4 Time-Saving Tools for Social Media Marketing

If you’ve tried social media marketing for your business, you know how time-consuming it can be.

Imagine the headaches if you had to manage social media for lots of businesses like yours.

That’s just what we do at nvision. And we couldn’t do it unless we used some really useful tools for social media marketing that save us a lot of time every day.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is sort of a traffic manager for many of the bigger social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.  In addition to letting you monitor posts to and from your different social accounts, Hootsuite lets you keep track of things like Twitter Lists, keyword mentions and hashtags, all in one place.

How Does HootSuite Save Time? Without HootSuite, just navigating to and from all the different social accounts we manage would cost us lots of time. HootSuite also lets us do things with social platforms that would either take much longer or be impossible, to do on the platform itself, like track multiple hashtags.

Other Tools Like Hootsuite?: Tweetdeck

Feedly & StumbleUpon

One of the major time hogs in social media management is finding and maintaining a constant supply of quality content for your channels. Feedly and StumbleUpon help you do just that.

RSS feeds, or Rich Site Summary, send you content from your favourite online blogs and news sources – so you don’t have to go to each site. But, unless you want even more email in your inbox, you need an RSS reader, like Feedly. It helps quickly find the most interesting and share-worthy stuff content from all your sources.

As for StumbleUpon, Wikipedia calls it a ‘discovery engine’, and it has been traditionally known as a social bookmarking service, but, whatever you call it, it’s a great way for you to find good content from outside your usual sources.

How Do Feedly & Stumbleupon Save Time? With the amount of useless information floating around the web, it’s often difficult to tell the good from the bad, unless you take the time to visit a site and read content, which, if it’s useless, wastes your time. Feedly and StumbleUpon help you filter out the bad stuff so you’re left with good stuff to fuel your social media.

Other Tools like Feedly & StumbleUpon: DiggReader is a good RSS reader and Reddit is another leading bookmarking service. The people, groups and pages you follow on social media are also great sources of information, but you’ll still need to do some filtering.

Commun.it

A ‘community management’ tool, Commun.it helps you focus on and connect with certain segments of your Twitter communities. Including top influencers, groups and those who engage with you the most. Commun.it also helps you rank your connections so you know which ones have more or less Twitter influence. In other words, which ones you should try to engage first.

How Does Commun.it Save Time? – Too often, social media becomes just a numbers game for businesses. They gauge success on how many Likes, followers, and connections they have. But, just like in real life, there are social connections that are more important to you; that can make your social media marketing more successful. Commun.it helps you quickly spot the higher value connections. Influencers, supporters (those who engage with your content) and those directly related to your business, like potential customers.

Other Tools Like Commun.it: The lines between community management, customer relationship management, and media monitoring are blurred on social. Often, no two tools do exactly the same thing, but they offer similar features in different combinations. The one that’s right for you is the one with the best combination of features for your needs. Social Mention and Tagboard are good tools for tracking keywords, hashtags, and trends related to your business. Hootsuite is also good for community management.

Using these tools will help you get over that first hurdle of social media marketing: finding the time to do it.

If you have any questions about your social media marketing, please don’t hesitate to call us at nvision, 905-943-2985, or email us. We’ll be happy to help.