Three helpful tools to manage your social media – episode 74

Tourism Upgrade with HollyG

Three tools to help you grow and manage social media.

Welcome to Tourism Upgrade. The podcast unpacking marketing trends from travel, tourism and marketing leaders. I’m your host HollyG and today I’m going to share with you three tools that I use that help manage social media.

Also in this episode I am going to ask myself an answer the $1000 bonus question.

For those that don’t know what that is, at the end of every podcast episode I ask my guests the same one question at that is – If you only had $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on?

Some find it tougher than others and I always think – what would I answer – well in this special episode I’m going to give you my answer!

But first let me share with you a couple of tools that i’ve started using in managing social media which i’ve found to be super valuable. I did a similar episode to this in the last podcast series, it was episode 37 and I shared that the right social media tools can help you better manage and deliver your social media plan.

I find you can have a fantastic strategy or plan but the downfall in often in the execution of that plan.

And thats why sometimes tools can really help you.

Three tools to manage social media

1) LATER

Later is a great tool for planning and scheduling Instagram content.

It allows you to plan from your desktop upcoming Instagram posts and schedule them for a specific date and time and then via an app you download onto your smartphone you get a notification that its time to post on instgram and with a few very simple presses of the button your post goes goes out live.

It won’t automatically post for you – there is some manual element there but its minimum and easy to use.

There are the free and paid version.

I like that it doesn’t post automatically as it gives me a second opportunity to look over the post, to decide if I feel like its the right time to post it, I may have posted something live and spontaneous early so I don’t want that post to go live until later, or the weather may have changed or some huge crisis happened etc..

The other great thing is the visual planner so you can visualise what your account is actually going to look like.

For me with my Tourism Upgrade Instagram account I have a pattern going for my Instagram so I can plan it out and see what it looks like ahead of time.

2) CrowdfireApp

My next favourite tools is called CrowdfireApp and if you have used this in the past and then ditched it well its time to look at it again because they have just launched a major upgraded to this tool.

I use this tool to grow Twitter and Instgram followers. I find it challenging to grow your followers on these two platforms without using a tool.

Basically you log in each day on your desktop and a bot walks you through a serious of suggestions for your twitter or instagram account.

For example is will say

Unfollow these 20 accounts that are not following you back – you can then choose to unfollow them or not.

Then it may say follow back these 20 accounts that follow you.

Then unfollow these inactive accounts

Then reply to these people that have mentioned you you

Then follow these 20 accounts from your competitors

Check it out for yourself using their free option and see what you think.

3) Facebook Scheduling Tool

Built in to Facebook is the ability to schedule posts. I honestly don’t know how people manage social media without using this tool. Read all about it here from the Facebook help centre.

In the comments below please let me know your favourite to help manage social media.

If you only had $1000 marketing budget what would you spend it on?

I believe one of the most over looked marketing assets we have in the tourism industry is our customer database.

If I only had a $1000 marketing budget I would be using the funds to set up something like Mailchimp – which is an email communication tool. Setting up Mailchimp is not going to cost me anything depending on the size of your list. Then I would be engaging my graphic designer to create a nice looking, on brand newsletter template. I would then plan out what useful and interesting email newsletters I could send to my database that they are going to find informative or entertaining or useful at some level.

If you are worried about the time commitment think about just doing 1 a month, and they don’t need to be very long. Just a couple of paragraphs. It is so important to keep a relationship going with past visitors, guests or customers. Repeat customers are more likely to buy from you, they are also more likely to refer you.

You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Stitcher or your preferred podcast service.

Tweet me with any comments or feedback @hollygalbraith or email is good too holly (at) hollyg.com.au

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