With changes in technology and the ways that the consumers interact with businesses and brands, it can be overwhelming to consider how many channels your business must manage in order to stay connected. If you’re a small company, the job of managing social media may also fall on the shoulders of the person who is busy providing services. Finding the time to promote your company and communicate with customers can be a challenge.

There are several online services that can help you schedule and manage many of your online accounts. Each service has a basic free plan, plus paid plans that offer more options.

Buffer
A scheduling program for social media, Buffer allows you to schedule posts on multiple social media platforms at the same time. The free plan allows you to post to 4 social media accounts (up to 10 posts per account). The Awesome Plan ($102/year) allows you to post on 10 accounts (up to 100 posts per account).

An especially helpful feature of Buffer is the ability to set a schedule (e.g. “post twice daily at 8:35 AM and 6:20 PM”). You need only enter your post, click “Add to Queue,” and Buffer schedules your post for the next available time slot. For more urgent or time-sensitive posts, you can choose to post immediately or schedule for a specific date/time.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers a free plan that allows you to manage up to 3 social media accounts. You can monitor all of your social media in one place, schedule posts, get analytics and view engagement (likes, faves, retweets, shares, replies). There is also a reasonably priced (currently $9.99/month) paid plan for businesses that allows you to manage up to 50 social profiles.

This social media management program allows you to customize the way you view all of the data and maintains it in one easy dashboard. It also offers a convenient ‘Autoschedule’ feature that will send your post at the time of day that will optimize your views.

IFTTT
IFTTT operates based on recipes. There are DO recipes (access programs and apps through this one service) and IF recipes (use an “If This Then That” logic, as the program’s name suggests). By connecting your social media and other programs, you can make sure that content is shared across platforms. For example, you can set a recipe for “If my account on Blogger pushes a new post, then share that post on my Facebook timeline.”

It can also save you time with the other social media management tools. You can activate a recipe to create a scheduled post (via Buffer) on your own Facebook or Twitter timeline every time something is posted by www.facebook.com/landscapincolorado. This could save you time by doing the scheduling on other services once you’ve created the content in one place.

Interested in learning more about managing your social media presence? Attend ALCC's social media workshop on Thursday, September 24 in Denver.

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Drought: Pain or profit?
Time for a mid-year tax check-up
Colorado construction is boomingALCC Affiliate members recognized for community projects