HootSuite is one of my personal favourites as far as social media management is concerned. The beauty of Hootsuite is that it gathers all of the streams from across your various networks like Facebook and Twitter and displays them in a single dashboard, from where you can view and manage them. It allows you to schedule your posts for later, which gives you the freedom to upload your entire campaign then move on to something else, safe in the knowledge that your plan is being executed exactly as intended and that your posts will appear when they should. Brilliant.
The free plan is sufficient if you if you have fewer than five social profiles to manage, but the paid plans increase the scope of what you can monitor and control and the depth of the analytics on offer. For me, Hootsuite has become an essential tool for managing social media, tracking conversations and measuring results via the web and mobile devices.
Buffer is another smart and easy way to schedule content across your social media platforms. Available for both browsers and mobile phones, this app allows you to upload a bunch of posts, choose which social profiles to send them to, and then Buffer will stagger them throughout the day or week so that you don’t have to be at your computer all the time to maintain a consistent social media presence. This way you don’t have to worry about micro-managing the delivery times of your content. The Bufferapp also provides analytics about the engagement and reach of your posts. Bufferapp has superior scheduling flexibility over Hootsuite but it lacks the fabulous dashboard.
ManageFlitter: This hugely popular tool allows you to curate and grow your Twitter account. It has many features, but for me the Search Feature is the best part of the tool, as it allows you to schedule tweets for the optimal times to be seen by when most of your users are online!
TweetDeck is similar in appearance to Hootsuite and on the surface works in a similar way to enable you to manage your Twitter accounts, but, whereas Hootsuite allows you to manage other social networks, you can now (since Twitter acquired Tweetdeck) only manage Twitter accounts on Tweetdeck. On the plus side for Tweetdeck, however, there is no limit to the number of Twitter accounts you can manage and it is completely free to use for unlimited accounts.
Meet Edgar: Edgar is the coolest kid on the block when it comes to social media management and scheduling. It allows you to create libraries of different types of content then create a schedule around those libraries to push out your content at specific times. Its biggest selling point for me is that it categorizes your posts, as this really focuses you on the type of content you are putting out there. It also has added attraction of re-using your content which makes sense when you consider that most of your social updates are only seen by a tiny fraction of your audience the first time round. The schedule lets you set times when you want your posts to go out and is really easy to use, and best of all, the content remains in the library once it’s been posted, making it easy, for example, to go back and look at last year’s Christmas posts, tweak them and reschedule for this year.
All in all, each of these tools is well-respected, well developed and enormously helpful if you want to set up systems to make running your business easier. The one which works best for you will depend upon your individual requirements and preferences, so it’s worth experimenting with each of them to find the best fit. And remember, scheduling is great, but there’s a lot to be said for mixing in some live posts every day and engaging with everyone who comments on your posts.
