Are you a social media manager drowning in content management and social engagement details? Here are eight social media automation tools that will help you save time…

Guest post by Uma Bhat 

Automating too much? Or, need help with automation? This review of eight social media automation tools will help you.

Do you constantly think that you need more than 24 hours in a day?  If you’re reading this, chances are you are a social media manager – By title or default.

Most of the social media managers drown in high tide of never ending social media tasks at some point.

Requirements such as:

• Posting content
• Scheduling promotions
• Finding trending content
• Engaging with audience
• Finding followers

Demand a lot of time and energy from a social media manager.

Social media management requires one to be quick, organized and highly responsive. If you are a social media manager with a goal of achieving great results from your social media strategy, then you really need to consider adding social media automation tools into your marketing strategy.

Luckily we are in an age of social media revolution where there is a wide choice of social media automation tools that are designed exclusively to make your life easier and save you time.

How will automation tools help a social media manager?

Automation tools help social media managers organize and manage repetitive tasks thereby freeing up more time to execute social media strategies, engage with fans and followers, and even, for that matter, taking a vacation.

Technology has made it possible for you to:

• Manage social media
• Optimize posts
• Engage with audience
• Schedule content
• Monitor competitors

All just with the help of few smart tools and some strategic planning.

If you have felt overwhelmed, you can re-start your social media marketing activities with a much-needed change by implementing quality automation tools. The good news is that there is a tool for almost everything that you wish to do on social media!

Here is a list of eight best social media automation tools that every social media marketer should consider using.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools.  You can use it to track multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Hootsuite helps social media managers by reducing the time that they spend on scheduling and posting content. With the help of it’s easy-to-post scheduler you can plan and schedule your content automatically, and at the best time, as suggested by the tool based on the most optimal time for your audience.

Social media managers can also monitor brand mentions and reply to customers.

2. Zapier

Zapier is a tool that will allow you to connect one service to another.  For example, Facebook to Twitter, LinkedIn to Facebook, Email to Dropbox, etc.  Linking platforms together can be helpful for some automations. 

One of Zapier’s features allows you to share Instagram photos with Twitter followers where the pictures are visible without clicking a link.  Zapier also allows you to

• Manage relationship with audience
• Tweet or retweet posts
• Share social media posts
• Send invitations using LinkedIn mailing list

And much more.

3. Mention

Mention is one of the social media automation tools that packs many features into a one single tool.  It is a real-time monitoring tool that allows you to monitor your:

• Customers
• Brand
• Marketing campaigns
• Competitors
• Industry

With the help of Mention, you can monitor keywords of your choice and get live updates when the keyword is mentioned on social media. You can engage with your customers by responding, retweeting, and replying directly.

You can also list competitors with whom you can compare performance on key metrics. Automated reports and summaries are sent into your inbox which can be shared with your team, or with clients.

4. Social Oomph

Social Oomph is a simple yet a powerful social media management tool with free and paid plans.  You can manage up to five Twitter accounts from one place. 

The tool has features such as:

• Schedule tweets
• Track keywords
• Save and reuse drafts
• Unfollow users

Also, send a consolidated email digest every day. 

It’s direct messaging feature allows you to send automatic message to new followers, intended to build relationships with your followers.  Editors Note: Many people look at this type of messaging as spammy behavior, so we recommend careful consideration on how you use this function.

5. Cloohawk

Cloohawk is social media automation tool that is capable of saving a lot of time that goes into identifying trending content, scheduling and posting content at the right time, finding influencers, and much more.

Cloohawk identifies the content that is evergreen and will automatically repost it at the best time suitable according to your audience analysis. The trending content is highlighted and prepared for auto re-tweet at the most suitable time.

Cloohawk also enables maximum engagement by just identifying interesting content from influencers which can be re-tweeted by you.

A stealth feature of Cloohawk: It suggests wise actions to take based on your profile and your audience profile.

6. DrumUp

DrumUp allows you to monitor multiple social media accounts from one single place to monitor your social media presence.

The social media tool helps reduce the amount of time spent on content curation and content sharing on social media. It offers options for:

• Customizing posts with hashtags
• Emojis
• @mentions
• GIFs

Any experienced social media manager knows, this saves a lot of time!

DrumpUp organizes the workload in terms of planning workflow so you can simply review and publish.

7. BuzzSumo

Social media managers can spend endless hours finding the right content relevant to their industry, or that of their clients. BuzzSumo helps you to discover the most trending topic of the day or the year.

Buzzsumo extracts and presents widely shared and popular content from different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. It also enables you to search for influencers in a selected domain. Building relationships with influencers is an important new way to ignite awareness for your brand. 

BuzzSumo is also packed with many other features to save you time on social media management. The filters within the tool will surface the exact content for your purpose.

8. dlvr.it

Just like the tool says ‘Spend more time away from your desk’, dlvr.it makes it possible to do that, and put some your social media activities on auto pilot.

With dlvr.it your content can be auto-posted on preferred social media channels by just defining the source and destination. The tool also offers useful analytics by tracking the clicks on your links.

Dlvr.it has the capability to search the web for popular articles and images, as well as scheduling more than 100 posts to Twitter and Facebook. You can also customize the posts with hashtags and attribution.

Conclusion

A big challenge of social media is keeping up with the pace of your audience and competitors. So you need to share content, engage with audience, monitor competitors, track conversations, and much more. All of these tasks take up time and can spread a social media manager thin.

Fortunately, we there are more social media automation tools available than ever before that speak to different work styles and let you automate a good amount of routine tasks that occupy a great deal of time.

About The Author

Uma Bhat is a content writer at Cloohawk with past experience as an Editor-In-Charge. She is into copywriting, and guest blogging for numerous websites. Uma specializes in web copy and digital marketing content that increases engagement and drives leads. Follow her on Twitter and connect with her on LinkedIn.