Social media has gotten so huge over the past few years, it can be hard to keep up with all your accounts. Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Pages, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram…the list is only growing these days.
If you run a blog, you probably know how important social media is. Social media can is an important tool to keep readers both informed and engaged with your content. While I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered social media, I have discovered some really awesome tools to make it a thousand times easier to manage.
Whether you’re a personal blogger, a social media wiz, or someone trying to improve your social presence, these tools should be on your radar. Here are few of the tools I use to manage my social media presence.
Hootsuite is a social media dashboard where you can create and schedule posts on your Twitter, personal Facebook, Facebook pages, and LinkedIn. I love using it to schedule posts for my blog’s Facebook page. You can draft a post and send it to as many or as little social media outlets as you have attached to your account, decide the time it posts, whether it has a photo, and more. You can even install it as an add-on or extension of your browser, which allows you to schedule social media posts of the page you’re already on. What does that mean? Let’s say you’re reading a New York Times article and you want to tweet about it. While on nytimes.com you can just hit the extension button, and a little window will pop up where you can schedule a tweet, FB post, etc. with the article link and then continue reading. Awesome for scheduling blog posts right from your blog.
IFTTT is all about putting the Internet to work for you by setting up “recipes” so that when one thing occurs, something else happens. You can set it up to get an email to bring your umbrella when the forecast is rainy, save a TIME article to Pocket when it goes viral, etc. As a blogger, it was my tool to keep my Tumblr page up to speed, since you can’t manage it with Hootsuite. I set up a recipe so every photo post that went to the Facebook page would go to Tumblr, keeping my social media channels consistent and engaging.
Tweetdeck is the great Twitter dashboard. You can make columns of your lists, specific users, your own feed, etc. It’s a great way to customize and make the most of your Twitter experience. It’s also great if you only need to schedule tweets. Plus, you can create lists of your favorite bloggers, reporters, coworkers and friends and give them their own column so you can easily see what they’re chatting about. Unlike the other tools, I use Tweetdeck as a daily dashboard to check out daily trends, hot topics, my favorite writers, and interesting articles.
Ahalogy is a marketing and management tool for Pinterest, allowing you to schedule content but also make it available to companies to use and pay you. It’s probably my favorite social media tool for personal blogging. Why? Because this baby can schedule your pins on Pinterest and I absolutely love that. While Pinterest has a Pin It you can add to your browser, Ahalogy’s browser extension is a bit easier and cleaner to use (it stays on the right hand side of your page and you can easily set up your next pin without having to click the button again) and it takes the pictures and schedules them so your Pinterest page will slowly but consistently update, rather than flood your feed once every few weeks. Love! Plus, Ahalogy lets you track your better performing pins and easily repin your content. There is a waitlist, but depending on your blog content it can move pretty quickly.
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