Managing multiple personal social media accounts can be very time consuming, let alone business accounts. I’m a strong believer in being organised and setting a strategy early on. Once you’ve done this, there are many tools out there to help you save huge amounts of time, leaving you enough time to do everything else you need to. Here are four tools that I use everyday to save me time managing social media for myself and for Woocom’s clients.
Canva
Canva is a visual content tool that allows you to create beautiful images optimized for social media. There are templates that contain the proper dimensions for Facebook cover images, Facebook post images, Pinterest images and plenty of other formats. It is amazingly simple to use, makes it easier to create a consistent visual style, and will save you a lot of time. It is also free to use if you stick to using your own pictures and the standard image library.
HootSuite
If you’re managing more than one social media platform or account, you absolutely need to use a social media management system to manage all these activities. I use HootSuite because it’s easy and intuitive to use. It is the world’s most widely used social relationship platform so they must be doing something right. It operates on a freemium basis and the Pro plan is quite cheap anyway.
Flipboard is another content curation tool. It’s quite different to other curation tools in that it displays content in a beautiful magazine format on your smartphone or tablet. You can set what sources it collects content from or you can use its suggested sources which I find to be very comprehensive. This app is seriously amazing as it makes sifting through heaps of articles quick and enjoyable. Used in conjunction with Buffer, I utilise a very effective workflow inspired by Malcolm McCutcheon.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management system that’s very different to HootSuite in that it utilises a queue format to schedule content. The way Buffer works is that you set days and times to post, and then put content in a queue which automatically schedules posts for these times that you’ve previously set up.
I think it has a lot of limitations but is wonderful for curation. When used in conjunction with Flipboard, it makes scheduling content really quick and easy. What I do is read my articles on Flipboard and when there’s one I want to schedule to post, I share it via email to a special Buffer email account which then pops the article in the queue. It’s as easy as that.
About the Author
David Rose is a Social Media Manager at Woocom, a dynamic, full service multi-channel web marketing agency specialising in every aspect of web marketing from content management systems through to social media and custom application development, based in Perth, Western Australia.