There is need to be equipped with important and affordable tools to market your brand/business on social media.

There is no gainsaying the fact that Social Media has become a viable and all vital marketplace that you cannot ignore in this age.

There is a need for flexibility and inventiveness in the way businesses are promoted, which in turn affects how customers or potential customers respond.

To make this happen, you need some social marketing tools to help you achieve your objectives. And interestingly, some of these tools are easy to use, and very affordable, especially for small businesses looking to grow.

So I have decided to make a small list of 5 of the most important ones.

Buffer/Hootsuite. – They are two different apps, but perform the same function of helping you schedule your social media content ahead, and save you time to face other things. You can schedule messages to all the major social media sites from one dashboard and even track them. The good thing is that they both have free versions every small business can use.

Social Clout: this is a social media analytics tool you can use for tracking engagement and calculate social media ROI (Returns on Investment). Social Clout shows you which demographics have the best engagement and which platforms convert the best, at what times, among many other things. It’s a tool that will help guide what kind of content to post to achieve best results. It has a free and paid version but is affordable for small businesses.

Tweetdeck: this is an all-important tool for you if your business is on Twitter, or you use Twitter for social media monitoring to understand what’s trending and which conversations are building up. Tweetdeck helps you manage every aspect of twitter from one dashboard. You can see your timeline, mentions, notifications, messages, trends, and hashtag tracking in one view! And guess what? It’s free!

Crowdfire: This is like a capable marketing assistant who tries to understand your social media goals and recommends things you can do to reach your goals (such as grow a following, drive traffic to your blog, or sell your products). You can also schedule posts and set up automation for your social media accounts. Crowdfire provides a personalized service depending on your goals. For example, if you connect your business store and add a new product to your store, Crowdfire will create and suggest a social media post about the product for you to share. The sweet thing about this tool is that it is FREE!

Canva: this is a VERY important tool for you if you do not have the money to engage graphics designers for your business online. With this tool, you can create your designs without necessarily needing to be a design expert. I use this tool to design all my blog materials. You may never know it, but I’m not a pro designer, the secret has been canva.

With this tool, creating images is so easy even a total newbie could do it. Using its multiple templates, fonts, and colors, all you need to do is drag image elements around and drop them into place.

If you can learn to use this tool, you’d be saving yourself a lot of stress and money.

For some, it is easy to learn, but you may still need someone who’s been using it quite well to take you through