2 Free Digital Tools To Take Your Social Media Management to the Next Level
Plus, a great opportunity for those looking to take this awesome tool pro!
I LOVE Publer. It’s a social media management tool and I use it all the dang time.
I use it for myself and for my clients.
It’s on a short list of tools I use nearly every day.
I love it so much, I wrote a blog post sharing 10 reasons I love it (NOT something I do for every tool in my toolkit). You can find that post at joshklemons.com/publer.
❤️ 🦃 ❤️ 🍠 ❤️ 🫛 ❤️ 🍹 ❤️
But first, happy Thanksgiving week! Before we dig in on sweet potato pie and stuffing, let’s dig in on some free digital tools lurking within Publer!
As always, if you would take a moment to share Free Digital Tools with a few friends, I’d be ever so thankful!
I bought a lifetime pro membership to Publer years ago through AppSumo.
The free product is great, and I recommend it all the time (obviously, or it wouldn’t be featured in this newsletter). BUT the paid product is a whole lot more powerful.
This Friday, Publer is offering a special deal for Black Friday. They are giving 50% off the platform — FOR LIFE — to the first 100 people who sign up.
If free works for you… great! But if you’ve been looking for a tool to take your social media management to the next level, I can’t recommend Publer enough.
Be one of the first people to upgrade this Friday and enjoy those lifetime savings.
Or just enjoy this simple and powerful tool for free instead!
Okay, NOW let’s dig in.
Customize Posts By Platform
Tool type: part of Publer
Over the years, I’ve used a bunch of the better-known social media scheduling tools. Whether free or pricey, almost all of them lacked this one key feature and it caused me endless headaches.
If this was the only thing that Publer did, I’d still use it. It’s that big of a game-changer for me. (But of course, it does so much more than that!)
So let’s say I wanted to do a post thanking WisDems (that’s shorthand for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin) for hosting an event.
I can create a single post in Publer, and then edit it as needed by channel.
Which matters SO MUCH if you want to be able to tag WisDems (or anyone else!) in your post.
In most scheduling platforms, you have three options.
Create separate posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, making sure that each post is just right
Don’t tag them on any channel
Tag them on one channel and let the remaining channels show a broken link
Not tagging someone on social media is like talking to them on the phone without first dialing their number. They might hear you, but probably not!
Tagging people with broken links… well that’s worse than not tagging them at all!
Publer solves this problem completely. Create your post once and then click the little street sign icon in the bottom left corner.
Now you can edit your post by channel.
And for what it’s worth – you have plenty of channels to choose from. Publer lets you post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and WordPress. They recently added Mastodon, and apparently Threads is on the way!
Often, editing by channel is as simple as making sure all tags are correct.
But you can also use this feature to specify which graphics you want to use on which platform. Or to share unique utm links per channel, if you’re looking to track links in Google Analytics or elsewhere.
Sometimes, a post that works great for Facebook will be just a bit too long for Twitter. Time to put on the old editing cap and whittle that post down.
I can’t stress enough how much easier this simple feature has made my life.
I post hundreds of pieces of content a month for myself and for clients. Being able to customize per channel saves me so much time and energy.
FREE or FREEmium: FREEmium
This is a free tool. You can upgrade your account at any time to unlock a whole lot more functionality.
Built-In Link In Bio Tool
Tool type: another free component of the platform
Instagram is known for being unfriendly to links. You can’t add links to posts (I mean you can, but they won’t be clickable). And you can add a Story Link Sticker, but that doesn’t really cut it for most brands.
Enter the Link In Bio tool.
With a link in bio, you can create a landing page that shows all of your Instagram posts with links, and folks can click through to an associated link from the matching post.
It’s far from perfect, but for many content creators, it’s better than the alternative – no links at all!
There are loads of free and paid link in bio tools out there. But Publer has one built right into its platform.
It’s easy to set up, simple to use and it’s free.
To create yours, click your settings menu in the top right corner and then select Link In Bio.
You can then customize your page, add primary links – like website, store, social channels… anything important and evergreen.
You can even add custom images for those evergreen links to keep things looking nice and on brand.
Then, whenever you’re creating an Instagram post through Publer, you can simply add a link, as needed, to the bottom of the post.
Once done, you can mention in the post that people can learn more (or shop, or donate, etc.) through the Link In Bio.
When someone clicks the link in bio, they’ll see that post, as well as all others you’ve added links to, and can then click directly through to the url.
Not as easy as Twitter or Facebook, but that’s how Instagram rolls. So it’s nice to have an easy – and free! – workaround.
FREE or FREEmium: FREEmium
Same deal. Publer is free to use and this is a free tool. But if you want to unlock more power, you can upgrade your account.
I mostly use Publer on my desktop. But they also have a mobile app that works great.
Check out Publer today and let me know what you think.
And if you’re thinking about upgrading, set an alarm to do so first thing this Friday. You’ll get 50% off for life!
In the meantime, please share Free Digital Tools with anyone you know who might enjoy this humble little newsletter.
Want to read more about what you can do with Publer? Check out my blog post.
Happy Thanksgiving!
See you in a fortnight,
Josh
joshklemons.com