As an entrepreneur with an autoimmune disease, automating social media content is important to my business. My energy can come and go. I don't always have the energy to work an 8 hour day or even work every day of the work week, even though I work from home. So, I have to schedule my work around my energy levels and automation is key. That way, I can create when I have the energy and schedule it to post on days that I don't. I can even automatically generate social media content with some tools.
There are tools that work specifically with just one social media platform, but for this post, I have chosen tools that work with multiple platforms for maximum automation benefit.
5 Powerful Tools For Automating Social Media Content
- Meet Edgar. This tool allows you to create a queue of social media posts that you can schedule to automatically post to social media accounts of your choosing. They currently handle Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It's pretty flexible. You can choose to only post once, post on a specific date and time, let the posts in the queue repeat once the queue has finished, or expire the post after a certain date. You can create categories and tie accounts to those categories as you create posts. It offers a bulk upload option, but you'll have to add images to each post manually. Meet Edgar makes automating social media content extremely easy. Just set it and forget it.
- Zapier. The great thing about Zapier is how many different services it integrates with, which, for the record, is hundreds. If you want to save a little money, you can connect Google Calendar with AirTable and schedule your own tweets and Facebook posts. I've even connected a MySQL database and used the native Zapier scheduling tool to create a template to fill with the data and generate new social media posts daily. The possibilities for automating social media content are limitless with Zapier.
- HootSuite. You can post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest with HootSuite. You can also bulk upload a spreadsheet of posts, but one caveat, like with Meet Edgar, you have to add any images separately after upload. That can get kind of time consuming.
- Buffer. Social media accounts you can use with Buffer include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. One interesting feature is that you can set up searches in social media for specific keywords and set up an auto-reply. It's not a feature I've tried, but it does sound interesting. That alone would take automating social media content and building an audience to a new level.
- Postcron. If you want to bulk upload social media posts and not have to add images manually after uploading, this is the tool you want to use. Postcron allows you to include a URL where your photo resides on the internet and will include it on your posts. Postcron works with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
While social media may be an important part of any entrepreneur's marketing strategy, that's not the only thing that can and should be automated. I intend to discuss in additional posts ways to automate your business to take advantage of the times you have the energy to work and to cover for the times you don't.
Have you run across some great tools for automating social media content? Let us know in the comments and we'll check them out.
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For more great tools to help you run your business, check out my resource page.