Unfortunately, not everyone has the extra funds to hire an entire marketing team. Likewise, trying to manage social media and your digital presence (which we know is very, very important) isn’t particularly easy to do alongside the other 50 uncomplete tasks on your list. This can result in forced, boring content that gets no engagement on your social channels.
Luckily, there are free tools that can help you manage your social media presence effectively and easily. Oh, and again: they’re free.
Two of the most useful tools that I find myself utilizing every single day are Canva and HootSuite. Available both from your desktop and an app on your phone, you may want to consider utilizing these tools before your next social media update.
Canva
Canva is a free online graphic-design tool that serves as an alternative to more professional, expensive accounts such as InDesign and Photoshop. It has a drag-and-drop interface, allowing beginners to edit customizable templates for easy, aesthetically-pleasing graphics for either print or digital use.
In addition to allowing you to add your brand’s colors and logos, Canva has tons of images, vectors and font combinations. With a stockpile of millions of images, you can find a ton related to the fitness industry.
Say your gym has a special where new members get their first session free. While you could post a sad, boring Facebook update that says that, many people will find it easy to scroll over and ignore the statement since it’s not attention grabbing.
When you look at the visual example (to the right) — it catches your eye. It becomes more motivating, more professional and more compelling. Little things like this could add credibility to your brand, along with motivating new customers to come check out your new special, because it grabbed their attention.
Canva also has specific dimensions for a variety of platforms, making content ready-to-post instead of having to worry if you’re going to have to crop out the most important part of the text. These templates come sized for print materials such as posters and documents along with digital materials like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and many more.
HootSuite
HootSuite is a social media management tool that allows users to schedule and post updates to multiple social media channels from a single dashboard, including: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and many others.
The easy-to-use dashboard interface lets you post an update, then click on which channels you’d like the update to post to. It gives you the ability to schedule a time/date for the post, along with letting you schedule multiple posts on those networks.
With these abilities, you could delegate a couple hours at the beginning of the week to posting on social media, resulting in freed time and less stress throughout the work week. This way, you know everything is already scheduled and taken care of.
So, take some of that stress off your plate (or your assistant’s plate) by utilizing these free tools that can make both the content and the timeliness of your social media presence and posts better.
