Even if you value social media as an important trade of your business, sometimes optimizing your updates can be tiresome. While you never want to fully automate all your social media shares, supporting your daily efforts as much as possible with third-party apps and resources will save you time, energy and money in implementing your social media strategy. Here are a few of my top apps and resources I regularly use to streamline my social media activity.
1. Manage your Twitter accounts with Tweetdeck
Managing more than one Twitter account via the web-application can be very cumbersome. Not only do you need to long in and out of your accounts regularly, but you also will not receive notifications for both accounts and be able to react in real-time. But even if you or your business only has one Twitter account, it is never a good idea to share access to a social media profile by sharing the password: once you have several people managing one account, the much more secure option is to use a tool like TweetDeck, which offers the possibility to create teams to manage one or multiple Twitter accounts without password sharing. In addition you can create custom (public or private) timelines, set up specific searches, manage private messages with multiple users and schedule tweets.
Whether you use Twitter for your personal or corporate branding and campaigns: TweetDeck is a must-install!
2. Manage your Facebook and Instagram ads with Facebook business manager
If you are an active member of your community (startup or other), chances are you are administrating more than one Facebook page. While you can manage several Facebook pages via your private profile, the much more effective way is to create a Facebook for Business account.
Especially if you are working in the communication or marketing industry and creating adverts for different pages or clients, or if you are managing different projects of your own, having all your pages under one roof will save you time when setting up similar ad campaigns, managing access rights of your different teams and payment methods.
As a special bonus, the Facebook for Business account will let you create Instagram adverts as well and enable you to branch out to a completely different audience!
3. Automatically schedule your social media posts with Buffer
As a social media user, you probably know it is a bad habit to automatically post your updates to different platforms. I wouldn’t recommend automatic posting of the same content to more than one platform, however I can only advice to check out Buffer: this tool will automatically post pre-written content at specific time-slots.
In practice this means that you can prepare a week full of updates in a single afternoon and Buffer will make sure it’s published at the right time. You save time because you don’t have to manually set the scheduling time for each post and still you can optimise the time of publication and content of your posts.
4. Find the perfect picture with free public domain image databases
How much time do you lose a month searching the web for free public domain images to illustrate your blogposts, social media updates or presentations? While Google helps you find some good source material, it is always useful to have a few great resources bookmarked to quickly find high-quality images to share on your profiles and add to your blogposts. Here are a few of my favorite sites:
- Pixabay: good set of public domain photos, but make sure to filter by “photos”,
- Startup Stock Photos: high-resolution photos of a “startup setting” – not the most original pictures (you see them around quite a bit) but great for presentations,
- New Old Stock: a selection of vintage photos, interesting for those of you who want to see a different style of photos,
- Unsplash: beautiful, high-resolution landscape photos – great for your motivational quotes!
Even more resources are collected in this blogpost: 53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts
5. Create shareable images with Pablo and Canva
Finding the right image is one thing, but sometimes you need to add your quotes, logos or icons to the image to create better engagement on social media. While you can use Photoshop to create custom templates, you would need to manually adapt image sizes to the changing sizes on the different networks. With Pablo or Canva, you can modify your images, add text, logos and export social media ready graphics all from the online applications.
6. Simplify your workflows with IFTTT
There are tedious tasks we do repeat a hundred times even though there is the possibility to automate them. This is exactly what “If this then that” does: it lets you save time and energy by automating the recurring tasks we do every day – also in social media marketing.
As an example, you can automatically share new Instagram posts as native Twitter pictures, save Facebook photos you are tagged in to Dropbox or automatically synchronise your profile pictures on Twitter and Facebook.
There are of course hundreds of other very useful resources out there. If you are looking for a tool to solve a specific need or have any other question, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments!
Author: Jerry Weyer, Partner at Clement & Weyer Digital Communication Consultants
