There has been a lot of talk on Business Business Business and networking events this week on what Social Media Tools are available to business owners and what is best. The ThoughtSpot PR and I team have been lucky enough to try some great products over the time, so today I thought I would share the tools we use so you can take a look at what may work for you.
There are a few schools out there on scheduling and social media, for me it is all about efficient use of time, so scheduling tools, combined with daily interaction works best for us.
As a PR and Marketing team we look after social media for clients with different needs, so our toolkit uses 5 platforms currently Meet Edgar, Buffer Latergram IFFT and Viral Tag to schedule, and 4 platforms Canva, Tagul Photogrid and Photofy for image creation. (see Make your content stand out with great visuals!)
Not every business can or should use all of these, but here is why we do.

What we use for Programing and Scheduling:

Meet Edgar: Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn:

  • You write a social media update and upload it to Edgar, categorizing it for your library.
  • Edgar posts it according to your category-based schedule.
  • The update gets stored in your library. When every other update in that category has been posted, Edgar will post this one again, so it can be seen by a new audience.
  • Supports RSS feed and bulk uploads.

We love Edgar for one great reason it’s categories and libraries allow us to target what we share and when.
All of your updates are sorted into categories that you create and published on a schedule that you choose, so Edgar publishes what you want when you want it.
The scheduling is easy to manage, and Edgar works with RSS feeds to feed your content in ready to be scheduled.
The libraries in Edgar store your posts so they can be reused again and again, the key to making Edgar work for you is to have a good library of content to share.
Edgar also offers bulk importing and editing of categories which are time savers when bringing on a new client of a platform for us.
Backed up with some great reporting Edgar is a great tool if you have content you want to share over and over again.
meetedgar.com

Buffer: G+, and Facebook & Twitter Video Sharing.

  • Write, plan and share posts via a schedule
  • Supports Video and Images
  • Easy to use with great reporting and scheduling tools
  • Supports RSS feed and bulk uploads.

Buffer is another one of my loves in our social media toolkit especially with its new feature for video posts and that they are starting to offer Pinterest too.
We use Buffer for sharing client video content and group posting for one of our admins, as well as G+
I will admit we left Buffer for Edgar, but we have added Buffer back to our toolkit to make sure we meet our client sharing needs for video.
Buffer offers you access to share content on a range of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn G+ and now Pinterest.
buffer.com

Viral Tag: Pinterest and soon to be Instagram

  • Schedule Pins so you don’t flood your board
  • Supports RSS feed and bulk uploads.

We use Viral Tag for Pinterest, so we don’t flood our or clients boards with an influx of pins. It also allows us to share our pins when the audience is there, not just when we remember to pin.
Viral tag offers scheduling for Facebook and Twitter, but these are features we have covered by the above, so we don’t use viral tag for them.
We have just heard the Viral Tag is introducing Instagram so we will be playing with that too!
viraltag.com

Latergram: Instagram

Latergram is an app we use to upload and pre-plan posts for Instagram. It then alerts us when we planned to post, and we click the “GO” button and post on Instagram. It is not a do it all for you solution but does allow you to plan ahead.
latergram.me

IFTT: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+

IFTT is an internet and app connector and has some amazing recipes for you to connect and automate some of what you do.
We use IFFT to post things as they happen across our social media platforms such as:

  1. New blog posts
  2. Media Releases
  3. Good Reviews

We also use IFTT to notify us of things as they happen too.
There are 1000’s of uses for IFTT, and if I covered them all we would be reading for days, so my suggestion is to have a play.
ifttt.com
Tools are just that tools, they become part of our Social Media Marketing toolkit, it is still important as business owners to act and interact on your chosen Social Media platforms.
Let me know what tools you use and why they work for you!