Like it or not social media is a major business driver that you need to take seriously and whether you’re just starting out and have less than 100 followers or you’re already an “influencer” with well over 10,000 it takes a LOT of time. Saving time on social media means you can spend more time working on your actual business. Ideally you should be posting between 1 and 5 times per day for optimal growth. Posting all that content takes a long time, and doing it well requires some planning. What you need is Social Media Management Software (or SMMS). Here are 2 that will save you hours each day and improve your posts because you’ll be crafting great captions rather than trying to come up with them on the fly.
We’ve tested out many of the popular scheduling tools for social media and here are the 2 most popular. We do not have promotional agreements with any of these SMMSs All of these have a free option with limited abilities that will allow you to try them out. Often these free accounts will work for your needs for a long time.
We currently use Later to post to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest. Scheduling posts is as easy as choosing an image from the gallery of photos that you have uploaded, choosing the platforms you will be posting to and then dragging them into the schedule window and writing the post. Typically I can schedule a weeks worth of posts (thats 2-3 posts per day) in a few hours. Because our accounts are all business accounts (highly recommended) Later will automatically post for us at scheduled times.
Some of the features we love are the gallery of photos that you can sort and filter in multiple ways and the saved captions feature that allows us to save combinations of hashtags for faster posting. Another great feature is the repost section where you can search by hashtag and save photos to your gallery which automatically come with the original poster’s link and caption so they can be credited for the photo. Reposting is a great way to increase your audience and get noticed but at minimum you need to always credit the photo and ideally you should get permission from the original poster. You can access later from your desktop and they have great apps for your mobile phone and tablet that make scheduling and managing social media on the go a snap.
For a long time we used it for free because we were not posting very often. As we grow and our needs grow we are upgrading our account for more uses. On a free account you’ll get 30 posts per month per social media channel for one social media profile per channel. Once you grow beyond 30 posts per month per channel it costs $9 per month. If you have more than one profile you’ll need the a $19 per month account to manage them both but typically it’s only agencies that need this more expensive option. Later is our overall choice for startups, small brands and solopreneurs.
HootesuiteThis probably the most popular and comprehensive social media management tool out there. With this tool you can monitor all your social media channels, schedule posts and delegate things to your team (assuming you’ve got a team.) I use Hootesuite for some clients where we have larger teams working on the same project. What I like about Hootesuite is that it’s easy to stay on top of conversations on multiple platforms. They also have some very robust analytics which are helpful but only if you pay for them. Hootesuite is perfect for larger brands or agencies. For small businesses or solopreneurs though I don’t find it significantly more expensive and with not as user friendly. The free option on Hootesuite allows you to manage 3 social media profiles and allows you to schedule up to 30 posts in advance, so if you are posting on all 3 profiles you’ll be able to schedule 10 days in advance.