Tools to make social media management easy

Since Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, it has been integrating the two and trying to make it easier for businesses to manage both platforms from a single dashboard. There have been a lot of changes, with Facebook Business Manager gradually becoming replaced by Facebook Business Suite from September 2020.

This is the best place for managing communications with a unified inbox that pulls in messages and notifications from your Facebook and Instagram business pages. It also shows analytics and allows you to schedule posts at optimal times for your audience.

Make sure that you set up Business Suite with all your profiles, pixel codes and ads right at the beginning to make life easier for yourself in future.

Want to find out more? Social Media Examiner’s guide to Facebook Business Suite walks you through the features.

It’s confusing for many people that Facebook’s Business Suite crosses over on some functionality with its Creator Studio. Business Suite is best for your management and communication, and Creator Studio is best for your content creation experience – particularly for video. This hub will give you the ability to create and manage posts, view insights and messages from all of your Facebook Pages in one place.

Creator Studio makes content creation and scheduling for Facebook and Instagram much easier. If you also use LinkedIn and Twitter, you will need to use these platforms or another social media management tool such as Sendible, Buffer or Tweetdeck.

If you would like some tips on getting the best out of it, check out this guide on how to use Creator Studio.

A go-to tool, Canva is a firm favourite because you can do so much yourself with it, whether you’re a larger agency or a business owner, it is such a simple tool to use. You don’t need to employ a graphic designer to create social posts, and you can even design business cards, flyers and presentations with it.

Canva’s won a lot of fans because it provides a range of pre-designed templates and a drag-and-drop user interface that makes creating designs easy. They also provide a whole section of their site dedicated to learning, with everything from typography to colour psychology.

It’s improving all the time and now has animation and video templates and assets. It’s always great to see the lightbulbs going off when we share this with our clients in our training programmes.

#HashMe generates related hashtags, so you don’t have to think of them all yourself. You put in a hashtag in the right area, for example #cake, and it generates a further 30 related ones. You simply copy the ones you want, and it opens Instagram and puts them in for you. It also shows you how many people have used that hashtag.

Make sure that you only use relevant hashtags for your post and never use one just because it’s popular and you want to boost your visibility. Instagram have cracked down on this behaviour and it can lead to you being ‘shadowbanned’. This term, if you’re unfamiliar with it, means that Instagram will block all or some of your content in a way that won’t be obvious to you, but the community are not being shown it.

The Quik app helps you to create videos from pictures, boomerangs and video clips. You can put them all together and tailor your video with different overlays and transitions. It’s a really easy way to put a video together even if you’re not very technically skilled. It’s another way you can work smarter, not harder.

A little-known gem, Facebook Mobile Studio isn’t actually on Facebook. It’s a website that presents you with different apps you can use, and it gives you all the instructions you need to get the best out of them. It has Quik on there, for example.

It gives you great instructions on how to take photos, get your lighting right, do Boomerangs, etc. It makes it really easy for you and isn’t just for Facebook either – you can use the tools it advises to create content for multiple social media platforms.