Top 3 Ways to Easily Manage Social Media Accounts

Task-management — it’s not always easy, right? Most people struggle with managing all the tasks that need to be completed in a day, and for businesses that are branching out into the realms of the web, the toughest task is to manage social media accounts.

With so many avenues of gaining exposure and traffic to a site, social media is one of those areas that can quickly overwhelm whoever is in charge of it. However, managing the tasks of posting to various accounts and engaging people in them doesn’t have to overwhelm you, if you utilize some online tools coupled with a game plan.

1) Using tools to manage social media accounts

There are quite a few online tools (both free and paid for) that can help you manage social media accounts. The nice thing about these tools is that many come with a single dashboard that connect all your social media accounts in one place, thus consolidating your efforts into one central location.

Each tool offers something a little different and each has their strong suits. If you’re looking for a way to help ease the stress of managing social media, then take a look at these tools.

Buffer (Free and Premium)

Buffer is one of the best tools you can use to manage social media accounts. The free version of Buffer lets you add a single account from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Pages (only works with pages and not profiles) to your Buffer account and manage posts to them from there.

The way Buffer works is by helping you schedule posts to your accounts so that you don’t have to spend hours online trying to do this on your own. Simply add your accounts, create the times you wish for Buffer to post to accounts and that’s pretty much it. After that, you can use Buffer to schedule posts on either all or only selected social media accounts.

The great thing about this application is that you can you have access to it just about anywhere. Buffer has smartphone apps and a Google Chrome extension that makes it easy to add posts to your accounts.

You can upgrade to the Pro version of Buffer to add to the amount of posts you can schedule and the amount of accounts that you can post to. Price for the Pro version is $10 a month, but you can save on the amount by choosing to pay the Yearly fee instead.

TweetDeck

Managing more than one Twitter account can be a headache for anyone. However, the TweetDeck app makes it a bit easier.

As the name would suggest, TweetDeck is only for managing Twitter accounts, but it has some cool features like scheduling our tweets, posts to all your Twitter accounts at once, upload and post images, and create and manage lists.

Scheduling posts can be a little bit more time-consuming here than it would be using Buffer, but using Tweetdeck is completely free and you’re not hampered by restrictions for how much you can schedule out or how many Twitter accounts you can manage.

ViralWoot for Pinterest

Most, if not all, social media managing software lacks the ability to manage you interest account(s). Pinterest isn’t an area you really want to avoid in your social media efforts so being able to manage it on top of your other accounts is still important.

ViralWoot is a unique online dashboard dedicated to help you manage your Pinterest account. One of the best features on ViralWoot is the fact that you can schedule up to 100 pins and repins in a month with the free version and upgrading to a subscription can be as low as $8 a month.

Hootsuite

Let me not forget this guy.

You’ll hear about Hootsuite just about everywhere you go when searching for help with regards to social media management, but that’s because it really does do a fantastic job of keeping all your stuff in one place and helping you manage each account you may have.

You can do quite a bit with the dashboard here, and even though the free version only lets you manage 3 accounts, there is a lot more that the Hootsuite dashboard has to offer. There is an analytics area where you can see just how well your posts have been doing, you can still schedule posts to your various accounts and there are some free apps that you can add to your dashboard, as well.

Upgrading to the Pro version is about $15 but it unlocks many other features and can give you a lot of your time back.

Co-Schedule

These guys are a bit new to the social media sharing world, but they’re well worth a look at. For the time being, these guys are WordPress centered (it only works with sites ran on WordPress), but their social sharing tool is much cleaner and easier to follow and use than anything else I’ve ever seen before.

The tool is setup to display a calendar layout and then you can easily drag and drop your posts onto the calendar to making it easy to see what is going to posted to social feeds and when.

Cost for using Co-Schedule is $10 per month per WordPress site and you can have unlimited Users and Social Media accounts under that. If you’re not sure if you’d even like it, then you can give it a free trial run before opting into anything.

2) Install An Automated Social Sharing Plugin

Do you run your site on WordPress? Then you’re in luck. WordPress has a ton of plugins that can automate your social sharing stresses by automatically posting to your social accounts for you — even while you’re off having fun or sleeping like a baby.

There are plenty of options, but here are a couple to get you started.

Ultimate Social Media WP Plugin

First of all its free for all DealClub members so, you can have the same if you are one. It connects via 8 Popular Social Media Networks including FaceBook, Twitter, GooglePlus, Linkedin, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit and enables content sharing over each of these. Completely responsive plugin that supports sharing over mobiles and tablets

Jetpack by Automattic

The Jetpack plugin has a built-in module called Publicize that will automatically post your blogs posts to the social media accounts that you’ve connected to it when you publish or update your posts. You can publish to multiple accounts within each platform so you if you have multiple Twitter accounts, then you can publish to all of them using the module in the plugin.

Content Resharer by WPsite

This is personally one of my favorite that I’ve come across so far. The Content Resharer plugin will automate your social shares so that you don’t have to worry about even scheduling posts on social media accounts.

The free version of the plugin only handles Twitter feeds, but upgrading to Pro gives you access to Facebook and LinkedIn, includes your featured images for for CTR and lets you create custom messages for each of your posts. You can read a full review of the plugin here:

• WPSite Content Resharer Review: Automatically Resharing Content on Social Media

It’s a great plugin and well worth the time configuring so that you can keep the stresses out of your social media posting schedule.

3) Get A Game Plan

To be honest, you can’t easily manage your social media if you don’t have a game plan in place. Handling your SM accounts means keeping track of a lot of. moving pieces which can be handled a little more using the above mentioned tools, but those tools are really nothing if you don’t have a path to carry on down.

If you’re not sure how to do this, then put on your learning’ hat and start a reading’. Check out Become a Social Media Guru!! 22 effective digital marketing courses by DeltinaU. Getting mentally organized will cut out a lot of the hassle and stress related to social media management. One of the best places to learn about to get this game plan in place is Hubspot’s Marketing Library.

They have quite a few free e-books on the topic of social media including a great read about how to manage social media in 10 minutes a day. I highly suggest checking it out and download any of the other free books that may catch your eye. Also, checking out the effectiveness of your work is a must. Howsociable.com – Social Media Measurement Tool is a great tool to measure your social media impact

Wrapping It Up

To manage social media accounts isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but with a bit of time and some help from the tools mentioned above, it can much easier. If you spend the time to plan out what you’re going to spend your time on and where you’ll spend it, then you’ll really help yourself out in the long run.

Find these strategies to be knowledgeable? Here’s a post that will teach you more about boosting your social media engagement.