Earlier this week someone said to me that I’m always online, always tweeting somewhere and they didn’t know how I did it. I then broke the news that this wasn’t actually true. While my phone is always in my hand (for community management purposes), a lot of the content that goes out on the accounts I manage is scheduled and automated. Now, i you want the best results, you can’t schedule anything. However, tedious things like promotion are great to schedule. Here are my top 3 social media management tools that will save your business time and, in the long run, money.
Edgar
Edgar is my favourite social media tool. It saves me a lot of time scheduling content and is very useful when you have a lot of different types of content to post and/or promote
Main Features
- Create content categories (such as blog posts, promotion etc.)
- Create a category-based schedule (instead of scheduling specific updates. It’ll pick a post from the chosen category and cycle through them, giving priority to new content)
- Use once category for one time only updates
- Schedule updates for a specific time
- Great for evergreen content
- Built in bitly URL shortener
- Basic stats
Edgar saves a lot of time when scheduling social media, especially if you have a lot of evergreen content. To find out more, check out my Edgar review.
Meet Edgar
Hootsuite
While Edgar now takes over my main uses for Hootsuite (scheduling), it’s great for monitoring your mentions and analytics. I also prefer to use it for one-off updates rather than use Edgar.
Main Features:
- Add 5 social networks (including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google + Pages, etc) and add apps to manage other networks (Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr etc.)
- See social media streams (E.g. timeline, mentions etc.)
- Send the same message across all networks
- Schedule social media posts (autoschedule feature also allows you to send posts and an optimal time)
- Save messages as templates if you’re going to want to send them often
- Add attachments to messages (E.g. images etc.)
- Analytical reports
You can also upgrade to a Hootsuite Pro account to add more networks and get other bonuses. Hootsuite can be used on the go, just download their mobile app!
Get Hootsuite
IFTTT (If This Then That)
IFTTT is an app that allows you to create recipes between other apps, such as sharing news from particular RSS feeds, keeping a record of your status updates and sharing your Instagram posts on Twitter. It’s mainly used for productivity and notifications, but if the right recipes are used it can be an excellent tool to have in your social media arsenal.
Main Features:
- Automates processes, so there’s no need for you to do anything other than turning it on, which saves you time
- Recipes between apps can sometimes not be achieved manually (or would be time-consuming and difficult)
- Can increase productivity (E.g. you can run recipes that will remind you to answer an email)
Get IFTTT.
If you’re willing to spend the money, Edgar is by far my favourite (and the most useful in my opinion). However, if you’re on a budget you can get pretty far with a basic Hootsuite account and IFTTT.