Tuesday, March 29, 2016

6 terrific—and free—Facebook tools for marketers

We all want to squeeze more juice out of our Facebook marketing campaigns, but plenty of barriers stand in the way.

Some of us struggle to identify how to get more visibility and traction for our Facebook posts. Others of us know exactly what we want to implement, but we don’t have the resources or the staffing to pull it off.

Luckily, there’s a whole host of Facebook marketing tools out there to relieve you of these burdens. Here are six super-effective Facebook marketing tools to boost your Facebook performance. Even better, they’re all free:

DrumUp

It’s important to post a steady stream of interesting, relevant content to your Facebook wall, but it can be a pain to hunt down share-worthy stuff.

Now you can outsource the scavenging to DrumUp and cross this task off your to-do list. This free tool identifies engaging stories that are suitable for your audience, ranks them and queues them up to be shared on your social media accounts.

To get started, just provide a list of relevant keywords. The service scours the Internet for stories related to these keywords and provides them in a content feed. See a story that you like? Give it a click, and DrumUp will add it to your share queue. It will even select an optimal time for the post to be shared.

If you wish to customize it, you can click into the post and add a comment along with the headline, adjust the date and time of the post, include a recommended hashtag upload an image and even schedule the post to be repeated in the future.

In addition to the content the tool recommends, you can also create your own unique posts, meaning you can use this tool to manage all your Facebook shares.

Likealyzer

Powered by the folks at Meltwater, LikeAlyzer provides an in-depth assessment of your Facebook page performance, coupled with recommendations on how you can boost engagement with your brand. Unlike many other free tools, you don’t have to turn over any personal information to attain the assessment. Simply plug in your page URL, and it will be automatically generated within seconds.

The report is user-friendly and provides clear insights into what is and isn’t working for your Facebook account.

In addition, LikeAlyzer shows you how your page stacks up to those of “Similar Brands,” so you can get a good feel for how much attention competitors are paying to their Facebook presence.

Canva

This design tool comes in handy anytime you want to create a custom image, a frequent task if you’re managing your company’s Facebook marketing efforts.

I love Canva, because it’s incredibly intuitive. It offers pre-sized templates for Facebook page covers, posts and app covers. Once you’ve selected your template, you can drag and drop a variety of design elements (images, text, shapes) to populate it and voila—you’re all set.

Don’t have an eye for design? I feel your pain. The first couple of Canva images I created myself were nothing short of heinous. Luckily, the team at Canva is sympathetic to our shortcomings. Their online Design School includes a wealth of tips and tutorials to help users create more beautiful images for content marketing and social media.

Still struggling? You can always snag one of their pre-designed layouts (some are free; some cost a small fee) and adjust the text to make it fit your needs.

[AWARDS: Did you use social in an innovative way to accomplish PR goals? Enter the Digital PR & Social Awards.]

Facebook Power Editor

The folks at Facebook designed this free marketing tool specifically for sophisticated advertisers who are managing multiple campaigns and ads. If you’re frustrated with the limitations of the standard Facebook Ads interface, this is for you.

With Power Editor, you can quickly build and duplicate campaigns, ad sets and ads. It enables you to edit all your ad sets within the same window, making it easy to adjust details such as copy variations, placement targeting and conversion tracking. Once you’ve created all your campaigns, you can set them live at the same time, and they’re typically approved within minutes. All in all, this is a seamless process that helps you get multiple new Facebook ads into production way more efficiently than you could in Ad Manager.

Even more exciting, as a Power Editor user, you can be an early adopter of new ad tools. Typically, Facebook does a test run of all new products in Power Editor to gauge their popularity before building them into the standard interface. This can give you a leg up on competitors.

Headline Analyzer

Marketers know that a post’s headline can make or break its performance. We take painstaking efforts to create eye-catching, compelling headlines for blog posts and ad copy, and we would be crazy not to do the same for Facebook shares.

The problem is that it can be tough to predict what headlines will work best for your audience—that’s where Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer comes in handy.

Once you’ve brainstormed a potential headline, plug it into this tool. It’ll spit out an overall score for your headline, along with a detailed assessment of its structure, character count, sentiment and previews of what it would look like in email subject lines and ad copy. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this tool is the link provided in each section that offers tips, examples and case studies.

If you’re not a natural wordsmith, this is the Facebook tool for you. It teaches you everything you need to know to craft headlines like the best of the content marketers.

Timeline Contest Manager

Contests are a great way to promote engagement with your Facebook page, but organizing them can be a nightmare. Agorapulse’s Timeline Contest Manager streamlines the process. It enables advertisers to launch on their timelines an unlimited number of contests, ranging from quizzes to photo contests to sweepstakes.

To get started, select a post that announces the contest you wish to promote.

Next, pick the type of contest that you wish to run. You’ll be prompted to include the winning criteria; then the tool will scan the post to help you identify your winners.

Though this seems to be the most popular of Agorapulse’s free tools, it also offers a Facebook Page Barometer and Agorapulse Academy, which are definitely worth checking out.

Have you found other free Facebook tools out there that you love? Please share your recommendations in the comments section.

Erin Sagin is a community manager at WordStream. A version of this article originally appeared on the WordStream blog.

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