5 Tools to Save You an Hour a Day on Social Media

Are you struggling on a daily basis to find the time to do all the tasks necessary with social media?

It's never ending and you never feel that you have done enough.

But there are some great tools that will help you save significant time on social media.

1. Automate blog content delivery using Dlvr.it

When you post content from your blog you want to share it out on your social media channels. Dlvr.it will automatically distribute your content to your social media channels and it will also use a custom web address so it will track the results of any content shared.

It's very easy to set up. You simply specify the source where you want the content to be picked up from and the destinations it goes to. For example, your source could be your blog and the destinations could be LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Why waste your precious time manually sharing your blog posts when you can automate it.

2. Use Zapier to Automate Tasks

We all know there are some things you just can't (and shouldn't) automate such as relationship building but we all have tedious repetitive tasks that could be automated and there are tools to help.

One of these tools is Zapier. Zapier supports over 250 different web apps and enables you to specify that when a specific event (or trigger) occurs in one app it kicks of an action in another app.

For example, if you upload a video to your YouTube channel you can automatically send a tweet, or if you favorite a tweet it's automatically added to a Google doc.

This will save you time which you can then use to focus on the more important tasks for your business such as relationship building.

3. Catch up on blog content using Feedly

If you want to produce content on a regular basis you need to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry which means you need to read a lot. One great way of reading content from a variety of sources using Feedly. Within Feedly you can organize all your blog content in one place, enabling you to get through your reading quicker. It even works on a mobile device.

4. Monitor what's important using Brand24

It's important to track your brand name, keywords relevant to your industry and even your competitors. But you can't spend all day sifting through hundreds and thousands of tweets, posts, updates, and more. Brand24 is a very cost effective and intuitive monitoring tool for tracking mentions across the web, including social media channels.

It monitors and reports on mentions on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums, Video and Photo sites. You can choose to view all mentions or filter by a specific channel or category. It even provides some level of sentiment analysis, which at such an affordable price is very unusual.

5. Buffer Your Updates

It's important to not just share your own content on social media, you should actually be sharing other people's content a lot more!

But what happens if you read for 30 minutes and find a lot of great articles. Do you really want to send them all out at the same time? Of course not.

Instead you should share these articles using Buffer. Buffer puts them into a queue to deliver based on times you have already configured.

So now you have a regular supply of content being shared out to your networks on a consistent basis.

Summary

Social media can be very time consuming but if you pick the right tools and automate what makes sense, you can seriously reduce the impact it has on your time and start maximising your potential by focussing on the tasks that truly matter.

What tools work for you? Which tools would you use?

I'd love to hear from you.

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About Ian

Ian Cleary a social media tools and technology expert and was recently voted as one of the top digital strategists in the US. He runs a marketing technology blog focussed on social media tools and technology over at RazorSocial.

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You are welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn.