Automation: 5 Ways to Alleviate the Social Media Grind

For most marketers, social media has become a way of life. Unfortunately, this innovation can often bring with it a lot of repetition and monotony. For effective social media engagement, we calculate this daily commitment to be at least an hour a day. Since its inception, social media has constantly been evolving. The same can be said about the tools we use to manage it. Below are five practical aids to ease the tedium of your social media operations.

Postplanner – Postplanner helps you manage and automate your social content by helping you find content you’re looking for and schedule your posts with a customizable publishing calendar. Postplanner also lets you edit, re-post and monitor your posts for maximum engagement. Depending on your needs, there are multiple plans that range from $7 – $39 a month.
Dlvr.it – One of the highlights of this service is it saves time by allowing you to distribute your content across all of your social networks at one time. Simply set up your desired social network destinations and Dlvr.it will automatically promote your content (blog, etc.) to those platforms once it is posted. Like Postplanner, Dlvr.it lets you collect, itemize and schedule your posts. Dlvr.it starts at $8.49/month.
Social Oomph – Social Oomph offers specific features with respect to each social media channel. For instance, Social Oomph offers scheduled photo uploads for Facebook and Pinterest while offering keyword searches for Twitter. This way, you can benefit from this robust array of features in accordance with your individual needs. There is a free version as well as several packages that vary in price.
IFTTT – This free service allows you to set up a chain of events and simply let the automation run its course. For instance, if, every time someone tags you in a photo, you wanted the tagged photo to be instantly archived, IFTTT will automatically perform this task. You define the trigger for your specific chains of events based on what you want to accomplish. IFTTT gives you an agreeable amount of control as you determine the direction of the automation here.
Zapier – Zapier works on the same automated workflow principle as IFTTT. Depending on which package you purchase, you can lengthen the steps of your workflows and even collaborate and share with coworkers. The packages vary in price from $0 – $125/month.