Let’s face it, social media can be a time suck! While it’s always best to be ‘present’ when sharing and posting content to your pages, there are occasions when time just isn’t on your side, or you need to take some much-needed leave.
Summer holidays and Christmas are perfect examples – how do you manage to keep the wheels turning on your social media during the busy holiday seasons when you’re visiting family, eating your weight in Quality Streets or sipping cocktails by the beach, and making memories with your loved ones?
There are lots of tools out there that can help you to plan content in advance and schedule posts to be sent automatically on the days and times you choose. Some might say there’s too much choice! So, I’ve rounded up a handful of social media scheduling tools to help you choose the right one for you, so you can enjoy a stress-free break from work.
Hootsuite
One of the better-known scheduling tools, Hootsuite’s big advantage is that it’s one of the few tools that offers free accounts! It is limited though, as you’d expect.
On the free account you can only connect up to three social media accounts and can only schedule five posts at a time, so it really depends how many pages you’re managing, how many posts you want to publish, and how long you’re going to be unchained from the laptop.
It does, however, include lots of features such as bulk uploads and analytics. The social media platforms it can manage are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. If you need a bit more than the basic free package provides, you can choose to upgrade from £39 per month.
Sign up to Hootsuite
Buffer
Another popular scheduling platform that offers a basic free package, Buffer lets you schedule up to ten posts for up to three social channels, giving you a bit more breathing space than Hootsuite. It works well for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram and lets you tailor the same post for each channel, but it doesn’t give you any analytics on the free version and doesn’t allow you to add locations or tags to Instagram posts.
The good news is, if you want to upgrade, it’s very affordable. For only $5 per month you’ll get a lot of great features, including unlimited scheduling, custom links, stories scheduling, plenty of analytics reporting, and with your Instagram account linked you can also schedule the first comment after your post is published.
Sign up to Buffer
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is great if you’re collaborating with a team as you can access a shared content calendar and set up message approval features so everyone is onboard with what’s going out before it’s published. You can also pull assets from a shared library or add product links to your posts by connecting product catalogues you might have with Facebook Shops or Shopify.
It works across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and comes with really good insights and analytics tools, as well as listening features that help you track conversations around relevant topics, keep up with trends and understand your share of voice.
The downside? There’s no basic free account here. It will cost from $89 per month, but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
Sign up to Sprout Social
Agorapulse
Agorapulse’s strength is that it’s a social media scheduling tool with a clever CRM behind it so you can engage, listen, collaborate with your team, and respond quickly.
Its social listening function means you can find out what everyone is saying about you and your competitors and can quickly respond to urgent conversations mentioning your brand, and its unified social inbox lets you easily manage all your incoming social media messages, comments and reviews in one place, and assign other people or clients to handle them.
Covering the major platforms Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, you can easily customise posts across multiple profiles in one-go. The downsides are, the reporting features are quite basic and, although there is a free version, you really need to pay to get the most useful features, with packages costing from $79 per month (and you’ll need the premium package to work well with a team).
Sign up to Agorapulse
SocialBee
What sets SocialBee apart is the ability to group post content into categories and set up ‘evergreen’ posts that will automatically be re-used.
Content categories will help you organise posts into different sections like blog posts, product promos, review shares, in order to get a better mix of content and easily schedule posts based on common themes.
You can set the categories to be evergreen so that the top-performing posts are reposted a specified number of times to drive more engagement, and the recycled content can be refreshed by adding post variations, so it’s great for re-purposing content and freeing you up for longer until you have the time to create new content.
There’s no free account, but it is budget-friendly from $19 per month, and the pricing structure is really simple and clear.
Sign up to SocialBee
Whichever social media scheduling tool you choose, make use of the free trials or basic accounts to try them out before you commit to any contracts. And remember, scheduling social media content is super helpful but to increase engagement you need to be available to respond to any comments or mentions.
By all means, use these amazing tools to give you a better work/life balance, but don’t forget to check-in from time-to-time (no-one will know you’re in your new Christmas pyjamas eating mince pies for breakfast, or looking like a lobster by the pool-side)!
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