You've established your social media presence, you've figured out how to measure your social media wins, and now you're so busy being social you're running out of time to do all the things that matter most to your business, like making money. What's a person to do? You know there are plenty of posts that you could easily schedule out if you just had a little help. Thankfully we've come a long way over the last few years and there are a number of tools that can help. Here are five tools to help you free up some of your time while still getting your company's message across. Just make sure you don't become a social media robot.
TweetDeck
After being purchased by Twitter TweetDeck took a lot of heat from its user base, but for the purpose of managing lists and scheduling tweets it is still my go to app of choice. The free and easy-to-use platform offers a web based, Windows, or Mac solution and allows the integration of multiple twitter accounts. If you're looking for a twitter management app that has a similar feel to the twitter website, offers scheduling, and doesn't have a ton of extra bells and whistles I highly recommend it.
There are a number of tools out there that can help you manage all facets of your Facebook page. Most recently I learned of a tool called Post Planner, which looks like an in-house marketers dream when it comes to Facebook. However, as with Twitter, I like to keep my post scheduling simple and free. As such, my go to solution for Facebook posts is Facebook's built in scheduling.
The Facebook scheduler, which is built right into your Facebook Page allows you to schedule posts anywhere from 10 minutes in advance to an entire year in advance. If you have a years worth of content ready to schedule out, you can easily manage all of it directly from your Facebook Page. As an added bonus you can see your scheduled posts alongside your already posted content in your activity log to see an overall view of everything happening with your page. As an added bonus it is believed that third party apps can often have a negative influence on the edge rank of your post, which influences the overall number of people who see your content on Facebook. So posting directly on Facebook may improve the chances of your content being seen.
Curalate
If you've figured out how to use Pinterest for your business you've probably discovered how easily you can get sucked into the abyss of pins the second you land on the site. If you're looking to lessen the chances of being sucked in to a pinning frenzy, scheduling some of your posts may help. Curalate offers the ability to schedule pins and repins on Pinterest along with a number of other great features to help you build and engage your Pinterest audience. As an added bonus, Curalate also offers Instagram integration.
Multiple Network Management
If you'd rather keep all of your social networking activity and scheduling in a single location your best option will most likely be a social media dashboard platform like Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows the integration of multiple profiles and multiple social networks all in one location. From Twitter and Facebook to Instagram and Google+, HootSuite has a rather extensive collection of native integration as well as social network addons that will allow you to manage and schedule posts on almost every social network you can think of.
Hootsuite offers a variety of account options from a Basic free account to varying paid accounts depending on the number of users needed and the number of social networks you need to manage.
New tools to manage your social presence and schedule out posts are popping up all the time. While this is a sampling of the ones I prefer and am familiar with, I always recommend trying a few different solutions and finding the right fit for you and your business. Sometimes all-in-one solutions like Hootsuite are a perfect fit, other times they can separate you from the network so much that you feel too disconnected from the network and your audience there. The key is finding a tool that makes the most sense for you and your business.
