Our Favourite Tools as Social Media Managers
8 tools to make managing your social media easier!
Every chef has their favourite whisk. Every electrician has their favourite rubber-handled screwdriver. Heck—every taxi driver probably has their favourite beaded seat cover. The point is, expert professionals are bound to find the best tools of the trade after enough years in the biz.
While we don’t deal with a lot of hands-on, physical equipment (aside from our keyboards), we’ve nevertheless assembled quite the toolkit to make social media management simpler. So what kinds of tools do we use every day that sets BNL apart? How do we manage to keep dozens of accounts posting, engaging, and growing all at the same time? Part of it is the creativity and energy of our amazing social media managers, and the other part is the tools we use to empower them.
In this article, we’ll go over all the tools we’ve learned to love. From graphic design to DM replies, these handy platforms let us do our job even better—and they could do the same for you. Let’s have a look at our 8 favourite tools as social media managers!
Canva - Graphics
If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that you don’t make it far on social media without some eye-catching graphics to help your message stand out. That’s why we love Canva!
With a super simple user interface, hundreds and hundreds of templates, a huge stock library, and a surprising amount of flexibility, Canva’s platform turns even total rookies into bonafide designers! At BNL, we employ actual graphic designers, combining their eye for aesthetics with the simple, efficient systems offered by Canva.
Gone are the days of needing a full-on degree in PhotoShop to make anything worth looking at. Using Canva, we’re able to create dozens of graphics for social media (and other uses) in a day. These can range from simple posts of an image and some text to carousel posts with pictures, graphics, and information all tied together.
2. Later – Scheduling
As social media managers, we deal with a lot of posts. Like, a lot of posts. With clients across so many time zones, we’d literally never have a spare moment if we posted each one by hand. So naturally, we went on the lookout for the perfect tool to help us create, schedule, and publish posts the easy way. And we definitely found it in the form of Later.com!
Later is one of the most essential tools in the BNL arsenal. It allows us to manage daily, weekly, and monthly calendars for all of our clients. We can add multiple accounts (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.) to the same Later profile, allowing us to choose what, when, and where to post at a glance.
3. Agorapulse – Inbox and Reporting
If you do social media, you know that posting is only half the job! We love Agorapulse as a tool for inbox management, as well as for its reporting abilities. On the inbox front, it’s the easiest way to view and reply to messages across platforms for multiple clients, all on the same site.
Plus, the reports for Agorapulse are essential for our larger clients. These flexible reports let us track how certain campaigns and posts are doing online, allowing us to rethink and restructure at a moment’s notice. These reporting tools are vital for the larger clients we hold in the BNL space that need very robust data reporting in order to inform their overall marketing strategy.
4. Asana – Project Management
If you’re a to-do list type of person, add Asana to that list! We use Asana on a near-constant basis to assign tasks, manage ongoing projects, add and edit due dates, and handle last-minute requests from clients. Our whole team is on our channel, meaning we can quickly assign tasks to each other, share essential links for each job, and communicate our status as we work.
Asana is a great way to improve efficiency throughout the workday. It’s way faster than sending a thousand Slack messages every time you need something done, and helps promote our chill, semi-asynchronous vibe that our BNL unicorns love. Plus, Asana sometimes gives you a cute little unicorn animation when you click that checkmark button on a job—perfect for that mid-day dopamine boost.
5. Slack – Quick Communication
Sometimes you just need to get in touch. At BNL, we don’t do a lot of email because Slack is just so useful. We’ve got a general channel, a channel for social media managers, a channel for brainstorming, plus a direct line to all of our unicorns at a moment’s notice. Of course, Slack can sometimes take over the day, so we encourage our people to take breaks in the form of daily Slack blackouts, so they don’t feel pressured to reply to every single message right away.
Slack also has the option to do quick voice and video calls. We love using these when it would take too long to type something out, but we don’t need to do a full-on Zoom call. Little features like this make Slack one of our top tools.
6. Squarespace – Websites and Email Campaigns
Since we’re mainly in the social media business, we like to keep things simple when it comes to email campaigns and websites. And that’s why we love Squarespace! Their super simple interface means literally anyone could get a site up and running in just a few minutes. Plus, their library of templates means they always come out looking great.
Squarespace also offers an in-depth email campaign service. This makes sending on-brand, good-looking emails simpler than ever! You just pop your copywriting, pictures, and other information in, tweak it to your liking, and send it off—simple as that.
7. Loom – Training Vids
If you ask us, written SOPs and tutorials can get a bit stuffy and cumbersome. Loom is a great way to quickly and easily explain how to use platforms and do certain tasks by making screen recordings. It’s quick and easy to set up, allowing you to simply pop it on and record your screen while also recording your face and voice at the same time.
We use Loom all the time since you can save the videos and send them out to all new members of the team down the line. We have a Loom explaining just about every tool on this list, which makes teaching it to new people that much simpler.
8. CapCut – Video Editing
As you probably know, TikToks and Instagram reels are a dominating force online. We’ve taken advantage of this trend for countless clients, helping to grow their profiles and get the word out. Of course, video editing tends to take a lot more time than other types of content, which is where CapCut comes in.
CapCut works as a standalone app or online, and it’s designed specifically for web videos. Think of it as the Canva of video editing. With super simple, flexible tools, features to allow team collab, and a little dash of magic from AI, this handy tool lets us create videos for socials much more quickly.
Putting Social Tools to Work for You
Without these tools, our work at BNL would be a lot more time-consuming and tedious, and we wouldn’t love what we do nearly as much! Fortunately, we embrace these handy resources for our benefit—and yours.
With the power of tools like Later, CapCut, Canva, and more, we’re able to manage, nurture, and grow your social media on a whole other scale. People trust BNL to be the social media experts so they can focus on their own expertise. That’s why we insist on using the best tools available and teaching our unicorns to use them!
If you’re curious about any of these handy resources, how we use them, or how we can put them to work for your business, we’d love to chat. Drop us a line today!