Social media has become a vital role for brands when it comes to digital marketing. If done correctly, social media can boost brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and increase sales. With thousands of social media tools out there, it’s difficult to know which ones to choose and which ones to pass. You’ll need a great scheduler, a graphic design app or two, and an analytics platforms to start. If you’re searching for any of these tools, here are our top 10 recommendations to make a successful brand through social media!

1. Later

There are a ton of great social media schedulers that can be beneficial for your brand, but that all depends on your social media objectives. If you’re looking for easy scheduling and visual planning across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, we recommend Later! This tool is especially handy when planning for Instagram, you’ll be able to “preview” and rearrange your scheduled posts, there is a UGC section that makes it easier to repost branded content, you can host multiple links in bio, you’re able to tag photos, and select cover photo for videos within the platform. Later is also one of the 40 selected Instagram Partners that are vetted in three areas of expertise: ad tech, community management, and content marketing.

2. Canva 

If you’re inexperienced with graphic design, don’t sweat it! You don’t need Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to create beautiful designs for your social media… not anymore! Canva is a user friendly tool with thousands of customizable templates that are readily available for each platform. If you have an idea and want to start from scratch, their drag and drop features allow you to build your design with ease. When generating content, Canva makes it easy for you to brand your designs with logos, colors, and fonts with their brand kit feature. Assemble a design or animation for announcements, quotes, upcoming events, or seasonal content.  

3. Adobe Spark 

Videos are some of the best ways to convey storytelling through social media. With Adobe Spark, you’re able to transform ideas into visual stories through social graphics, web pages, and short animated videos. Creatively expand on your social media themes by crafting attention grabbing content. Since creativity is a driving factor for Adobe, Spark has a stunning collection of professional graphics that are ready for use! Produce teasers, slide shows, trailers, lesson plans, promotions, explanatory videos, and more. Browse the inspiration page by category and experiment with templates that you can tailor for your brand!

4. Unsplash

When you’re trying to build an editorial content calendar, you may come across a few posts that need photos to pair with the caption. Unsplash is one of our favorite websites to source images and professional photos. They have over one million royalty free, usable photographs to download. Images are submitted by a community of photographers and creators which takes the stock photo vibe out of the equation. Pro Tip: If you’re looking for a theme or similar photos, search by collections or add descriptive keywords to the search query. 

5. Photo Resizer 

After finding photos that you’re planning on using, make sure that they’re uploaded correctly to each platform. Some social media schedulers come equipped with cropping features, but others require the photo to be cropped before uploading. Regardless, taking preventative measures and resizing your images ahead of time will ensure that extra layer of professionalism, especially when you’re a new brand trying to establish awareness and credibility. Photo Resizer is a great free tool that has pre-set sizes per platform for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. All you need to do is drag or upload your photo to the website, select the crop size, and download the resized photo. 

6. Hashtag Expert

One of the biggest driving factors for increasing reach and brand awareness through social media is by utilizing hashtags. Hashtag Expert is a free app that will generate hashtags that you can easily copy for Instagram and the latest trending social media app, TikTok. There are various ways that you can search for hashtags such as browsing trending, top, new or recent hashtags. You can also browse through 35 categories from food to memes to holidays or generating relatable hashtags by searching hashtags within their generator query. 

7. Tailwind

As mentioned in #1, depending on your social media objectives there may be schedulers that are better suited for your brand. Say you have a food brand for example, being able to share recipes and dishes would be ideal for the type of content you would generate. Tailwind is a great scheduler that is equipped with features specifically for Pinterest (and Instagram). Some Tailwind features for Pinterest are the drag and drop feature for visual planning, automatic optimal post times, multi-board pinning, and an option to download a browser extension where you can gather pins from other websites. Tailwind is also one of 80 Pinterest Partners that were vetted and selected based on specialties such as content optimization, targeting, and measurement.

8. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a multi-purpose tool that can help you discover trending and topical content, analyze top performing articles and blogs, find Twitter and Facebook influencers, and monitor brand keywords. When you’re looking to share content that’s performing well, you can use the BuzzSumo search query to find the highest ranking articles as shown in the picture above! With the discover feature, you create custom feeds by selecting up to ten keywords or hashtags relatable to your brand. This can help predict viral content and provide real-time analytics. 

9. Brand24

If you’re looking to advance your community management, a social listening tool is the way to go! Brand24 is a listening tool that provides mention analytics which analyze buzz quality and quantity, it can provide influencer scores for people who are driving conversations, and sentiment analysis so you can have a better understanding of your customer’s attitude. Refine your social media strategies based on mention analytics and measure the impact made by your brand! 

10. Downloader for Instagram

Downloader for Instagram is a Chrome extension that allows you to do a majority of mobile only features on desktop. A key feature is the ability to download images, videos, and stories with a click of a button. Some other handy features are the ability to watch live stories, post stories, and direct message via desktop! This tool may save you hours of time and reduce the need to switch from mobile to desktop, especially when searching for UGC!