Social media is a very effective way to generate interest in your products and create brand awareness. If done correctly, a good social media marketing strategy can generate leads for your business and help your business grow.

One of the biggest challenges with social media marketing is the time it can take for a business to build influence and foster relationships and connections with others. Thus typically requires many months of effort and regular postings.  It can take many months before you can start to see real benefits for your business.  Repetitive tasks such as sharing new posts from your blog manually on all your social media profiles can be very time-consuming and put a drain on your resources.

Fortunately, there are many tools that you can take advantage of to automate part of your social media marketing efforts.  If you have just started using social media for your business, you can benefit from these tools.

1. Hootsuite.com

HootSuite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one secure, web-based dashboard.

2. IFTTT

I highly recommend this service to all. It is one of the best free services to boost your social media marketing efforts. IFTTT is a web service platform that connects various web services together to automate common tasks on the web. The service uses triggers on one side of the connection to execute actions on the other side. .

3. Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it provides bloggers, publishers and businesses with an easy way to syndicate content across several social networks and expand their reach on the social web. It can automatically retrieve new content from RSS feeds and post it to several social networks. You can also connect it to multiple social accounts on your favourite social networks, which is not typically available in the free versions of other tools.

4. Bufferapp.com

Buffer is a system that will let you schedule all your tweets automatically on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.  You simply post items to your buffer queue and you posts are share on social networks throughout the day as opposed to all at once. It does this at pre-defined times of the day which you can easily customise based on your needs. A recent study has shown that using Buffer can increase engagement by as much as 200%.

5. Twitterfeed.com

Twitterfeed.com automatically feeds your wordpress blog posts to the social platforms. It takes your RSS feeds and sends new items to the social platforms of your choice like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

6. Bundlepost.com

Bundle Post is a social content management system that automates 80% of your back office social media functions, resulting in improved engagement, content,post consistency and relationships.

7. TubeMogul.com

This service is designed especially for promoting videos. TubeMogul is an online service used by marketing agencies and brands to buy video advertising across multiple inventory sources. It can also be used to upload your videos to several video websites at once. It does not retrieve videos to upload automatically and you are required to initiate the upload yourself.  However it can save you a lot of time and resources as you don’t have to upload them manually on each video site separately.

8. Tweepi.com

Tweepi is one of the most popular Twitter tools for managing followers. It also provides in-depth stats on various aspects of your Twitter presence. Their aim to help Twitter users add the most interactive people and unfollow the deadbeats with Tweepi’s four tools. Among other features,  you can use set it up to automatically follow users who follow you.

9. Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates content from across the social media universe into a single stream of information. It is not a posting tool. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any other topic of interest across all leading social media channels in real-time. You can also use it to set-up automatic alerts.

10. Rssgraffiti.com

RSS Graffiti is a developer of social media products. It is fairly limited in its capabilities but if you are only looking for a simple Facebook App to syndicate content from your blog, Twitter and YouTube to your Facebook Timeline then you can find this tool useful.

Conclusion:

Although your business can benefit from automating social media marketing, one should exercise caution with automation.  Sharing new content from your blog on all your social profiles can be advantageous and does not have negative impact. However, a majority of your social media tasks should be done manually.

A personal touch and direct involvement is essential if you want to succeed on social media. The automation tools listed above should complement your social media involvement, not replace it.

My Personal Take on the Above Automation Tools:

I have used most of the tools on the list above and they all have their pros and cons.  HootSuite and Buffer are not only my favourites but also of most other marketers I know. Until some time back, the scheduling ability of Buffer was a big advantage but I find Hootsuite’s new automatic scheduling feature very impressive to say the least. Another feature that makes HootSuite stand out is the ability to post to Google Plus Business Pages and LinkedIn Groups. While many other tools support LinkedIn, very few offer support for posting to LinkedIn groups.

Although I don’t use Dlvr.it as often as I would like,  I have given it a try and have been impressed with the results. What I like about Dlvr.it is the ability to post to multiple accounts on each social network plus the ability to post automatically from RSS feeds. This is typically available only on the paid versions of some other tools .

The good old Twitter Feed is still very relevant and useful. The ability to post content automatically from your RSS feed makes it a very powerful automation tool to manage your social media postings.

IFTTT deserves a special mention. It is by far the most powerful free automation tool that can be used to automate many web tasks for your business, not just social media postings. It supports over 50 channels which is far more than only Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that most other tools support.

What About You?

How do you use social media for your business? Are you taking advantage of social media automation services? We would like to hear from you. Please add your response by leaving a comment below.