Social media tools are key to streamlining your social media marketing for your pet sitting business. The biggest struggle for small pet business owners when they are trying to tackle social media marketing is the daily upkeep, so I’m going to share 6 social media tools to streamline your pet business! More so than other businesses, each day comes with new challenges, and you can never be certain you’ll have time to spend on creating social media content. Fear not – PetBrainy has the perfect solution for your busy schedule! We have a tried and true pet business system to make your social media marketing easy and painless. The best part? Every tool on our list today is 100% FREE!
Social Media Tools for Content Creation and Organization
Creating content yourself is the best way to provide value to your audience! Does that seem intimidating to you? It really shouldn’t be. We’ve got three free tools (plus some downloads you can pick up right here on PetBrainy) that will help you make quality content all on your own. It’s more possible than you think. All you need is the right social media tools and a little inspiration! After you create great content in Canva, you can use Google Sheets to plan your posts and Google slides to organize it easily and effectively.
Content Calendar Google Sheet Template
All good plans require organization so to keep your plans straight, we created a calendar in Google Sheets. Download our free content calendar template here! Not only does it have a unique tab for every month, so you can plan ahead as far as you want, but it’s color-coded! Every unique category of posts shows up in an entirely different color, letting you see at a glance what you have scheduled. This simplifies your planning process, making it easier to avoid repeating similar posts.
A variety of posts keeps your audience from getting bored. Are you looking for post ideas? Download our FREE list of 100 Social Media Post Ideas. Once you’ve planned out what kind of content you want for the year, you now know exactly what content to create.
Canva
Those clever images with unique text and cool pictures don’t just come out of nowhere! The best tool we’ve found is Canva. While there are premium features, the basic functionality is all free! If you find that you are using the premium images in Canva, it is worth it to upgrade to the paid plan.
This tool is super easy to use! We recommend batch creating content within the same theme to save yourself time. So, for example, if you’re making images for Pet Holidays, make several of them at a time! You’re already in that mindset, so it’s a lot easier to create multiples than one each day you need it. You can even batch create an entire YEAR’S worth of content. Imagine how nice it would be to have that off your mind!
Google Slides
How do you organize all the content you’ve created? Google Slides are ideal for organizing images in the precise order you need them in. Not only can you organize the images in Google slides, but you can also plan each post by using the notes section of the slide. Put the post date as the title, any words you want to post, and the beautiful image you have made in Canva, front and center. Repeat the process for every post you have planned! It doesn’t get much simpler than this!
Social Media Tools for Content Scheduling
You’ve got the materials planned out, artistically made, and organized for easy use, but there are still more ways to make your social media marketing easier! What if we told you that you could automatically schedule your newly minted social media content all at once? That’s right. Set it up in advance and don’t worry about missing a day EVER again. Sound too good to be true? It’s really not! We’ve got two great tools that will make scheduling so easy that the only thing you’ll be forgetting is why it took you so long to get started on social media marketing to begin with!
Hootsuite
With the free version of HootSuite, you can schedule up to thirty posts at the same time. That’s an entire month of posts at once. You have full control over what day and even the exact time that the post goes live, and even schedule on over 35 social media networks. It’s as simple as drag-and-drop and copy-paste! Don’t believe us? Try Hootsuite out for yourself!
Buffer
So, if Hootsuite will do up to a month of scheduled posts for free, why do we use a second scheduler tool? Because there’s more content you can share with your audience than just the images you’ve made! You want to be able to share other people’s blog posts or information you think your audience would find of value. It works a lot like HootSuite. You link your different accounts directly into Buffer, and just set up a posting schedule. One of our favorite parts is that you can add content to a queue to be sent out at the next available time slot. They literally couldn’t make it any simpler!
Social Media Tool for Content Collection
Unlike the other tools on this list which either help you make or plan content, this one helps you find other people’s content to share. You don’t have to do everything yourself. It’s important to share a variety of content from a lot of different content creators. But we know you don’t have time to go searching the corners of the internet for pet-related content for your audience so having a tool that will help you to organize, read, and share content from your favorite sites will be a tremendous help in sharing valuable information with your audience.
Feedly
There’s a ton of great content out there on the internet that your clients might like just as much as you. Feedly gathers all that fun, relevant content and shows it to you all in one place! On one side of the screen, it will track the blogs you’re following, and on the other, the actual posts those blogs have put up. You can tell it what kind of content to look for, so it will only be relevant to pets. What a time saver!
You’ve Got the Social Media Tools, Now Learn To Use Them!
These six tools are all you really need to get started on social media! Start using these tools and you will master them in no time. Like all skills, the more you practice, the easier it gets. Especially the graphic design part. Feel free to use templates until you feel comfortable building them on your own. A quick recap, this is the general process:
- Use the Content Calendar to plan out your posts
- Use Canva to make the posts themselves
- Put into Google Slides to prepare and organize your posts for easy access
- Schedule your own content with Hootsuite
- Use Feedly to find relevant blog posts to share
- Use Buffer to share other people’s content.
It doesn’t seem so hard now does it?! Don’t forget to download our FREE content calendar template. If you need help with post ideas, be sure to download our list of 100 social media posts ideas so you can hit the ground running. Your pet sitting or dog walking business will thank you!
Don’t forget to check back next week when we’ll be talking about content marketing.
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