Social media has been hailed both as a powerful business tool and one of our greatest time-wasters. In many cases, it's actually both concurrently, but thankfully, you can also have the former without the latter.
By arming yourself with a tool stack that will automate some social media tasks, you can make your life easier and save time while you capitalize on the immense business opportunities posed by the medium.
1. Pablo
One of the biggest time-wasters in managing your social media marketing effort is custom-designing every image you share with your networks. Instead, save time by using a tool like Pablo, by Buffer. Pable enables you access to a library of 50,000+ royalty-free photos and provides easy tools for superimposing your message and logo to quickly and easily make shareable images that make your posts pop (and hopefully have a viral effect).
A quick example - I made this image for free in about 12 seconds using Pablo:
2. Spectoos
Many businesses get great benefit from testimonials and reviews written by real people on social media platforms. Spectoos enables you to request testimonials from customers and connect their feedback to their social media profiles by using a branded form. It also lets you easily consolidate all of the great things that have been said about you from across Yelp, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and display them all on your own site in a clean and attractive Faceboard Widget.
You can also make your widget appear on your Facebook page or create a testimonial list page, if you prefer.
Spectoos also provides you with a dashboard with statistics on which of your testimonials drive the most conversions, so you can optimize the widget and showcase only the most effective testimonials to increase leads. Spectoos also has a WordPress testimonial plugin that can be installed to easily implement the widget on your site.
3. Brand24
Another time-consuming aspect of managing social media is manually monitoring everything that's said about your brand, product, or company. A tool like Brand24 concentrates all of your mentions automatically in real-time, acting as a single dashboard where you can view and respond to everything that's said about your business across the social sphere.
4. Sprout Social
SproutSocial is a sort of all-in-one social media management tool that can make your life easier by integrating all of your important social media activities in one place. It enables you to engage with your customers on multiple platforms while also providing an analytics layer with the data you need to drive business decisions about your social media investments across all platforms.
5. Edgar
Edgar makes it easy to schedule and re-post content. As social media scales and attracts more users - more companies, more updates, more noise - the reach of every post diminishes. And with each post being seen by fewer people, another drain on a marketer's time is the endless re-posting of content.
Edgar uses algorithms that consider the time of day, social network, message category, and other factors to create an automated workflow that posts at the optimal time.
6. RivalIQ
To gain insight about the social media activities of your competitors, use a tool like RivalIQ.
Competitive analysis in the social media ecosystem can help you increase your social engagement, track key influencers, and enhance your social media metrics with competitive context. The best part is that RivalIQ will send you email alerts every time something happens with one of your competitors - it keeps you looped in and ready to take advantage of opportunities to outshine your competition.
They even offer a free meta description competitive analysis tool here.
These tools will make your life easier by saving you time on manual social media tasks. Moreover, even if you had the time to do things manually, these tools give you important data to drive business decisions - and in many cases, this information is not available via the platforms themselves.
Think about our distant ancestors millions years ago - they used tools to make building their shelter quicker, easier, and more effective. Like them, when we need to build our homes on the web - we can use these tools to make our lives easier.