Social Media Scheduling Tools

So what’s one of the first things most of us check when we wake up?

Yes, mobile phones, no surprise there! Its safe to say Social Media is an integral part in today’s day-to-day routine. We are all using social media for our personal use, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and its got our attention all throughout the day as the one thing that’s close to all our hearts are our smartphones.

But what has gained greater momentum is that businesses be them local, SME’s, MNC’s all have slowly but surely made a transition to social media. Marketing efforts are increasingly being directed to promote on these fast gaining popular platforms. Having a strong brand presence on social media has become essential for your digital marketing efforts. Content strategy and communications are the key success factors for these mediums.

• How are we going to communicate – One or across all platforms
• What are we communicating – Content Strategy
• To whom are we communicating – Target audience
• When do we communicate – Scheduling

It’s difficult for a Marketing team to continuously sit in front of the computer or phone and keep sending out regular updates, You can calendar updates, but what if you were called out for a meeting? Or an emergency? Oops, there goes your chance to be at the right place at the right time!

And that’s why you schedule your communication

Various tools are available that help you schedule your social media marketing plan. By using these tools your social media promotions and content strategy is put to good use with timely information sharing. There are various researches and analysis available, when should a Facebook post be updated best time of the day and week, or when should you schedule your tweet and retweets? and these facts help us in scheduling our promotions and reaching our target audience at the correct time. Last but not the least, being consistent in your promotions and engaging with your followers is very important as that what keeps them coming back for more. Gone are the days that you only broadcasted information on your social media platform.

Here are some Fantastic tools:

Yet again a very popular multiple social media scheduling tools. You can schedule your posts well in advance, simply pick your time and date to send out the posts. The unique analytics feature gives you an in-depth view of how well your social media strategy is working. The tool tracks click across all your platforms, delivering them in easy to read series of charts. Social media monitoring and listening are key components for a successful social media strategy. Monitoring is about keeping a track of conversations that are already happening around your brand, while listening is about finding opportunities to join relevant conversations that may not be specifically about your brand or product. This tool helps in both.  With HootSuite, you can respond to messages, mentions, comments across channels with a single click on the dashboard.

Free to use the tool, can be used for all major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+).

Buffer provides you with a bunch of default time slots (which are the most optimized active ones) or you can also schedule as per your time preference.  Once the schedule is finalized, Buffer automatically sends out your posts throughout the day and week  (As per the defined time slots)

To get started, you need to sign up for free at www.buffer.com and add the social profiles you want to use it with. You can view the dashboard, where you can add your post content, select a date from the calendar, choose a time and save your settings. It’s best to schedule your posts at a time when your followers are most active and most likely to see your post.

This tool is the most helpful when you are managing your Twitter account. It can manage up to 5 Twitter profiles for free. The automatic direct messaging feature is a blessing as it sends out direct messages to new followers. The tracking capabilities also extend to URL Shortening, where you can monitor the number of users clicking on links in your tweets. One of the best parts or feature of SocialOomph is that you can delete all your old tweets and not lose your followers, this helps you to start over and you already have the followers.

By now we are all aware that Twitter is one the most dynamic platforms to be on. With TweetDeck, you can perform almost anything you would do on your Twitter account. You can tweet, retweet, reply, follow, unfollow and send direct messages and it allows you to manage more than one twitter profile. With this tool, you can schedule tweets as far in advance as you want. With TweetDeck, you are a part of the Twittersphere making it one of the best tools to schedule your tweets.

Once again publishing on all social media platforms is made easy with Hubspot. With this tool, you not only get to publish and monitor but also get closed loop-reporting data. That means you are not just seeing what channel drive the most engagement, but you can track further down the funnel to see what posts and channels drive actual leads and sales. You can select and calendar the posts for a specific time and date, sit back and let it publish for you.

An all in one social media management tool that has the ability to both post and schedule across multiple networks, which results in massive time-saving. User-level permissions provide specific access to marketing managers, writers and everyone in between to contribute to your social media calendar. The sprout social’s calendar provides your team with a bird’s eye view of what’s being published and promoted on any given day.

While the above listed are a few suggested, there are many more scheduling tools in this vast world of digitalization that helps us make our work life so much easier and reap benefits of all our efforts. It’s best to know about all and choose wisely the one that works for your business as all business needs are different with different social strategies.

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