If you are in business for yourself, odds are good that you don’t have a lot of time. But your business might depend upon social media for sales or leads, and that can get sticky because you know you need to do it, but you just can’t. That’s where social media automation tools come in.
If you started the business of social media a few years ago, you might remember how it used to be. At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, there was just Twitter and Facebook that a company needed to worry about. There were no tools to manage social media and automate processes because they weren’t yet invented or even necessary.
But there are thousands of social media sites now and several where you should be active now, and unless you use automation, you’re probably not going to be able to use the platforms to their full potential.
Luckily, there are automation tools for just about every single social media platform out there, and some of them handle many different social media platforms at once. They all do different things and it will be your choice which one you go with, but here are some options for automation tools that are quite popular along with a short description of each.
Social Media Management Tools
Buffer: Buffer is a social media scheduling app. Basically, you set up a list of things to publish and decide which platforms and when and the app does it for you. The great thing about this is that you can then post on a regular schedule which is very helpful for building your fan base.
HootSuite: This is one of the most well-known and popular social media tools and does almost the same thing as Buffer, but each have their strengths and weaknesses. HootSuite is set up specifically so that business can conduct social media marketing campaigns across some of the most popular social media platforms. They incorporate Google Analytics and Facebook Insights as well.
TweetDeck: TweetDeck is specifically for Twitter (as you probably gathered) and it is a wonderful solution for managing Twitter feeds, setting tweets to go out at a certain time and setting up alerts so that you always know what is going on. In fact, TweetDeck even grew so large that they were bought by Twitter. This is a great set-it-up-and-go application that is perfect for busy entrepreneurs.
SocialOomph: This little tool has some really great features if you go with the premium version, but even the free version is pretty amazing. You can do a lot of things with these tools, like the aforementioned scheduling of tweets like TweetDeck had, as well as allowing you to track keywords, auto-follow people who follow you and a whole lot more. If you are too busy to do most of the things that social media requires, this is the perfect solution for you.
SproutSocial: This is basically a collector of all of our various feeds that puts them all in an inbox format so that you don’t ever miss something important form any of your social media platforms. However, SproutsSocial also does great things like helping schedule tweets, schedule direct messages, post to Facebook and much more.
SocialBro: This is a Twitter helper that gives you a much deeper ability to use Twitter by identifying those who are having an influence on others, helping you learn when is the most optimal time to tweet something and even compare yourself with your competitors to see how you are stacking up. This tool is not so much an automation tool as it is a more comprehensive tool for Twitter, but it does save entrepreneurs time by providing them with data they would have had to figure out for themselves.
Tweepi: Tweepi is sort of a cleanup tool for Twitter. When someone unfollows you on Twitter, you won’t know it until you start looking, but Tweepi finds them and unfollows them. It also looks for inactive people on Twitter and cleans them and it can follow those who follow you, as well as let you set parameters to follow others automatically. It has a pro version with a few more features as well.
Managing Your Social Media
These are some of the tools that can help you, as a busy entrepreneur, manage your time on social media more efficiently. Which of these tools do you find most useful? We would like to hear your thoughts.