5 apps to make your social media easier for your small business

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In preparation for this blog post, I wrote down all the apps and websites that I use; some free, some paid for, that help us to run the business smoothly. It became a long list so I decided to break it down for you - here are 5 apps that really help us with our social media; from scheduling to design, as well as helping us run our Facebook groups.

PLANOLY FOR INSTAGRAM

Planoly is designed to help you with Instagram; to plan it and to schedule it. It is free to a certain point, with you needing to pay to get better use from it. We use the free version for The Indie Practice. What we love about this app, is the ability to plan what your grid is going to look like in advance as it is important that it looks good and represents your brand well. When we take on new Instagram clients we are often asked to design a new look and feel aligned to their brand values and this is where Planoly comes into it’s own. We can upload images and see what they look like together, move them about until we and the client is happy.

TAILWIND FOR PINTEREST

Tailwind is a great app that we use for Pinterest but you can also use for Instagram. It lets you schedule pins from Pinterest and from your website at different times per day - it even tells you when is the best time to post. We schedule for ourselves and our clients, up to 20 times a day to ensure our pins get the best reaction. You can also create Smart Loops (where you can repin successful pins), join Tribes (where everyone shares your pins) and establish which content works well for your fans through their insights. Tailwind does cost 10 dollars a month but it is well worth it.

RECUR POST FOR FACEBOOK

We use the free version of Recur Post to push regular content through to our Facebook groups. This saves us time and ensures that all our posts happen at the right time on the right day encouraging engagement from the community. For free you are allowed to push content to 3 pages or groups that are linked to one account. This can be across Twitter, Facebook and Linked In so well worth it. We used to use Meet Edgar, which is a paid for service but moved here as felt it worked better for our needs (Meet Edgar is great also as it pushes to unlimited accounts but we felt we were happy with just 3 for free!).

LIVE LEAP FOR FACEBOOK LIVES

When we go live on Facebook, we want it to appear live inside our groups at the same time, to reach more people and get that all important engagement up. Live Leap does just this and is a paid for service, but really important to our strategy. You can of course share it afterwards instead but we like the fact that we can go live in a group and it appear elsewhere.

CANVA FOR EVERY PLATFORM

We couldn’t live without Canva. We design email marketing graphics, blog graphics but also graphics for social media too. It has templates for Instagram squares, Stories, Pinterest headers, Facebook events and more - in fact everything you’ll ever need. It has templates you can use to save you time or if you don’t feel confident with your design skills or you can create your own look. The paid for version allows you to upload your fonts and save your brand colours which is super useful but to be honest we use the free version. It also gives you access to free images which is super helpful as well as paid for ones. Really Canva has changed our lives (a big claim huh?) and since they launched the ability to create print ready graphics with bleeds etc - well it is fab!

Which apps to you use? There are more out there - Hootsuite for example but these are our go to ones. We will share more of these blogs and let you know what we use to simplify systems, ta make videos, and edit them too!