As I talk to other entrepreneurs, one of the biggest problems many of them face is they don’t have the time to do everything they need to do. As a result, there is always something falling through the cracks. Often one of those items is social media marketing.
If you look at the results of social media marketing, you’ll see why this is one area you don’t want to ignore.
But there’s good news. Don’t stress out wondering how in the world you can fit one more thing into your busy schedule. There are many tools you can use to automate many of your social media tasks. Best of all, many of these tools are free. As the owner of HIT Virtual Assistants for the last nine years, I have tested many of them in the trenches and I will occasionally share them with my readers. Today, I have three tools to help you automate some of your social media tasks and one tool that will take care of a pesky problem we often run into.
MISSINGLETT_R: Their tag line is “Automated Social Media Marketing For Professional Bloggers. If that doesn’t describe you, don’t skim off to the next tool. MissingLett_r can work for anyone using social media marketing. Are you promoting your blog posts on social media? And, if you are, do you promote once and then let that stellar quality post waste away in the tombs of your blog-forgotten? Keep that post working for you! After a quick and painless setup, MissingLett_r monitors your blog 24/7 and when it finds new content, a campaign is created. Each campaign contains a years worth of social media posts created from your blog post which includes an image. When a campaign is created, you get an email asking for you to approve it. You can scroll the created social media posts and delete or change any you don’t like. Next you look at a list of hashtags taken from your content and again can delete or add. It’s as simple as that! The entire approval process takes me less than five minutes. Check it out here.
IFTTT: With this tool you create “recipes” to automate routine tasks. For our purposes, we will only be talking about social media tasks but this program can automate many things in your work and business life. The recipes are “if this then that” statements. Now if the thought of working with mathematical statements is causing your head to spin (mine did) take a deep breath. It’s not algebra. IFTTT has created many of the “most used” statements for you and you just have to turn them on. Here is a small example of what you can create:
- If new Twitter Follower, Auto Follow them back.
- Pin your new Instagram photos to a board.
- Track New Followers in Spreadsheet
- Share your Instagram photos as native Twitter photos
- Automatically keep your Facebook and Twitter profile pictures in sync
- Save photos your tagged in on Facebook to Dropbox
These are all recipes you can apply to your account and, if you don’t see what you need it’s a simple, quick process to create your own. Their wizard will walk you right through the process.
Teweroid: This is a free twitter tool that helps you make the most of Twitter by letting you know the best time to tweet. Each time you publish anything, you should check the results. You’ll start seeing a pattern with content that is getting better results than the others. Promote the content that gets higher results more. For example, if you discover that your audience engages more with video, start doing more videos. This tools gives you the analytics you need to do this. With the basic account, you can learn:
Best times to tweet for the most exposure:
Most Followers online:
With this information, evaluate your posting schedule. Are you posting at the optimum time for exposure? Are you posting when your followers are online? Revise your posting schedule with this information in mind to get your posts in front of the most people.
The free plan only covers 1000 followers but if you spring for the premium plan you can get more detailed stats on all your followers. The reports can be branded for sharing with your clients.
SmallPDF. Have you ever had a document in PDF format and you need it in DOC? I can’t tell you how many times that has happened to me! Many times the situation is a client only has his course materials for the next webinar in PDF and he needs to make changes. That’s where small PDF comes in to play. You can upload your document and quickly convert it to the desired form. And it’s not just PDF to DOC. It also does:
- PPT to PDF
- PDF to PPT
- JPT to PDF
- PDF to JPG
- Excel to PDF
- PDF to Excel
- Word to PDF
- PDF to Word
- Merge PDF
- Split PDF
- Rotate PDF
- Unlock PDF
- Protect PDF
Document conversion headache solved! And it’s free.
Bonus Tool: Are you still feeling a little overwhelmed with your social media and other administrative needs? Then outsource these tasks. When you partner with a virtual assistant, you can delegate the tasks you aren’t proficient at, don’t interest you or that eat away at your time. Your VA can handle items that are stressful or difficult for you, and allow you to concentrate on what you do best.
There are so many tools available to help you run your business like a well-oiled machine and with no stress! When you find the ones that work for you, put them in place and start building your business.
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