Automation tools are incredibly helpful when trying to increase your reach online. Making sure certain posts are scheduled at a certain time and following each post’s analytics can help make spreading your presence easier and less of a hassle. The following are a few of these tools, starting with some free options and following with a few paid options.
Free Options
Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers support to up to three social media profiles with the free version. And it allows you to schedule up to 30 posts in advance at a time. The tool also gives you a dashboard for monitoring your posts and feeds.
Hootsuite also provides a calendar that allows you to schedule when you want certain posts to go up. Including the time and date.
With Hootsuite, you can easily automate and schedule your posts. You can also monitor your profiles all in one spot. This is a great tool for bettering your social reach and to maintain a consistent media presence. This tool has a leg up in design and usability. And it’s easy to navigate and understand for new users. Setup is straightforward and easy. Not to mention the fact that it’s free and offers so many different options. Hootsuite is a great all-around tool and would be my top choice for automating my social media profiles.
Later
Later is similar to Hootsuite, yet lacks the dashboard aspect the Hootsuite provides. Later is basically a calendar that allows you to schedule posts. The tool allows one “social set” which includes a Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest profile. You can post up to 30 posts at a time using Later.
You can also check the analytics of your profiles using Later. There’s an entire analytics dashboard dedicated to tracking the performance of your profiles and reporting them back to you. To be able to check analytics, however, you must upgrade to a paid plan, so if you’re looking for something free only the scheduling aspect of Later is available to you. Later is a great, simple tool to use if you’re solely looking to schedule your posts. It’s simple and allows you to have a variety of media saved to the site itself. I would recommend this to someone looking for a simple scheduling tool that doesn’t come with any other features. There’s also a mobile app that comes along with the tool, which makes it easier to track your automated posts.
Missinglettr
Missinglettr is very similar to the previous two tools. However, it has an extra “campaign” feature that lets you connect your RSS feed to your profile and post whenever a new article comes out. Not only that, but Missinglettr also allows 50 posts rather than 30 like the previous two. However, you only have the option to link your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to this tool. Missinglettr provides a calendar like the other two that allows you to choose the date of each post. And it allows you to automate your social profile.
Although this tool is useful and works similarly to the previous two, the feel of using Missinglettr doesn’t seem as intuitive as the others. It is a good, free option to automate your social media posts, but it’s not at the top of my list.
Paid Options
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a paid tool starting at $14 per month for the Blog Calendar plan. And $29 per month for the Marketing Calendar plan. They also have a free 14-day trial for each of these plans so you can get a feel for each and decide which is best for you. The tool allows you to connect your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, and LinkedIn profiles to the service. It also lets you add CoSchedule to your WordPress and other blogging services as an add-on. This tool provides a scheduling calendar and helps you set up posting campaigns whenever you publish a new blog post or want to boost the reach of something.
There’s also an analytics section that shows your audience growth and engagement status. The analytics section shows you your analytics for each individual profile linked to CoSchedule.
All in all this tool has everything you might want in a social media automation tool. It has a simple design and extra features like Analytics and a ReQueue feature that allows you to save messages for reuse. Although this is a good option, it has a lot of the same features as the free options above.
Buffer
Buffer is a slightly more expensive tool starting at $15 per month for the Pro plan. The Premium plan is $65 per month and the Business plan is $99 per month. This tool also provides a free 14-day trial that doesn’t require credit card info. You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to this tool. Instead of the usual calendar, Buffer opts for a list of dates and times that posts can be scheduled. You can just write a post and add it to the automatic queue. Or you can edit that post and give it a specific time to be posted.
This tool is also simplistic and provides all the necessities. Its automatic queue is helpful if you’re in a rush and need to get out a lot of posts in a specific order within a day, but don’t have the time to keep up with it. There’s also a Campaign feature that allows you to set up a planned out schedule of posts, boosting reach and potential engagement.
Conclusion
There are many options out there for automation tools. Many of them don’t have anything very special to offer. However, the ones listed above are probably the best you’ll find out there. They’re all simple and easy to use and take seconds to set up and start using. You can use any of these and your social media presence will be boosted. Having a regulated post schedule is essential to having a strong online presence. Hopefully, these tools help you with your attempt to better your social media profiles and keep up with the speed of media today.
