Stop Wasting Time On Social Media: 36 Tools and Tricks for Marketers [Update]

Every minute:

YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video
Pinterest users pin 3,472 images
Instagram users post 216,000 new photos
Twitter users tweet 277,000 times
Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content.

It might be daunting. You need to curate the content, produce it, distribute it, and share it… How not to go crazy? How to avoid spending hours on scrolling and swiping? How not to succumb to an abundance of cute animals videos?

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A wise marketer works smarter, not harder, so she arms herself not only with good tips but also useful tools that boost her social media performance. We listed them for you below.

We look forward to learning what tools and apps help you be more efficient in social media marketing. Le us know in comments!

Why do you need to automate and schedule social media?

You can’t do your social media marketing manually, and there is a couple of reasons for that:

Handling social media manually kills your productivity: it’s time-consuming and distracting;
You need regularity in posting: when you get overwhelmed with ASAP tasks, your social media activity will drop to the low priority. In consequence, you’ll lose credibility and readership you’ve been building for months;
Automation and scheduling forces a more organized attitude towards social media. It will encourage you to plan more;
If you neglect distributing your content in social media, you limit the number of its potential readers and waste its potential;
You lose options of lead capturing or user monitoring offered by an integration of some social media automation tools and marketing automation platforms.

In other words, you need tools that will streamline the process and a few rules to control your work.

Social media marketing: best practices

Don’t publish the content just once. Publish it, and then share once or twice again, altering the message each time. “The more often you share, the more likely you are to get clicks,” says Neil Patel, a strong advocate for sharing your content multiple times on social media. It doesn’t mean that you should share something every hour. That will definitely make you a spammer!
4-1-1: when sharing content on social media, don’t shovel marketing messages down followers’ throats. Use 4-1-1 rule to find the right proportions: for every self-promoting tweet you should tweet 4 pieces of relevant content from others and retweet 1 relevant tweet. (Source)
Schedule posts, but don’t be a slave to your post calendar. If you come up with a witty or funny response to something trending, post it! It’s impossible to schedule your invention or great ideas, so leave some room for new concepts and spontaneity. It also applies to interacting with your audience – when user asks about something on social media, you might provide the material they would be interested in instead of the planned content.
Batch. Instead of checking your social media all day, assign a specific block of time to social media only and do all your SM-related tasks during that period. It will help you manage time and prevent you from wasting long hours on scrolling and swiping pointlessly. Batching also allows you to avoid switching from the task to social media and back to what you have been doing.
Don’t be passive. Avoid futile scrolling! Know what you want to achieve (engage in a conversation, learn something about your audience) and hold yourself accountable.

Sticking to these tips will boost your productivity. And try the tools listed below!

Tools for social media scheduling

Buffer: schedule and manage your content publication. Saves time, helps plan your posts and delivers analytics.
CoSchedule: helps you integrate your blogging with sharing the content in social media.
Hootsuite: manages your communication in 35 social networks, schedules publication, measures performance, delivers insight. A great option if you have a social media team and want to delegate tasks.
SocialOomph: manages and streamlines your marketing. Has great automation features, such as queue reservoir. And it’s free!
Piquora: a tool for managing your visual content and scheduling posting in platforms such as Instagram or Pinterest.
Tailwind: another app for managing visual content, dedicated to Pinterest. It also measures effects.
Oktopost: manage and distribute your content. Dedicated to B2B.
Google Calendar: is a great free option for social media teams to schedule posts.
Zapier: an IFTTT app. For example, it can tweet about new videos on your YouTube channel automatically or add your Tweets to a Google Doc. Read a full list of zaps for social media.
SALESmanago Publications in Social Media: Marketing Automation is used to automate marketing processes. Therefore SALESmanago couldn’t miss the opportunity to facilitate Social Media posting management. Publications module allows you to write and plan posts from the platform. What’s more important, you can integrate multiple accounts with it and manage content on any of them from one place.
SproutSocial: all singing, all dancing browser platform for managing profiles on social media. One of the most useful features of the platform is Smart Inbox, which collects all your relevant notifications and alerts in one place.

Tools for lead generation and campaign management:

Socedo: identify people who might be interested in your products on social media and engage them with a customizable workflow. Work wonders for B2B companies active on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Fast Tony: manages your Facebook campaigns, so you pay only for predefined actions, monitors content and responds to comments and posts, using zip codes and weather data to target your ads more precisely, adding CTA buttons and much more. It can be integrated with Marketing Automation platform.
SALESmanago FB Custom Audience: effective Facebook campaigns are targeted to groups most often interacting in a given area of interest. Precise targeting is the key to success. In SALESmanago you can create target groups based on user behavior monitored by the system. The examples of actions considered while building the audience: adding a tag to a contact, user reaching a particular stage in the sales funnel or defined scoring if, or even a contact opting-out from the newsletter.
Shortstack: allows you to create the competition apps and helps to redirect traffic on the landing page. Its developers promise to increase site traffic by up to 80%. Short stack works with the most popular services: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

>> Read more on SALESmanago social media integrations.

Tools for social media analytics:

LikeAlyzer: it’s a free a simple tool that analyzes your (or any) fanpage and shows you insightful stats about it. What type of posts do you publish most? What’s your engagement rate? Do you ask enough questions? Check your fanpage and fanpages of your competitors.
Cyfe: detailed social-media analytics, SEO, AdWords, Google Analytics and brand mentions. Affordable for small businesses.
Social Mention: it’s a social media-monitoring tool. Discover what people are talking about your product, your brand and your niche. The tool shows the sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags and your last mention.
Audiense: a tool dedicated for Twitter – helps you analyze your followers’ interests, identify influencers and find the best time for publication.

Tools for content curation

Canva: you need visual content in social media to communicate your ideas fast. Canva is a free (some templates are paid extra, but are still affordable) tool that helps a layman create nice micro-content: simple infographics, quotes, etc. It’s always a good idea to choose a caption from your post and share it on social media. It will make it easier for the audience to get your point and decide if they want to read more. Including a picture with such caption in your text also supports scanning and simplifies content consumption.
Flipagram: creates simple short movies and audios. And it’s free!
Buzzsumo: identifies the most shared content in a given niche in a given time. Helps you understand what your audience likes, provides inspiration and is a must for a sky-scrapping technique. Type in your keyword and the app will list the best performing pieces. The basic version is free.
Nuzzel: organizes content shared by your friends and followers, and helps you discover new pieces. Works for Twitter and Facebook.
Feedly: a friendly RSS-reader.
Compressor.io: compresses graphics so they “weight” less and thus helps to lighten the entire web page. A very important factor in the era of mobile-friendly everything.
Fontface.Ninja: if you are fond of a font on any page, use Fontface Ninja and decorate your artwork with the perfectly stylish captions.
Piktochart: a simple and intuitive tool for creating infographics.
Place it: you don’t have to master the Photoshop to place a snapshot of your website on a picture with a laptop or a smartphone. Place it is an extensive database of photos of mobile devices, TVs and desktop computers. By uploading URL you can place the view of any web page on any of these devices’ screen. The image is immediately set at a right angle and properly scaled.