What’s in our resources toolbox?

When Mary is training she often shares some of the free (or low cost) tools Concise Training use in our business to save us time, make us more effective and look more professional. 

In our spirit of sharing, we thought it would be useful to list some of the tools from our resources toolbox that we use most often – you can see other suggestions on the resources page of our new website.  Each of these tools has a free option which is perfectly adequate but you can upgrade for more options.

You can add Grammarly to your browser as an extension and it will check anything you write into a browser (spelling and grammar) – it’s like Word spell check going at 100mph for social media and blog posts.

Trello is a really useful tool that allows you to manage tasks.  We use it to help our team manage the course update process as well as our ‘to do’ lists.  We know who is updating which course, which is ready for proofreading or finalising and which is left to do.

I’m sure that many of you will have heard of this one – but if not – have a look.  Canva will help you to create images (with and without text) sized suitably for each social media channel. Be careful though, we have had clients like it so much they have spent hours on Canva rather than working!

ContentCal helps us publish original content across social media channels.  It offers a visual calendar with easy options to reuse content. We use the paid option which allows for multiple calendars and client approval, but the free option works well for 1 calendar.  Read more about ContentCal on our blog post.

Mention notifies you when anybody mentions your brand or keyword phrase across the Internet. It is a great way of keeping on top of what is trending and comes with an option to have notifications on your mobile phone.

Pure Chat allows you to add a web chat function to your website. The free option allows you to add up to 3 users on one website.  We have a great conversion rate from website visitors who use this.

Image Source

Using TweetDeck and Hootsuite you can schedule content for publishing (as an alternative to ContentCal) but more importantly, both tools will assist you with engagement – particularly on Twitter.  You can create columns of your Twitter lists, your mentions, and what is trending so that you can get involved in conversations. 

Whereas Tweetdeck is purely for Twitter use, the free version of Hootsuite allows one user to connect 3 social media channels out of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and YouTube.  Premium plans are also available at a monthly cost. We use Hootsuite for monitoring, sharing and engagement and posting to Instagram (as it works better than ContentCal for Instagram).

Do let us know which of these tools you find particularly useful, which are new to you and if there are any resources we haven’t listed that you would recommend. We will regularly update our Useful Resources page so don’t forget to add it to your bookmarks– and share with your contacts.