Graphic / Photo Editing

Graphics are an important part of your marketing presence on social media – and you don’t have to be a Photoshop master to make your own. Remember that great graphic content is easily shareable, which is a great chance for you to get noticed!  You can create your own with Canva or Piktochart – they offer a variety of features and they can also play a key role for graphics prepared for your social media platforms or blog.

(that is what we generated thanks to Pablo – another great tool for designing simple graphics)

You will also need some photos for commercial use – for your infographics, fanpage, or blog posts. Librestock is perfect for that.  It offers more than 60 thousand photos permitted for commercial usage (and it’s consistently updated with new photos).

Benchmarking & Measuring

Measuring or optimizing your results may seem difficult – especially if you haven’t done it before. We know a few tools that can come to your rescue. One of them is, of course, Sotrender,  which helps you analyze your social media activity and provides not only helpful data and statistics, but also hints, tips, and tricks for improving your social media performance. When it comes to benchmarking, you can compare your results with competitors and follow everything they do on social media. Just like this:

Update: Sotrender isn’t just an analytics app anymore! We also provide a social inbox and moderation feature for Facebook and Messenger. You can now provide excellent social customer care, engage with your fans, and measure your social media metrics from one app. 😉

Monitoring

Your social media actions should be effective and you should keep an eye on the impact and influence you have.

Social mentions will be crucial for your personal branding, which is why you should track them as often as possible. How unfortunate would it be to miss someone mentioning you, your business, or your branch and not react on time?

Social media isn’t known for its mercy, and you need to react right here and right now. If not, you’re out of the game and your competitors will react before you. That is why you should give Brand24 or SentiOne a try – these two social media monitoring tools, when properly configured, will work wonders for your business.

You may also find BrandYourself an interesting tool for online reputation management. It shows you how often, why, and where you are googled – and in what context! You can also create a kind of business card for yourself. And there’s Muckrack, which gives you access to see where your articles have been shared.

Social Media Tools for Automation

If you just started personal branding on social media, you’re probably not that interested in automating your activity. But as soon as you produce more content, become more visible and active, these tools will be a great way to save time. Take a look at our article on the best affordable social media tools that can help you automate your social media tasks. You may even find it especially helpful in terms of your content distribution – planning and publishing your posts and articles.

Organisation

If you don’t get your work organized, you’ll get lost! For some people, Google Calendar works perfectly and is enough. But if you’re not among its admirers, fortunately, there are other tools available.  Tools that’ll help you plan your activities, divide them into projects, on daily or monthly basis, and will change your workflow for the better. For organizing your tasks and getting motivated to do your work, we would recommend ToDoIst. You can consider them your personal assistants in getting things done. Time to wipe away your sticky notes!

image source: churchm.ag

Inspiration

Personal branding requires being creative and producing a lot of quality content – so it’s normal that from time to time you may find yourself a bit uninspired. Buzzsumo helps you find highly loveable content and shows you how often and how willingly some articles/posts were shared. Answer The Public is a free visual keyword research & content ideas tool, showing you what is being typed into searched using Google’s search engine.

You should also follow trends on social media to simply see what is hot, and what is not – and obviously try to follow the former path. Google Trends will show you what actually rides a trending wave. And Sotrender Trends, being prepared every month by Sotrender’s research team, is a great source of creative insights based on the social media activity of tons of brands over numerous categories in the UK.  

You can find a bunch of inspiration by following some key marketing influencers and websites (follow people such as Lilach Bullock, Dan Purvis,  Ian Cleary, Lukasz Zelezny or Adel de Meyer or websites like RazorSocial.com, wersm.com or socialmediatoday.com – but of course there are many more in the business!)

Miscellaneous

For many of your everyday tasks, Google Docs may seem pretty irreplaceable. Remember about Prezi and SlideShare for preparing and sharing attractive presentations and offers. Meanwhile, bit.ly makes your links shorter and more user-friendly if needed (and tracks clicks).

We hope that our article was helpful and will make working on your personal brand pleasant and effective! And we know there are tons of other useful tools for keeping your personal branding on social media in shape. If there’s anything you want to add,  we’re happy to find out about them in the comments section below!