.

Image Makers

  • Canva – another free tool we commonly talk about on our blog is Canva (if you’re new, you can find those posts here and here). It literally is the most easy-to-use tool for creating compelling images for well, just about anything. At emagine, our digital marketing team often uses Canva to make images for blog posts, infographics and status updates.
  • Pablo – As an avid fan of the popular social sharing tool, Buffer, I was so excited when they released their newest addition to the team, Pablo. With Pablo, you can easily create stunning images to include with your social updates in less than 30 seconds. You can use their pre-loaded images or upload your own, add text or logos and once you’re done and ready to share, Pablo will automatically resize the image to fit best for Facebook and Twitter.
  • infogr.am – viewers love infographics and you should, too. As B2B marketers, we keep track of a lot of data. Unfortunately, no matter how interesting and thought provoking the data we find is, it’s not always easy to make it appear that way to our readers. With infogr.am, you can turn that juicy data into an enticing graphic that feeds directly into your viewer’s heart with bright colors and chunks of information that they love. Pick a template, add your data and share away!

Streamline Sharing

  • Buffer – like I mentioned above, I am a big fan of Buffer. With both free and paid account options, Buffer makes it easy to manage all your social accounts in one spot. I also enjoy being able to ‘buffer’ articles I want to share right from my RSS feeds or by using my browser extension.
  • Hootsuite – another great social management and sharing tool that the emagine team loves. It provides most of the features that Buffer has like a browser extension and RSS integrations and it also allows you to monitor your mentions and other industry news.
  • Gramblr.com – this awesome tool answered every social media manager’s prayers by allowing you to post right to your company Instagram account from their site. No more having to log in and out of different accounts from your phone. All you have to do is upload your photo, create a caption and leave the rest up to them.

Have you tried any of these tools? Have any tools I missed in this list that you cannot live without? Let me know in the comments below.