3 Social Media Scheduling Tools To Save You Time

According to We Are Social “Nearly one-third of the world’s population now uses social media."

That’s why if you want to build up a relationship with your customers and prospects, you need to be on social media too.

But how do you post at lots of different times of the day from your different chosen social media platforms when you’re trying to run your small business?

You know you should be doing it, but you have 1001 other things you need to be doing too.

Easy.

Use a social media scheduling tool like Hootsuite, Edgar or Buffer.

These tools allow you to schedule your social media posts well in advance, so instead of sending out a tweet 4 times a day, you can add it to the schedule and it will be sent out when you specify.

You can schedule your posts weeks in advance.

Very useful if you are busy running your small business!

Don’t worry as you can add in your images, videos and links as usual.

Hootsuite
https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/
Pros

• Hootsuite have a free plan https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/plans/free
• It's easy to use
• You can manage up to 3 different social media platforms with the free account
• 7 social media platforms are supported with the free plan (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Wordpress and Google+)
• There are over 150 apps (not all are free) that can be added to your account to make your life easier. For example, add the Dropbox app to enable you to add images from your Dropbox account directly to your posts
• They have a good online help centre
• Excellent free social media training courses https://hootsuite.com/en-gb/education

Cons

• You can only schedule a maximum of 30 posts at a time on the free account
• The analytics with the free plan are fairly basic, but if you move up to the Pro plan they are far more detailed

 
Edgar
https://meetedgar.com/
Pros

• The main advantage to using Edgar is that it reuses your updates, which saves you tons of time
• You sort your updates into categories created by you and schedule them. Then Edgar will keep your updates in your library and reuse them once it’s got to the end of the queue.
• You can also use the Use Once category and Edgar will not reuse the updates, unless you ask it to (useful for one off events, sales etc)
• You can add content in bulk using an Excel spreadsheet
• You can also automatically import content from your favourite sites to share with your followers. All you need to do is add the RSS feed of the sites and Edgar will then import the content for you to approve
• Impressive stats enable you to fine-tune future social media updates by sending them on the best days and at the best times for your target audience
• It's easy to use

Cons

• There is no free plan. The Starter Plan costs $49 per month if paid annually or $79 per month if paid monthly
• At the moment you can only connect your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts

Buffer
https://buffer.com
Pros

• Buffer has a free Individual plan
• They offer a free 7 day trial for their Awesome plan ($10 a month thereafter) and 14 days for all their other paid plans
• Buffer tells you the optimal times to post
• They have a library of over 600,000 images in their Pablo tool for you to choose from to add to your posts. You can send these posts straight away or schedule them for later.
• Good analytics
• It's easy to use
• On the Awesome Plan yon can share links from your favourite sites

Cons

• You can only schedule 10 posts per social account on the free Individual plan
  
• The paid plans are considerably more expensive than Hootsuite’s and Edgar’s paid plans

Social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Edgar and Buffer are great time savers. Instead of dropping in and out of your different social media accounts at various times of the day, which is distracting and often just not possible, you can devote a set time to scheduling your posts all in one go, when it suits you.

It’s a great feeling when you’ve scheduled a few weeks’ worth of posts and you know you can then get on with running your small business!

If you’re not using a social media scheduling tool yet, my advice would be to take a look at each one to see what works best for you.

I hope you've found this blog post useful. You can find out more about what we can do to help your small business grow by visiting our Marketing Services page.

Or even better, go ahead and contact us now by phoning 0131 629 5117 or dropping us an email at tara@ticketyboomarketing.co.uk.