These 12 social media tools will make social media marketing infinitely easier. They are either free or only require a nominal fee to use (with one exception). None of them are total management tools like HootSuite. But, used together, these small tools add up to a streamlined and fluent social media experience.

Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark allows you to edit photos quickly and easily right in your web browser or in the Spark app. Simply touch up photos you’ve taken on your phone before posting them or get a little more creative and use the effects and text captions to create truly unique content. In addition to photos, you can also use Spark to make branded videos, complete with text captioning.

Backly

Backly turns every link you share into a message that also points people back to your site. Rather than just sharing something interesting and having your social media followers go to that other site, Backly will insert a message that also points them back to your site so you can reap the rewards of sharing interesting content.  

Bitly

In addition to shortening links for you, Bitly gives your a custom redirect so you can track the click-through ratio on shared links and also what the person does after the click. It’s a phenomenal tool for anyone who wants to share links. (And who doesn’t wanna share links?)

BuzzSumo

Like Sumo wrestlers are wont to do (we think), BuzzSumo helps you find content that is trending for given keywords and topics. Use it to find buzzlinks (a term we just coined that means links to content about topics that have a lot of buzz around them) and use it to optimize your content to take advantage of the topics that have buzz around them online.

IFTTT

The almost-acronym IFTTT stands for “if this, then that.” As the name implies, it allows you to create custom triggers for content sharing. For example, if you publish a new blog post, then IFTTT automatically creates posts for your social media accounts and sends out an email to your mailing list about the post. It helps you streamline this entire process and gets all your accounts talking to each other.

Pixabay

For when you need stock photos and you want to get them for free, Pixabay is the tool to use. It has a plethora of royalty-free stock photos you can choose from either through your browser or through the Pixabay app on your phone.

Quuu

Quuu bills itself as a way to get hand picked curated content for your social media channels. The completely free service gets you to choose categories that you’re interested in and then it suggests and saves personalized recommendations. This lets you share content that is relevant to your brand without having to spend the time to search for it yourself. You should note that in its current iteration, Quuu only works as a plugin for Buffer or Hootsuite.

Refind

Refind is for those people who see something online and don’t have time to explore it, so they save it for later. (So, basically everyone.) The tool saves and tracks links of interest that you find while browsing. On top of that, you can also use it to find links to similar content. It also has an element of social media to it, as you can connect with other Refind users and see what links they are exploring. It can be useful for tracking content that is trending.

Rocketium

This one is especially interesting to us. Rocketium can turn a photo slideshow into a short video and also take a non-captioned video and provide captions for it. This is important because a lot of Facebook videos are watched without sound, so if there is dialogue that is crucial to the video, captions are necessary to have. It’s lightweight and easy to use.

Social Mention

Social Mention searches for mentions of whatever brands, influencers, topics or products you want to monitor the internet for. It can give you an overview of the conversations happening online about any subject you’re interested in. If you are adept at coding, you can also connect the Social Mention API to other apps to extend its reach.

Yala

Yala doesn’t just schedule posts for you automatically, it can also suggest the best times to post based on your social media feeds. You can use Yala via Slack or Facebook. Try it for free and if you like it, you can get a monthly or annual subscription.

Yotpo

This one is a bit of an exception because it does require a higher end plan to work, but it’s well worth it. Yotpo gathers all the reviews and user-generated content about your brand online. If you see content about your brand that you like, you can link to it and share it and if you find less than flattering stuff about your brand, you can take steps to reach out and rectify the situation.

These are just a handful of the available social media tools for small businesses. Another great tool for engagement is animated explainer videos. Click here to use our price estimation calculator to see approximately how much your video will cost. (You don’t even need to talk to anyone!)