Alongside blogs evolving over the past five years, social media has expanded into a medium so big and so powerful, no one truly knew how integral it would become in our day to day lives. Back when I first started blogging you only had Twitter and Facebook, those were the two channels you could use to self promote and share your content via but the majority of people interacted through comments and chatting on the individual blog posts. Now you have Instagram, Pintrest, Snapchat, Periscope where not only do you have to engage and keep content consistent, you also have to be on top of each individual platform in order to stay active and current.
Doing this can be a full time job in itself, no wonder brands and companies are creating social media roles as strategising and keeping an account popular is no mean feat. This lends to the question of how, when you yourself have your own full time job, do you juggle them both? How do you keep up? No surprises here – scheduling! Oh yes, the majority of my tweets, Facebook posts and even my Instagrams are all planned and prescheduled. This gives me the control and ability to schedule my content however the downfall is that you loose the beauty of what these platforms are. They are live. Sharing exactly what is happening in that moment in time so use these tools with a pinch of salt and don’t forget nothing beats an active account.
Latergramme
This little app transformed my interaction with Instagram. Before my posts were ad hoc, unplanned and the quality of what you would find over on a Snapchat account (I’m talking unedited what I’m doing now pictures/videos not that other kind you saucy devil!) With a clean and super easy layout you can schedule pictures and captions to post on your Instagram account for any time of day or date in the future. Want to organise you pictures? You can even unschedule a selection of photos to give you a mini bulk of content to choose from if your inspiration is having an off day.
As you can see I also gave TakeOff a whirl but found this to be super buggy and less user friendly in comparison.
Hootsuite
Think of Tweetdeck or Buffer and this is Hootsuite in a nutshell. An online social content management systems (that’s free), I have this linked to my Twitter and Facebook account so I can schedule posts sharing my latest blog post or video. Google+ and LinkedIn can also be connected giving you all your social media channels in one easy to manage place.
IFTTT
Aka If This Then That, the newest app to grace my iPhone this is something I honestly wish I knew about sooner. A nifty little tool that automates some of the most mundane activities, uploaded a photo to Instagram and want to share it to Twitter? Set up an IFTTT recipe and this will automatically share your Instagram photo over on your Twitter account with the smexhy embedded picture instead of the oh so annoying link. There are a whole host of recipes including weather findings, tumblr shares, auto share RSS reads and also adding new movie releases to your calendar. The list is pretty much endless and it takes away the pressure of remembering to share content across multiple channels.
What are you go to social media tools to help you keep on top? Do they enable you to stay afloat or do you prefer to stick to live realtime content?
