Canva vs Adobe Spark: Which is the Best in 2021? A Comparison of Image Creation Tools For Social Media

/

Are you an individual or business trying to decide whether Adobe Spark or Canva is best as an easy way to create stunning graphics for social media?

In this blog post, I will be taking an in-depth look at both tools to help you decide which you should be using to build your brand's graphics in 2021.

Plus, I’ll end with my personal opinion on which is the top pick between the two!

Note: Both Canva and Adobe Spark have free plans, but this post will be a review of the features of both tools’ individual paid plans.

Read More

9 Twitter Best Practices For Better Tweet Copy, Images, and Videos (With Examples)

/

Do you want to improve the performance of your tweets on Twitter?

Whether your focus is on tweet copy, images, or video, in this blog post I will share 15 simple Twitter-backed tips to fine-tune your output.

Read More

3 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Social Media Response Time (to Impress Customers And Shame Your Competition)

/

Want to respond faster to your customers on social media?

In a world where customer service support via social media is now expected by customers (and preferred over phone and email), just being on social and responding whenever isn’t enough. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or wherever … customers want speedy replies!

And while instantaneous replies are beyond the scope of most businesses, studies show that the majority of customers expect a same-day response from brands on social media.

Read More

3 FREE Social Media Marketing Tools Every Business Needs in 2021

/
3 FREE Social Media Marketing Tools Every Business Needs in 2021

3 FREE Social Media Marketing Tools Every Business Needs in 2021

Are you looking for free social media tools to boost your social media marketing in 2021?

In this blog post, I’m going to share three of my favourite (and in my opinion, some of the best) FREE social media marketing tools that are perfect for streamlining your workflow and creating great content for any social media platform in 2021. Let’s get going!

1. FREE Social Media Tool For Screen Recording: Loom

Free Social Media Tool For Screen Recording #1: Loom

Free Social Media Tool For Screen Recording #1: Loom

Customer support has become a huge element of successful social media marketing, and that trend is likely to continue in 2021. Loom is a free desktop or iOS app, or Chrome extension that allows you to screen record and share video clips with ease. Loom can be used in tons of different ways for business and social media, including:

Customer support: Customers having trouble with your website? Need to make a quick “How-to” video? Record and share a clip of you talking through a solution to the problem in seconds, and share a link straight to it.

Product marketing: Record your website or service to share information on new features, or to onboard new sign ups. Alternatively, you could record a video to encourage customers to share testimonials that you can publish to your social media profiles.

Sales: Capture a prospect's attention with a personalised video recorded over your website and your face chatting away on-screen. Share the video direct with your prospect to build a personal connection from the off, and share a link to your calendar/pitch deck too.

Other things I really like about Loom include:

  • Letting you add a CTA button at the end of your videos.

  • Simple editing tools to make your video more engaging to watch.

  • The ability to add password protection to your videos.

  • Engagement metrics to see who’s been watching your videos and how well they’re performing.

Find Loom at www.loom.com

2. FREE Social Media Tool for Keyword Research: Ubersuggest

FREE Social Media Tool for Keyword Research: Ubersuggest

FREE Social Media Tool for Keyword Research: Ubersuggest

Need inspiration for blog post ideas? Ubersuggest has a ton of different features, but my favourite is its keyword suggestion tool. Whack a keyword into Ubersuggest and it will return a bunch of suggestions, questions, related ideas and more, ranked by popularity.

For the top 30 results, you'll be able to click through to see which website ranks highest for that particular keyword and check the page/article out for yourself.

Ubersuggest's free version gives you 3 free searches per day, which you can copy to your clipboard or export to a CSV file.

If you're looking for a mega deep-dive into blogging data and strategy, you won't get it without upgrading. But as a starting point for keyword research, Ubersuggest's free version is a great place to start.

Find Ubersuggest at www.ubersuggest.com

3. FREE Social Media Tool for Graphic Creation: Canva

free-social-media-tools-2021.PNG

Creating consistently eye-catching social media graphics can be a challenge, but Canva makes the job so much easier! Most social media managers will be pretty familiar with Canva already, but as a quick and easy tool to create professional graphics for social media, I’ve yet to come across one that I like as much. It’s so easy to create still images, videos with animated text, and more.

Canva’s generous free plan gets you access to features including:

  • 250,000+ free templates

  • 100+ design types (social media posts, presentations, and more)

  • Hundreds of thousands of photos and graphics

  • Real-time collaboration and commenting tools

  • 5GB cloud storage

Full disclosure: I use a paid Canva plan which gives me access to (amongst other things) premium stock graphics and instant re-sizing tools, so I can turn a square piece of content for, say, Instagram, into a long and tall image for Pinterest, instantly. So handy!

Find Canva at www.canva.com


FREE Social Media Tools for 2021 Conclusion

So there you have it, my top 3 FREE social media tools for 2021. If you’d like to me suggest more ideas for free tools, including scheduling and link sharing, do let me know in the comments below!

How to Use Hashtags to Grow Your Business on Social Media (Tips and Best Practices for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, And YouTube)

/

Why Hashtags Are Important For Brands on Social Media

Hashtags on social media help to group conversations, give context to your message, and crucially - because using the"#" symbol in front of a word turns it into a clickable link - hashtags can help you and your content get found by your target audience. Clicking on a hashtag will take to a person to a list of posts containing the same hashtag.

Many brands use hashtags "just because", but adding them without purpose can one can at best weaken the message of a post, or at worst turn people off your brand completely. 

In this blog post, I'll guide you through everything you need to know about hashtags and how to make the most of them on all of the biggest social media platforms. Read on for hashtag best practices, and how to best integrate hashtags into your social media marketing strategy.

Read More