Twitter can be mind boggling, so much happens all at once that it’s hard to filter the “noise” let alone keep up. So what’s a business owner or an organization to do apart from hiring a social media manager? Scheduling. With every platform, one always considers cost, multiple account support, brand and conversation tracking, as well as little perks like url shortners. After all, the ideal tweet is 126 characters or less, to allow for tagging friends when retweting.
Scheduling tweets allows you to “post” at your own convenience, then spend the rest of the time monitoring and engaging with your followers. That means that you are more effective at responding to queries that your customers may have. It also means that you have more time, to follow up on created conversation, by monitoring feedback and checking on insights.
Now that that’s out of the way, the question that begs is, which tools are available for me as a business owner when it comes to scheduling right? Fret not, that is why I am here, to “guide” you through the somewhat murky waters of social media scheduling. These tools can be divided to free, low cost and organizational level scheduling platforms and tools.
Free tools include Twitterfeed, Social oomph, Buffer app, tweet deck, and Hootsuite. Twitterfeed allows you to automatically share links everytime you post on your blog. Thus it is not scheduling perse, but it saves you the time required to create compelling tweets touching on your latest post.
Buffer app guides you on which is the most opportune time to tweet in addition to scheduling for you. Tweetdeck allows you to have several accounts, all in columns that make it easier to not only schedule but monitor your accounts. Hootsuite shortens urls, saves your tweets as drafts should you want to post them another day, schedules tweets and can post across platforms. That includes Facebook. Social oomph tracks conversations relating to you and sends them straight to your email. How cool is that!
Buffer app and Hootsuite also have low cost paid options that allows you to gain access to Google Analytics, in-depth Facebook insights, support profiles that you manage as well as unlimited posts. You can compare and contrast, and see which one fits the bill for you.
If you are an organization, have you heard of Sprout Social? First, they allow you a 30 day trial period, over which they constantly update you through email. They notify you about your key influencers, and as well the people who most engage with you. Sprout social monitors conversations about you, and notifies you, and has different pricing options depending on what you want.
When paid for, Optify gives you the benefit of advanced reporting, conversations monitoring, insights, social media marketing tools as well as a fourteen day trial period. Social Oomph allows for multi platform posting, tweeting via email, as well as scheduling wall and photo upload updates on Facebook. I shall elucidate on the many benefits of these two in an upcoming article.
