Social Media Marketing Tools For Local Business Owners
Are you short on time but wish to regularly feed content to your social media marketing channels?
Do you often find yourself carrying out cumbersome social media marketing tasks for your business? Nowadays, it is essential to integrate social media into your marketing mix.
This post will focus on five social media automation tools that will save you valuable time by automatically handling much of your social media marketing efforts.
How to use social media automation tools
There is only so much time you can devote to the tackling of various tasks. This is particularly true for entrepreneurs who run a business independently or who have only a small number of team members they can rely on.
Fortunately, there are multiple tech resources that you can easily utilize to:
- Post content on several platforms.
- Pre-schedule your posts on social media.
- Automate repeating social publishing jobs.
- Manage all social media accounts from one place.
- Keep track of your results.
Social Media Automation tools that will help you save time
Here is my list of top 5 social media automation tools:
1. Hootsuite – with over 10 million active users, this tool is presently one of the top ranked social media automation platforms.
It has a reputation for being one of the best tools for social media presence management, something attested by the Wall Street Journal. Its chief benefit, perhaps, is that you can start using this tool for free.
Key features:
- Connect with as many as 35 social media accounts.
- Integration with RSS feeds and your blog site.
- Keep track of conversations mentions of your business from the dashboard.
- As a bonus, you can integrate and manage this tool from your WordPress blog.
2. Sprout Social: Famous for its sleek, easily navigable user interface, this tool is another strong social media marketing / automation resource. According to its users, this tool can get the job done in fewer steps compared to other platforms. It costs a little under $59 a month to use it.
Key features:
- User friendly dashboard and interface.
- Unified smart inbox to make engagement intuitive.
- Keep check of Topics and Hashtags on Twitter.
3. Buffer App: Another easy to use, free of cost social media automation tool – but it does have a few limitations. The tool allows you to effortlessly pre-schedule content and post it to your active social media accounts. One of its most likeable features is its seamless integration with the Bit.ly App, a link shortener utility that can help you earn some extra profit on the side.
Key features:
- Support for multiple Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
- Seamless integration with the Bit.ly link shortener.
- Browser extensions for Firefox, Chrome and Safari browsers are available that let you share content straight from the web to your social media channels.
4. Social Oomph: Similar to Bufferapp, this is another free social media automation tool which can be used to manage and streamline your social media channels. It has been up and running since 2008 and is a formidable social marketing app that is definitely worth a look.
Key features:
- Allows you to manage as many as 5 Twitter accounts as well as an unlimited number of LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.
- Automatic follow back feature incorporated.
- Monitor mentions and retweets from the app’s dashboard.
5. Twitterfeed: As implied by its name, this social media automation tool allows you to literally feed your blog to Twitter (as well as other social media platforms).
It may not fall under the conventional definition of a social media marketing app, but it does help you automate the task of sharing content across various platforms, and above all, it is totally free to use. You can see an example of http://www.hydrovac-edmonton.com using it to feed several of their social platforms.
Key features:
- Allows you to feed your blog content to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Content can be added from other RSS feeds to your social media accounts.
- Fetches real time information on how well your feeds are performing.
So there you are, a description of five cool social media management applications that will streamline your marketing endeavours and help your business grow. Best of all, you won’t even have to spend anything to take advantage of most of them!
