4 Time-Saving Social Media Marketing Tools

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​“Time is the currency of social media.”
Social Media Examiner
 
And then some! Yes, the social media platforms are free but the time it takes to learn how to use them—and then use them, your time—is not!! Every day, as I train social media topics across the country, the main question I’m asked is, how do you squeeze it all in?! The short answer is, you don’t.
 
And if you are truly having a conversation with your audience, then expect to spend MORE time online. The more you learn about social media, the more you “do” social media, the more people there will be to talk back to you.
 
The good news is—your people are talking back to you! Some companies feel they are screaming into the void. So, celebrate the people who take the time to interact on your social pages.
 
Here are my 4 favorite functional tools designed to save you time as you interact with your audience online.
 
Here we go:
 
1. Toggl.com—a time management tool that allows you to track and understand your online habits. If you’re like me, you can fall into your computer, emerging hours later to the realization you’ve got nothing done!! Stop the madness and monitor your time investment. Use the free version of either desktop or app program and track your tasks. Set-up takes only minutes as your task list build itself with your activity. Remember to track separately the time you spend on each social network. Pull a report at the end of each week and month to track your time investment—and prove to the boss there’s a conversation happening online.
 
2. Canva.com—for the graphically challenged! Like me. I always wondered where those professional, eye-catching online graphics came from. And then I found Canva and started creating them on my own. Using the free online and app versions is easy, but consider spending the $15/month fee for the upgrade and easy resizing options. You’ll also expand the background, photo, and clipart selections in the easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface. Take your time; have fun. Use their handy templates to get your creative juices flowing. Download all graphics to your computer for easy storage and use my next tool to help get your graphic posted across all the social platforms.
 
3. Pushbullet—share easily between your computer and phone and team members! Once you create a graphic on Canva and download it to your computer, you can upload that graphic to Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, and your blog. But if you want to post in on Instagram or Twittter, use the tool Pusbbullet to quickly and easily forward the graphic from your computer to your phone. Share the graphic photo or video from the Pushbullet phone app directly to the platform desired. I often link my Instagram and Facebook pages to save time posting across both platforms at once. For those needing to post on many platforms at once, check-out tool 4. Pushbullet is also a great tool for collaborating and sharing links, photos, videos, and text easily between team members.
 
4. Hootsuite—a social network dashboard management program. Instead of logging into three separate social media networks, imagine you could log into one dashboard and check them all. You can—and for free!! Hootsuite is one of the simplest tools available for monitoring the activity of your newsfeeds. But you can monitor so much more than that, newsfeeds, posts, mention, and hashtags. And if that wasn’t enough, you can also simultaneously post messages across all your social networks and once!!
 
Would you want to do that? The short answer is: sure. The likelihood someone saw your info across all the platforms is pretty small, so do it. In a perfect world, you’d write separate messages for each of your social networks as each has its own culture, language and nuances, but let Hootsuite save you time until you can find that time. Use Hootsuite daily to join the online conversation. The paid version will give you multiple streams and robust analytics.  
 
Use these 4 time-saving social marketing tools weekly and watch your online audience grow.
 
#loquaciouslindee

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