6 Social Media Tools to Make Your Life Easier

A robust SEO strategy includes a healthy helping of social media interaction. Smart digital marketers know social media provides an invaluable direct conduit to their customer base. Ideally, social media can help you to build brand recognition, generate leads, repeat customers, and introduce new products and services to the market.

The only trouble? It takes too much time to manage everything all at once, and as you know, time is money. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available to us that are designed to make managing your social media accounts…and life…easier. To get the ball rolling, we’ve put together a brief overview of a few of the most popular social media management tools available to SEO’s, digital marketers, and social media experts.

Stop wasting time, start managing your time with these helpful tools.

1. Everypost

First up is Everypost. Social media may be an invaluable addition to your marketing strategy, but all of those regular updates take time to create and post. Everypost allows you to create, and post, all of your updates to the major social media platforms at once, and from a single interface.

Using Everypost, you can create your message, adding photos or video content as desired, and then post your update to all of your social media accounts at the same time. Everypost supports most of the major social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn.

The best part of Everypost, is that it’s free.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is rather more robust that Everypost, and will allow you to manage your social media content, schedule regular posts and updates, and monitor and analyze your social media metrics.

Using Sprout Social Feedly Integration you can search for content, schedule posts, and reply to messages directly through the application’s interface. Social Sprout also offers a streaming inbox that allows you to monitor incoming messages from your social media accounts in real time.

More importantly, Sprout Social offers in depth analytics so you can track valuable social media metrics, and the charts look beautiful! Example below.

Sprout Social offers a free trial period, after which you will be required to sign up for one of three management packages, starting at $59/month.

3. Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is one of the more narrowly focused social media tools on our list, though it’s no less useful for savvy digital marketers. Crowdbooster collects data from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, allowing you to more closely analyze the progress of your social media strategies.

For example, with Crowdboost you can see when the majority of users are viewing your posts and video, allowing you to better target your regular social media updates. Crowdboost also allows you to analyze impressions, gauge your total reach, and estimate your overall social media engagement. What’s really nice is that it will learn your optimal scheduling times and make recommendations for you!

The service is not free, but at roughly $10 a month it does fit nicely into a modest business budget.

4. SocialFlow

SocialFlow is one of the more impressive social media management tools available. Using its own proprietary algorithm, SocialFlow allows you to monitor and track your Facebook and Twitter data so that you can maximize the value of your regular posts.

SocialFlow monitors data according to relevence, audience, and time. In short, SocialFlow lets you see how many people are connecting with your updates, who they are, and when they are making contact. This will help to create more engaging content, as well as helping you decide when to post and who to target. SocialFlow services start at about $99 a month.

5. Buffer

Buffer is one of the more popular social media management tools for it’s simplicity. Buffer makes it easy to share content and schedule posts on a wide range of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn using a simple browser add-on.

Using Buffer you can schedule your social media updates so that all of your accounts have a steady stream of updates throughout the day, and so keeping your brand in front of potential leads and customers. The service also provides analytics on the reach and engagement of your updates with the business plan.

Buffer is free for the first 4 accounts, then their “awesome” plan allows up to 12 for $10/month.

6. Hootsuite

Like Buffer, you’ve probably heard of the popular, Hootsuite Pro, which allows you to manage posts across a wide variety of platforms including Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, along with the big 4 social profiles you’re used to.

Hootsuite enables you to manually schedule posts or auto-schedule posts depending on the time of day your audience is most likely to see your content. And the dashboard is layout out intuitively in columns.

Basic setup is free, but limits the amount of accounts one can manage. On Hootsuite, your business can divide management into teams and add admins. Upgrades are based on the number of company users and lets small/medium businesses and agencies manage social media presence across all social networks, scheduling hundreds of posts at once with Hootsuite’s Bulk Scheduling Tool.

Hootsuite Pro also provides detailed analytics of all social platforms. The Pro version costs as low as $10 per month. This management system is sometimes more costly than others with advanced reporting, but perfect for both small and large companies looking for a wide variety of capabilities.

Hootsuite is by far my most used social media management tool!

In Summary

Social media can play an important part in your business’ digital marketing strategies, but only if it is properly managed. social media management tools make it easier to create and post content, as well as providing important metrics that can help to inform and define your future marketing campaigns.

As always, the trick is finding the right tool for your social media needs. The few mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social media management Systems, but should hopefully set you on the right track to finding the application that best suits your social media strategies.