List of Useful Social Media Automation Tools for Small Businesses

Regardless of the scale of operations almost all businesses are on the social media. It is of course, true that we have to be where our customers are. If you have just entered the social media in search of your customers, you have done the right thing. However, after some time, you might find it difficult to be on social media. As you are an owner of a small business, you can’t think of hiring a social media manager like the large businesses do, neither can you  be available online all the time you want to tweet or update your status on Facebook. The best thing you could do is automate the process so that you can take time off for the other tasks that need to be done. Automating your social media activities is helpful, however, it doesn’t relieve you of your task of keeping track of the updates. You can always automate certain processes like;

• Calculating statistics
• Scheduling tweets, and
• Push notifications

Scheduling tweets helps but scheduling all tweets could prove to be fatal to your reputation. Often, blunders happen when you schedule tweets for live events. When you want to tweet about a live event, it is best to delegate the work to someone reliable so that the tweets are appropriate. Automating certain activities helps you a lot only when you choose the right tools. There are thousands of apps and tools available in the market that will help you automate your social media activities. An attractive user interface with cool animation is not what you have to look for in an automation app, instead check the features and customization levels you are allowed. Below are the apps that I have personally found really helpful.

Social Media Automation Tools:

1. Hootsuite: Looking at the reputation this platform has gained, many assume that it is a go-to tool for all social media automation tasks. However, it is not the truth. Shocked? I’m sorry for having to burst your bubble, you can rely on it only for Google+ updates. Though Google+ might not have as many users as the other sites such as Facebook and Twitter have, this platform is going to see a boom in 2013. So, you will definitely want to be on Google+ and be an early bird. Therefore, you can rely on Hootsuite for your Google+ accounts. One big advantage of using Hootsuite is that you can schedule posts for all your Google+ accounts from a single window, because it supports multiple profiles.

2. Buffer: Buffer can be used on a range of platforms such as Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. It is also available as a web application, iPhone app and a browser extension. You can schedule posts to multiple accounts on multiple sites using Buffer. It also lets you share any type of content such as links, videos, text, pictures, etc. Buffer can also give you the Analytics for each item you have shared on different accounts. It is not necessary that you will have to use the Buffer app always. You can use other apps to add updates to your Buffer account and it will start posting updates as instructed by you. There are numerous other things that Buffer lets you do. You will also be able to get a social bookmarklet to bookmark the articles you find interesting, for your Safari browser.

3 Do Share: Do Share is available only for Chrome browser. However, you can’t ignore it for this reason considering the various advantages it has. It is of great help for your Google+ automation activities. You can share content to any of your Google+ pages from the tabs on Chrome. Moreover, you can use it for any number of profiles, and this means you can use it for your personal profiles, too. It supports a range of activities such as sharing to circles, notifying circles, photo uploads, + mentions, reshares, and so on. It also supports hashtag auto-complete and so you can use this scheduler for most of your updates on Google+. It also creates polls on Google+ automatically besides giving you the freedom to work offline. It also offers you a rich text editor using which you can create content, save it as a draft, and schedule it for posting later.

Must Read: Free social media automation methods

These are three of the best automation tools available for social media scheduling. Using these tools doesn’t necessarily mean that you will not have to log in to your social media accounts at all. There are certain tasks you will have to do manually and make yourself available to your audience at the right time and for the right purposes.