What is your favorite tool for automating social media marketing and why?
The following answers are provided by members of Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social stands ahead of the crowd. In addition to scheduled posts and analytics, a couple other features make it robust. It focuses on engagement. The platform will automatically publish posts based on historical data. It also focuses on efficiency. If your social team includes more than one user, you can gather data segmented by each community manager, then reward top performers.
– Mark Krassner, Knee Walker Central
2. Shareaholic
Their eponymous browser extension for Google Chrome makes it ridiculously easy to share articles I enjoy to a wide variety of socialnetworks I participate in, including niche sites such as Inbound.org, Plurk and Houzz. This comes in handy if the social buttons on a specific page aren’t working properly or if a website has chosen to limit its social bookmarks to just Facebook and Twitter.
3. dlvr.it
Sharing engaging content on social media is crucial when you don’t always have time to make every post on every social channel a unique masterpiece. This tool is essential for sharing recent blog posts. I can always share a more unique post about an article later on, while resting assured that dlvr.it already helped spread it across social.
– Brian Honigman, BrianHonigman.com
4. SpredFast
SpredFast is an enterprise-level social media publishing, engagement and trending insight platform. It allows me to manage hundreds of accounts. I can put in keywords and it notifies me when a topic is starting to trend. I jump in at the beginning to join and spur that trending conversation. I don’t have to interrupt or be late to the party. SpredFast streamlines social media for my team.
– Joshua Lee, StandOut Authority
5. HootSuite
Among the many social management tools, I have found HootSuite to be the best. Among its advantages is the ability to manage socialactivity across multiple channels and accounts. In fact, HootSuite connects to over 25 social networks. In addition, it facilitates direct conversation with fans and followers, providing a more organic engagement. Auto-schedule and bulk upload also offer convenience.
– Arthur Ebeling, Koi Creative, Inc.
6. Social Oomph
I like Social Oomph because it gives me the ability to manage multiple social media accounts and to schedule tweets as well as posts to Facebook and LinkedIn. This tool has many useful features, such as finding targeted friends and followers. It’s also cheap. Many features are free and their Pro version is only about $6 dollars per month.
– Shawn Porat, Fortune Cookie Advertising
7. Buffer
Buffer is truly an elegant app that provides a great user experience. We recommend all our staff use Buffer. Our community manager uses it for everything we do. I also love their analytics, which provide great feedback about the results of your posts. Buffer as a company is also very admirable. They set a great example with regard to transparency, employee benefits, accountability, etc.
8. Edgar
I’m obsessed with Edgar, the new social media scheduling tool that lets you categorize your updates and schedule them to be re-posted in the future based on topic and content. It’s a great way to make your social updates work harder and repeat content over time, since over 50 percent of social posts aren’t seen by your followers the first time they’re shared.
9. IFTTT
IFTTT (If this then that) has specific social media tasks that can be automated based on events. If the event happens, the automation triggers and your action takes place. Search IFTTT for your favorite recipe, or take a look at these 34 hacks for social media productivity.
10. ScheduGram
My favorite tool right now is ScheduGram, which makes managing our social media account on Instagram a breeze. ScheduleGram allows you to manage multiple accounts through it’s web interface. Its features include web uploading, post scheduling and multiple user access. This app will save you and your team time. It’s a must-have if you manage multiple Instagram accounts.