With so many things to be completed each day in our businesses, at times, it can be really hard to keep up. I remember pulling my hair out, when the end of the day approached and I hadn’t completed everything that was on my to-do list. Frustrated doesn’t even begin to cover it…!

At Xenmedia, we needed a way to get more done in less time that wasn’t too time-consuming and allowed us to get on with the important role of helping our clients.

If you’re using social media for your business, you probably realise now that there are many tasks that are quite repetitive.

It’s a pain, isn’t it?

This list is by no means exhaustive and not in any particular order.

Agorapulse

As far as apps go, Agorapulse is one of the most popular social media tools because of its competitive price point.

Agorapulse lets you manage your social media at lightening speed, whilst providing you really great tools for competitions, publishing, analytics and moderation.

Never miss a tweet or comment

Depending on the size of your accounts, there may be several thousand messages on any given day. Managing them manually would be impossible for a small team and really not a good use of their skill and talent. However, this tool will allow you to filter each Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts inbox for your review.

Since the messages are filtered, you should never miss a conversation. This is great if your company gets a lot of questions or has a lot of customer service queries.

Get to inbox zero

This app allows you to respond to as many new messages, tweets and comments as you like. You can then either assign or tag each one and you’re done.

Higher engagement

• 24/7 syncing is a great little feature that collects all new content and then shows in your feed as new until you review it.
• Since the dashboard is clear and well laid out, you can actually see how many new items are pending review.
• Filter between ‘new’ content and ‘all’

IFTTT (Stands for If This Then That)

If you are on a tight budget and need a way to better automate a lot of your tasks, then IFTTT is the tool for you!

Not only is IFTTT a free web-based tool, you can create quite clever chains of simple conditional statement called “applets”. These are triggered by certain social media services, such as Pinterest, Facebook, Gmail, and Instagram.

Here are a few things you can automate:

• Tweet your Instagrams as native photos on Twitter
• Automatically keep a playlist of your Spotify Discover Weekly recommendations
• Post your Tweets to Facebook when you use a specific hashtag
• Automatically save every Tweet you post to a Google spreadsheet
• Share the same links you post on Twitter on Tumblr
• Save your favorite tweets in an Evernote notebook
• Publish a Medium post when you add a tag to an Evernote note
• Speak notes to Evernote using Siri and iOS Reminders
• Promote your business by sharing Instagram photos with Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, & Facebook Pages
• Automatically share your Instagrams to Facebook
• Post photos you upload to a Facebook Page album to a Pinterest board when you include a #hashtag
• Pin new WordPress posts to a Pinterest board
• Share on Tumblr every Pin you like on Pinterest
• Promote your business by sharing Instagram photos with Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, & Facebook Pages
• Save and share your Instagram photos across your social media
• Save your Instagram photos to Dropbox
• Automatically upload your Instagrams to a Facebook Page Album
• Automatically save new email attachments in Gmail to Google Drive
• Automatically create new reminders on your iPhone for emails you star in Gmail
• Automatically sync emails in Gmail labeled “Evernote” to a notebook

And many, many more….

[bctt tweet=”10 Best Tools To #Automate Your #SocialMediaMarketing @IFTTT” username=”XenmediaM”]

Post Planner

If there was ever a tool you had to love, then Post Planner is it. What I liked about this tool was the fact it was built from the ground up BY social media marketers FOR social media marketers.

The app makes it easy to find and share some great content consistently.

If you are a small business or entrepreneur, this tool will save you a lot of time and frustration by carrying out the heavy lifting.

Here are some of the features:

• Post queue: In a hurry or extremely busy, you can schedule your posts and add status updates in a queue. You can easily automate several thousand posts for the month in a couple of hours, instead of painstakingly doing it for days on end.
• Targeting: This great little feature allows you to target specific audiences for your posts. You can target by country and demographic to reach the people you want at a specific time.
• Post link as image: Images are far more effective on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. With a single click, you can post a link as an image. Studies have shown that this increases the overall click-through rate of each link posted.
• RSS feed automation: Not as popular as it used to be. However, you can still automate publishing from your site’s or blog’s RSS feed.
• Status idea engine: If you’re using post planner for business, you can also post quick updates using status idea engine.
• Trending content: Finding the top trending content couldn’t be any easier. This helps if you have a Facebook group that regularly want the latest technique or “how to” on a particular topic.
• Post to the list: If you have several pages or groups “post to list” allows you to post simultaneously to all of the groups on your list. The idea is to segment your list and then strategically post relevant content to the ones you select.

Buffer

If you’ve been using social media for any length of time you would have seen “Buffer links” and probably wondered where they came from.

Buffer is probably the most used social media tool out there with several million websites using it.

Buffer allows you to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin, Google+ and Pinterest at a specific time and date of your choosing. This gives you unbelievable control and effectiveness.

Not only can you schedule posts, but you can also schedule multiple posts to multiple platforms. So if you want to share a Youtube video on Twitter and Facebook but not Google+ this isn’t a problem

Here are some of the amazing features:

Custom Schedule for Each Platform

If you are a social media marketer, you know very well how important engagement is. This metric will vary from day to day and plateform to platform.

With Buffer you can schedule and rebuffer posts at times that are the most prolific for engagement. You can set specific times on specific days to share your content.

