16 Tools to Run a Social Media Agency

In the early days of running or working at a social media marketing agency, you can probably get by using email to communicate and post to social media manually. As you grow, you need to start to implement tools into your workflow in order to be more efficient, more productive, and able to handle more clients, work, and team members.

This is not a comprehensive or best-of list but it will serve as a great place to start if you’re starting an agency or it might give you might discover a tool you haven’t considered yet.

Project Management

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Asana Project management is essential for making sure that everyone knows what needs to be done, by whom, and by when. When there’s one central location to keep track of all ongoing work, you have a better chance of staying on top of everything and getting everything done.

With Asana, you can organize tasks by project or by client, assign tasks to different members of your team, attach files & comments to them, and create subtasks for items with several steps.

Asana was created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz and ex-Google & ex-Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. Who better to create a productivity tool for social media managers than two social media forefathers?

Data Tracking & Consolidation

Coupler.ioCoupler.io is a reliable and secure importer of data from various applications into Google Sheets. Set up your data flow and forget about manual copy-pasting. An optional app will do the job for you. Set up custom timings to automatically update your data on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis. Import data from various apps into Google Sheets or connect BigQuery to Google Sheets to take advantage of multiple reporting options. Stop installing new add-ons every time you add a new app. Use Coupler.io to replace them.

Content Creation

G SuiteAnyone with a Google account is likely familiar with their suite of apps; Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. They also have a service designed for businesses to create and manage accounts for their employees. G Suite gives a business owner the ability to create accounts and give their team access to the aforementioned apps and Gmail, all using the company’s domain for each account’s email address.

Users can create files using any of Google’s apps, share them with the rest of the team, work on them collaboratively, send them outside the company using a shareable link, and download them as a variety of different file types. Not to mention, storing or sharing any file with Google Drive and using Gmail for your work email. Check out this article on gmail tips and tricks to supercharge your Gmail efforts. All for as low as $6 USD/user.

KeepGoogle

Docs is a heavy hitter when it comes to creating documents but sometimes you want to jot something down or type something out that doesn’t need to be that formal. Google Keep is essentially digital post-it notes so it’s the perfect place to make short notes or lists that may be disposable. If you want to draft some social copy or you need to quickly jot something down, do it there. If it turns out to be a bit longer or something that needs to be preserved, one click can turn it into a Google Doc. If it’s short, Keep is a great place to keep 50 short notes instead of 50 different Google Docs.

Grammarly

The rise of social media has made everyone’s writing a bit (or a lot) more casual. While that is generally accepted, you don’t want the quality of your writing for a work email or social post to be the same as a text to a friend. Grammarly is a browser extension that’s autocorrect on steroids. Not only does it detect mistyped words, but it can also tell when a word is being used incorrectly or if a phrase doesn’t make sense grammatically. It’s not perfect but it is good at correcting things based on context and it will teach you a thing or two about the English language.

Canva

All social media managers need Canva because it has the best ROI of any other content creation tool. The investment being money and effort. Canva allows you to create professional-looking graphics that can be as simple or as elaborate as you need and they make it really easy; drag and drop, WYSIWYG. Better still, they provide thousands of templates that you can use to jumpstart your creativity and graphic elements that you can use in your own designs.

The best part is that you can use it for free. There is a premium subscription that unlocks some features but most people can get more than what they need out of the free version. It’s web-based, so there are no apps or programs to download and install.

Paletton

Unless you’re a seasoned designer, you might not be aware of the importance of colours. It’s important to keep brand colours consistent but what else do you need to know? What looks good together? How do colours affect the people looking at them? Before you start designing something, you need to think about these things. These things may not be make-or-break but if you care about creating great content, care about using the right colours.

Paletton provides a powerful tool to create colour combinations and palettes of colors that work well together. As opposed to most digital displays that create colours based on red, green, and blue (RGB), it uses the red, yellow, and blue (RYB), which are the building blocks for all other colours. The colour combinations it produces are very different from those you can get in many computer graphic applications and it also applied colour theory which is a practical guide to colour mixing & matching. There’s a lot more to designing with colours than you might think. Paletton makes it easier.

Creative Cloud

Adobe’s suite of products are the industry standards for a lot of creative fields. Video creators, photographers, graphic designers, and digital illustrators everywhere swear by Premiere Pro, Lightroom, Photoshop, and Illustrator (among others). There’s a steep learning curve, and there are cheaper options that are easier to use, but what these programs can do and allow you to do are incredible.

Time & Money

TSheets

It’s important that you and your team track the time that you’re spending on client accounts. Not so much for accountability that you’re putting in the work, but that the clients are being properly billed for the time that you’re putting in. Users can clock in & clock out or enter time manually. When you enter your time, you add the client you’re working for, the general work you’re doing, and optional notes. Later, you can collect all of this data into a comprehensive report.

WaveWave is a great tool to start with for accounting in your business. You can track your income & expenses, create & send professional invoices, accept credit cards & bank payments online, pay employees & independent contractors, and generate reports to make filing your taxes easier. It can integrate with your existing bank account in order to track expenses or transactions can be entered manually.

Communication

SlackIt’s healthy to have boundaries between your personal and professional lives, so you don’t want clients and colleagues contacting you via Facebook Messenger during evenings and weekends. G Suite comes with an instant messenger integrated into Gmail called Hangouts and it can be a good start for communicating with the rest of your team. However, it is limited and will soon leave a lot to be desired.

If you start off with a bigger team, or you grow into one, a great messenger to use is Slack. Once you set up a Workspace using your company’s domain, anyone with an email address with that domain can join. From there, you can message each other privately or create Channels (like chat rooms) for specific people; whole departments, everyone working with a particular client, specific work-related topics, etc. It provides a rich experience that allows personalization through the use of emojis, GIFs, comments, and files.

It provides a rich experience that allows personalization through the use of emojis, GIFs, comments, and files.

Client Management

HubSpot doesn't belong in just one category on this list. It provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, and search engine optimization. It can integrate with Salesforce, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and others. There are also third-party services that provide templates and extensions.

LastPass

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t use simple passwords and you shouldn’t use the same password for everything. It’s hard enough to remember your own passwords and even more difficult when you add all of your clients’. LastPass is a password management system that can automatically fill website & app logins so that you don’t have to remember complicated passwords.

The service is very secure and is highly regarded, so you can trust them with your data. For added measure, you can set up two-factor authentication or have it ask for your master password every time you want to use it. Once you have all of your logins cataloged, you can sort them into folders by client and share them with other LastPass users, perhaps your other team members.

Time & Money

Wave is a great tool to start with for accounting in your business. You can track your income & expenses, create & send professional invoices, accept credit cards & bank payments online, pay employees & independent contractors, and generate reports to make filing your taxes easier. It can integrate with your existing bank account to track expenses or transactions can be entered manually.

Conclusion

Some of the biggest benefits of these tools are that they sync and are cross-platform. Any kind of digital business needs tools that do so that you can work on any computer or any device; macOS or Windows, iOS or Android. You can have confidence that what you’re working on or talking about with your team won’t be lost if you get a new computer or phone or need to work remotely from someone else’s. It’s all online.

The other benefit is that you can use most of these for free. Premium versions are available and can give you more features, but the free versions serve a lot of people’s needs. The tools listed here that do cost money are highly praised and worth the investment to save you time, effort, and frustration.

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