For people looking to promote their work, build a following, and promote their education course offerings, social media is a powerful place to make yourself known.
However, for those of us with too little time in the day to bring our light in to the world and constantly post on social media, we need help in the from of power marketing tools.
These are the currently recommended marketing tools that we use here at St. Paul’s Free University to get our message out in to the world.
Tailwind — Pinterest and Instagram Marketing
Tailwind is a powerful post scheduling, content managing, and data tracking service with a history of being practically indispensable for Pinterest marketing, and has added functionality to support Instagram as well.
Both of these social media platforms work best when content creators are posting new items serval times a day, with an emphasis on fresh new content. This level of activity can quickly become quite the time-suck.
What Tailwind allows you to do is bulk upload a large number of pins, and schedule them out days or weeks in advance. Tailwind helps you choose the optimum time to post throughout the day, and tracks how successful each pin was. You can also use their Magic Loop feature to set up a pool of images that will be repined automatically in different places, spaced out over time, to keep your best content constantly being seen.
Additionally, they provide an optional tribes feature, which lets you join groups of content creators in your category of content. Within the group, everyone shares their content, allowing other people to Pin your images in exchange for you pinning theirs. This gives you access to a much wider audience, while keeping people who follow you constantly engaged with a wide variety of content.
IFTTT (If This Then That) — General Social Media Automation
IFTTT is an extremely powerful weapon when it comes to internet marketing. It allows you to link almost any two websites together using there simple automation system, that works by building simple sentences in the form of, “If ___ then ___”.
For example, you could create an action so that if you post a new blog article, then IFTTT will post a link to it on your Facebook Page. This ideas works with all the major social media platforms, reducing the need to copy paste links between sites when you are promoting your new content.
Another thing that it works great for is keeping an eye on the competition. You can have IFTTT keep an eye on things like news sites or Craigslist searches, and email or text you when it find something that meets your criteria.
IFTTT is so versatile, there are practically unlimited uses for it if you are creative enough.
Canvas — Online Design Tool
Canva is a free (with paid options for premium service), online graphics editing package, with an emphasis on simplicity and pre-designed options.
For many marketing tasks, Canva is all you really need to be successful. Some of the things you can do with it include:
- Create text images for Pinterest
- Meme style text images for Facebook
- YouTube video thumbnails
- Visual ads for paid advertisements
- Simple logos and social media branding
- Print items like posters, business cards
Free Resources Stock Images, Videos, and Music
Having high quality multimedia resources on hand is essential when creating engaging content, especially on social media platforms. The following resources offer royalty free resources you can use to create social media posts and landing pages.
- Pixabay – royalty free images, line art / illustrations, and video clips
- Pexels – royalty free images and video clips
- Unslash – high quality royalty free stock images
- YouTube Music Library – royalty free background music
- Mixkit – royalty free video clips and background music (be careful of licensing, some videos with “Restricted” licensing cannot be used for commercial projects)
- Bensound – royalty free music
- Videvo – royalty free sound effects (note: other resources on site are non-free/attribution required)