So if you’re based in the UK and most of your clients or followers are in the US, you can schedule your posts to uniquely mirror their engagement patterns. This feature alone is pretty powerful!

Plan Your Biggest Content, Months Ahead, with a Social Media Calendar

The calendar within the dashboard allows you to plan your content way ahead of time which means all of your platforms are consistently updated with your content. This saves a bunch of time and your followers will never know that you have automated this task.

Share Your Favourite article straight away

Buffer also has a Buffer browser extension that allows you to share content you are currently reading in seconds.

Simply install the buffer extension on your Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari browser and with just a few clicks you’ll be instantly sharing your favourite read with a buffer link that tracks the amount of engagement and clicks so that you can analyse later.

Track your top-performing content and repurpose/reshare in a flash

This is hands down my favourite feature. This is because it takes the guesswork out of knowing how well your content that was shared is doing and which ones to repurpose for another campaign. This is brilliant!

By clicking the analytics tab you can see your best-performing content by retweets, likes, replies, clicks and reach. With this information you can strategically re-purpose your content and also produce similar content since you have the stats to show just how popular your content is. One of the most powerful features on an app platform.

Meetedgar

Edgar is very similar to the other social media tools I’m mentioning in this article. It allows you to post content and track your updates. However, Edgar has one powerful feature that allows you to build a library of all of your content and arranges it into categories such as:

• Blog posts
• Quotes
• Fav videos

With that data you are then able to schedule and publish content by category.

Once Edgar has gone through your new content it will then start re-purposing the older updates so you’ll never run out of things to post.

Socialoomph

SocialOomph is a great choice if you are looking to brand build. It focuses it’s efforts on Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter it helps you build a new following by creating an extended profile where you can provide additional information about your brand, product or service.

With Facebook you can schedule updates at any time and day of your choosing. You can also manage multiple pages and schedule wall posts.

There is a free and pro option. If you are serious and want to utilise this tool to the fullest the pro version is the only way to go. The free version is OK but has major limitations with regards to full itinerary of automation.

Here are some of the pro features:

• Schedule tweets
• Set up alerts and track keywords in the public Twitter stream
• Save draft tweets, frequently used text snippets and URLs
• dld.bz URL shortening (means you can include more content or hashtags sine the URL is a lot shorter)
• manage up to five Twitter accounts
• Send direct messages (DMs) to new followers
• Vet new followers — Semi-automation
• Mimic follow — Replicate the following of others
• and many, many more…..

[bctt tweet=”10 Best Tools To #Automate Your #SocialMediaMarketing @socialoomph” username=”XenmediaM”]

Socialflow

Socialflow is very similar to Post Planner and Buffer. You set up rules of when and where to post content and you can schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin.

Great features:

• post video directly to Facebook
• view analytics on a post in real-time
• “queue” and “messages published” are side by side
• analyse every tweet in real time
• great reporting feature to track analytics

[bctt tweet=”10 Best Tools To #Automate Your #SocialMediaMarketing @SocialFlow” username=”XenmediaM”]

Zapier

Zapier is a really powerful automation tool with more than 500 applications. It’s action is called a “ZAP”.

Great Features:

• folders to organize Zaps
• more robust product than a service like IFTTT
• user interface is user-friendly
• commonly used Zaps are suggested
• you have a selection of triggers to choose from which can activate Zaps across multiple platforms
• email list building and registration management
• Zapier newsletters and email updates are packed full of interesting content to help you
• Integrates with Social Pilot

[bctt tweet=”10 Best Tools To #Automate Your #SocialMediaMarketing @zapier” username=”XenmediaM”]

Socialpilot

Again, very similar to Buffer and Post Planner. Social Pilot allows you to bulk-upload and schedule all of your social media updates in advance. This is great if you are posting to various global time-zones.

Features:

• Integrate all social media accounts
• Schedule posts for Pinterest, Tumblr, Googlle+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
• The ability to add team members to the account
• Facebook branding
• Integrates with Zapier
• Link shortener service (allowing you to post additional content or hashtags)

DLVR.IT

Dlvr.it is another social media optimisation tool used by bloggers and companies. You can use it to schedule post to several platforms, monitor engagements via Google analytics, etc.

Compared to the other platforms, Dlvr.it allows you to automate your social activites via several platforms such as Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Linkedin, WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr.

Features:

• Auto-post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others using RSS feeds
• Place content into different categories for different groups of your followers
• Auto feed content at optimal times
• Link shortener service (allowing you to post additional content or hashtags)
• Set your own UTM (Google analytics) tracking parameters on every link you share

Conclusion

As you can see, there are quite a few options when it comes to automating your social media task – this is just the tip of the social iceberg.

Take a look at some of the options in this article and try them out. What works for one blogger or company might not work for another.

Here at Xenmedia we use Buffer for the vast majority of our social media automation. Not because it’s the best software out there, it’s just the best software for us and our needs.

If you aren’t using one of these tools with your marketing, I think you’re missing a trick. Due to the sheer amount of competition out there to provide such tools, the prices are uber-competitive and many even have free options.

Like I said before, if you want to take social media automation seriously, at some point you’ll have to opt to go for a pro or paid option to really utilise the power of these platforms.

Good luck!

Let us know what platform you use and why?