By Jessica Davis

For start-ups, social media platforms provide an avenue to reach out to potential customers and engage with them directly. Engagement is essential on social media sites and helps build trust and forge strong relationships with your followers. Managing your various social media accounts, however, can be tedious. Here’s a list of tools that can help you manage the various aspects of your social media campaign:

• Tweriod: After analyzing tweets posted by you and your followers, the tool gives you a detailed report that also includes the best times for you to tweet in order to achieve maximum exposure. The analysis will include the last 200 tweets of 1000 of your Twitter followers, who have low privacy settings.

• DrumUp: Your social media strategy will undoubtedly involve content marketing. But, developing original content constantly demands a lot of time and effort. DrumUp is a free tool that can help you discover and schedule new content from across the web based on the keywords you enter. To find the most relevant results, the tool also has a negative keywords feature that you can use. You can edit the content suggested and add custom posts as well. It also allows you to connect your blog feed to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
  

• Canva: This is a great tool that helps you to design a wide variety of visual content. The tool provides a number of templates that you can use to create graphics for various purposes. You can design event notifications and create marketing materials (ranging from menus to real estate flyers), header images for emails and social media accounts, and design ads for Facebook. The tool is easy to use and provides a tutorial to help you get started. In addition to the in-built templates, it allows you to upload some of your own templates as well.

• Infogr.am: The tool allows you to create various kinds of infographics, including pie charts, scatter diagrams, tables, and bar graphs among others. You can make use of maps of countries, or the entire world, in your infographic. The tool also allows you to upload and add images and search online for videos too. The infographic you create using the tool can be shared on various social media platforms.

• PowToon: The content that you share on social media can take many forms: articles, images, graphics, infographics, and videos. PowToon helps you to create visual content in the form of animated videos. Such videos are great to showcase your products, or educate your customers on their use.

• Everypost: If you want to manage your social media accounts on the go, this mobile app will prove useful. You will be able to link your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr accounts to this app. You can also use Everypost to search for multimedia content on YouTube, Flick, Pinterest, and Instagram which you can then incorporate in your posts. You can create and schedule your posts and connect up to 3 RSS feeds to this app.

Each of the tools discussed above can help you deal with different aspects of your social media campaigns. The tools are all either available for free or have free versions to help you get started. Depending on your requirement, a combination of the above tools can help you successfully implement your social media marketing strategy.

About the Author
Jessica has a keen interest in social media and content marketing, and writes extensively about it. She represents Godot Media, a leading content marketing firm.