5 Tools to Streamline Your Social Media Outreach

As more and more people transition to using the Internet primarily on their phones, websites that offer appshave become the biggest destinations for these mobile users. And the most popular among these sites are social media platforms. Not only are these the destinations that the most potential customers gravitate to, but they’re also places where people are very comfortable letting you know who they are and what they’re like, in contrast to a previous era of the Internet that prized anonymity and discretion. But managing outreach across multiple social sites can be a major challenge and quite time-consuming. Here are 5 great tools to help you maximize your productivity and reach more customers on social media.

1. IFTTT

IFTTT’s name stands for “If This Then That,” a way of describing a common function in automated programs, and it’s all about automation. IFTTT is a very intuitive tool for automating much of the busywork that’s required of social media managers, freeing them up to focus on genuinely engaging with followers and crafting content instead of copy and pasting links across multiple sites all day. You create a series of linked triggers and actions to do the little things for you, like cross-posting an Instagram photo to Twitter. You’ll find that once you have IFTTT set up to accomplish most of your most mind-numbing daily tasks, you have a lot more mental energy to devote to building your brand.

2. HootSuite

Many software tools help you schedule posts, but HootSuite can help you do it purposefully and effectively, with an eye on continued engagement and pushing the right content at the right time of day. With a few clicks you can schedule hundreds of unique posts across multiple platforms, and then turn your attention to other tasks as HootSuite does your job for you. You can also make use of their collaboration features, sharing approved content with your team via the cloud to keep everyone on brand, and get analytics back to show you how well each of your social marketing techniques is delivering.

3. Hubspot

One of the most popular platforms for growth-focused businesses of all sizes, HubSpot aims to be a centralized solution for everything you could need to manage your social media outreach. You can use HubSpot to build and execute social marketing campaigns, but it doesn’t stop there. Once your content is out and people are engaging with it, you can stay in the same spot to manage your mentions on multiple social platforms and respond to the feedback, concerns, and comments of your followers, even monitoring particular keywords to keep track of specific kinds of interactions. This extends to generating leads, as you can even set up HubSpot to alert your sales team when social media users invoke a certain hashtag or keyword that indicates they might be interested. HubSpot is also one of the best ways to accurately assess the effect of social media on your bottom line, as its social reports are firmly grounded in real data on ROI and conversions.

4. TweetDeck

If your company does a lot of outreach on Twitter, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most personalized and direct social platforms. And if you’d like to take your Twitter outreach to the next level, you don’t have to spend a dime. TweetDeck will let you schedule and distribute posts in a simple, streamlined way, as well as monitoring multiple hashtags, conversations, and accounts. It’s a great tool for keeping up with a social network that moves at the speed of light.

5. Buffer

Buffer is another social media management platform that lets you operate on multiple diverse platforms from one spot. Its strengths are in customizing posts for each individual network to avoid spamming out the exact same thing across platforms. Buffer also excels at feeding you actionable data on what time of day your engagement peaks, and when to avoid posting. The attractive interface is on par with HootSuite and HubSpot; choosing between them is tough, but really comes down to what features you want to prioritize.

With millions of people voluntarily submitting their personal information and data about their interests, social media is a dream for the data-driven marketer. And there are an ever-growing number of platforms to cover and techniques to exploit. Leverage the tools above to keep all your bases covered.