Social Media Scheduling Tools

Every morning I stumble out of bed at 5:30 AM and brew myself a cup of pure magic. Once I take my first few sips and begin the path to cognizance, I sit down at my desk and check social media accounts and stats. I am a power user, handling multiple accounts, client accounts and team members, so I need powerful tools that let me do this efficiently. I work at ridiculous speeds and have zero patience for things that are not highly automated, so I tend to try out many solutions before I settle on the one I like. I learn the ins and outs because I’m geeky like that and it also helps when our team develops a strategy with the tools we’ve chosen if everyone is up to speed on our options.

One of my favorite tools for social media scheduling and listening is Hootsuite. This is not an affiliate post, nor am I getting anything out of this, so it is my sincere review of the tool based on our experience over several years of using it. We also use several other tools, since there are things that Hoostsuite doesn’t do for us.

The Pros

We’ve used Hootsuite for years and continue to do so simply because we can handle so many things in one place. Here are some of the things I really dig about using it.

• Manage multiple accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress and Foursquare).
• Show any combination of streams including clients, competitors, hashtags, followers, ANYTHING!
• The search functionality is amazing.
• Instagram integration is good for now, looking forward to upgrades.
• Schedule using a calendar and ability to upload a csv file to mass schedule. The is HUGE.
• Customizable analytics with scheduled reports.

The Cons

There are several things that we would like to see in Hootsuite that currently aren’t there, like Pinterest integration. Here are a few of the things we need and can’t use Hootsuite for.

• What about Pinterest? There is still no Pinterest integration and it’s almost 2017!
• You are stuck with the ow.ly url shortener unless you want to cough up over $500 annually for each custom url. Most large clients are fine with this, but for the regular blogger and solopreneur, this is just a ridiculous cost.
• Unless you use your own custom url and use it consistently across all tools, you will not be able to get an accurate report of the activity on an account. For example, if you post natively or through other apps, you will not be able to track that in your reports.

Alternatives to Hootsuite

Here are a few alternatives worth mentioning. We use some of these as well.

• BufferApp Starts at Free or $9.99/month. Buffer has a mobile app and a browser extension, both of which I think are essential when managing your social accounts. It allows you to manage your Twitter, Facebook. LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram.
• TweetDeck If you need a tool to manage twitter only, then this is a great tool which is also free. You can manage multiple accounts and schedule tweets. As I said, it is only for twitter and owned by them too!
• SproutSocial Starts at $59/user/month. It’s a little pricey when starting out and only starts wiht 5 social profiles, but it has some nifty features like a built in CRM .

There you have it. If you’re in the market for a social media management tool, test these out and see what works for you. There are a lot of choices, so you’re bound to find what makes you happy.

The post Social Media Scheduling Tools appeared first on Danay.

via WordPress http://www.danay.net/social-media-scheduling-tools/