Note: This article will be most beneficial to Small and medium Business owners and Social Media managers who are managing accounts only on Facebook or Instagram or both.
In this article, I will share with my readers two free software you can depend on to manage your social media pages across Facebook products.
When I started out as a social media manager I didn't have much money to invest in social media management software like Hootsuite and others. I was compelled to find an alternative means to ease my daily task of creating and posting contents manually. I had time but no money, so it was natural to opt for something free or less expensive.
Beginners in social media management and small business owners can still function as maximum as they should with these free and available tools that I will reveal in this article and it is available to everybody. You only need to pay with a fraction of your time.
I have managed a company's social media pages with good results with these free and available tools. So, stay with me.
What Social
Media Managers Do Mostly
Basically social media managers do four things:
- Creating engaging and relevant content
- Posting and scheduling the content
- Follow up on questions and comments
- Track campaign performance (Likes, unlike, comments and engagement)
Every other thing done in between the above activities depend on how much
involved a company wants to be in social media.
Strong Social media presence cannot replace the quality of a product but, doing it wrongly can damage the good effort you are putting in to bring your products/business online.
In the digital marketing world, every product has something unique about it and that is exactly what brands and companies are coming to shout about on their social media pages. In situations where companies sell exact products, service delivery will be the distinguishing factor, and that too can also be Unique.
The real reason people buy your product is because they trust you or they trust
the person that referred them to your product. It is not a good practice if a
business uses social media with the sole aim of driving traffic to its web
page. You will end up having fewer and fewer engagement in your social page.
First of all, build trust with your followers and they will in turn buy from you and probably refer others to your product.
1. Facebook Business Suite
The one tool many social media management software companies don’t want you to know much about is Facebook business Suite.
It is a social media software created and owned by Facebook used for managing all of your connected accounts across Facebook and Instagram in one single user-friendly place. And the good news is that it’s for free.
Facebook stated that the Facebook business suite was built for small business owners. Social media managers who are just managing business pages or brands only across Facebook platforms will also find it helpful for their job. I did.
The
popular social media management software available will surely offer you more features
than Business suite, but the features will be mostly beneficial if your
management spills over to twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Features like social
listening will be useful if you have a strong competitor you are competing
against. All the added features comes at price.
Furthermore, Facebook is doing more to help small business owners to stay up to date by managing their businesses across Facebook platforms with ease. And they plan to add more useful features soon.
Business suite offers tools for creating feed posts, scheduling and viewing post reach and performance. It also allows you to create an ad to boost a post to reach a new audience.
I believe any small-medium business owner or social media manager who doesn’t have a huge budget will not lack anything with business suite. Besides, Facebook and Instagram accounts for a large chunk of the pie in social media users.
How to Get Facebook Suite and Start Managing
To get started, all you will require is a
Facebook account and a Facebook Page
Facebook Suite is available for both Desktop and Mobile users. You need to have
an account on Facebook to be able to start.
Desktop Users
I assume you have an account with Facebook and/or Instagram or Both.- Log into your Facebook account associated with your business page.
- Then access Business Suite on desktop with the following link https://business.facebook.com
Connecting Your Instagram Page To Business Suite Desktop
- Open Facebook Business Suite with this link https://business.facebook.com
- Locate and click <More Tools> from the side bar
- Click <Page Settings>
- On the page setting, locate and click <Instagram> on the side bar.
- Click <Connect Account>
- If you are probably logged in to Instagram at the time, the App will prompt you to connect the logged account. But if this isn't the account that you want to connect, then click <Switch Accounts>. Type in your login details.
- You
will be asked to enter your security code if your two-factor
authentication is turned on. Then Confirm.
Mobile Users
Mobile users can download the business suite App from:
For Android : Download for Android
For iPhone: Download For iOS
On the home screen, you will be able to see information like notifications, post summaries, engagement and reach. The side bar will be in view to open your inbox, planner, notification, Ads, Insight and All tools. With these easy to understand features, you will be able to schedule your created posts and content on the Facebook business.
Connecting your Instagram Pages to Business Suite Mobile App
- Open your Business Suite Mobile App
- Click <Settings>
- Click <Connect>
- Click <Connect Account>
- If you are already logged into Instagram account you wished to connect just go ahead and click <Continue As> But if you want to connect to another account, click <Switch Account>
- Confirm you are Done
Once
completed, you can now schedule posts, respond to messages and comments, create
ads and view insights across both Facebook and Instagram. This helps a busy
business owner or social manager to save time and money.
2. Canva
The second software that will be useful is no other than Canva.
Note: Canva has a paid plan, but I am referring to Canva free plan in this article.
Canva is an all-in-one design tool social managers and small to medium
business owners can use to:
What To Use Canva For:
- Create marketing Materials
- Create business branding
- Create social content.
To
get started on Canva, you need to Register first.
Once you are done with Registration, the canva homepage will come live to you.
To start your first design,
- Click <Create Design> in the top right side. While designing, you can:
- Choose from thousands of template they already have.
- Add your own photos or choose from more than 60 million photos they have available.
- Choose from over 210,000 videos.
Graphic pictures of your products when done very well improve your social media page and attract attention to your content.
Remember that the images you use in your social media pages serves the same reason you use headlines in your blogs and email and their single aim is to get your content read. In cases where the graphic itself contains text within it e.g Info-graphics, proper attention should be paid on how texts are arranged and positioned and what message it aim to pass across.
I have also observed that nice and beautiful images of my post do better than some of my half-hearted graphics with nice post write-ups.
Canva also has a plethora of templates to choose from ranging from a happy new month anniversary template. You are sure that when you choose any platform template like Facebook template you are will be offered the best template for Facebook so you need not to worry about making a post that shows only half of your graphic while cutting off the remaining edges.
Canva
also has a free plan for registered non-profit organizations so, you stand to
benefit if you ace a contract to manage a non-profit organizations' social media
page.
In summary, digital marketing is not lacking in tools to handle the various task you want to handle, if there is any shortage at all, it is in the creativity of an individual to make use of the available tools to achieve a goal online - and this is exactly why creative social media managers are highly sought for.