By Drew Neisser 
If you want to spread your brand’s message and keep your audience engaged, you need to be active on social media. But you can’t pin your hopes on a post and a prayer — you need tools to help you be more productive on social.
Social media can be a tedious and time-consuming task, to be sure. Every morning, you may wake up and update your various social channels, bouncing back and forth between accounts. You need to develop and publish content for those channels to keep followers engaged.
But how many social media channels do you need? How do you prioritize channels? Depending on how many you have, this process could eat up several hours. As a result, your overall productivity suffers: You’re spending too much time and energy on social media, which cuts into priorities like growing your business.
Even worse, you may get sucked down a social media rabbit hole, scrolling through your friends’ and colleagues’ posts. The next thing you know, you’ve devoted 30 unproductive minutes to social media — without a single follower or interaction to show for it.
Find Tools to Increase Your Social Media Productivity
To prevent a time suck from happening, invest in these six tools that will not only make you more productive on social media, but also enhance your productivity regarding the things only you can do:
1. Calendar.com
While Calendar isn’t specifically designed for social media management yet, it should be part of your social media toolkit. For starters, Calendar is one of the best calendar apps that syncs with your existing Google Calendar, Office 364 Calendar, and Apple Calendar. This means you can create a social media calendar to manage and organize your social media posts.
As a result, you’ll enjoy the following benefits:
- Plan social media content weeks or months in advance so you can focus on growing your business. You won’t be scrambling to find engaging content every day.
- Customize content for each specific network so you’re not repeating the same message.
- Plan for holidays and days of observance so you can create relevant content surrounding those celebrations.
- Track the performance of your social media efforts.
- Improve the efficiency of your social efforts.
- Keep your entire team on the same page. With a calendar, you can assign tasks to various team members and keep them in the loop. With a shared calendar, people will know when specific social media updates will be published and on which platform.
- Become more effective at time management because you’re setting aside specific times in your schedule to plan and manage your social channels.
When it’s time to plan an upcoming social media campaign, you have room to discuss its progress. Calendar allows you to painlessly schedule a meeting with your team — just share your availability, and your teammates can select the date and time they’re available. This means no more going back and forth via email or IM to set up your next meeting.
You need to have a plan when it comes to social media. With Calendar, you and your team can collectively schedule and plan the direction you’re headed.
2. CoSchedule
This is an all-in-one marketing calendar that can be used by content marketers to stay productive while keeping track of their tasks and teams.
CoSchedule helps users achieve by allowing them to create and customize a unified calendar. With CoSchedule, you can organize the various types of content you produce. This means all aspects of your publications — your blog posts, podcasts, and social media updates — can be created on timelines. You can track deadlines and prioritize tasks for you and your teammates.
At the same time, you can schedule your social media posts or publish a fresh piece of content on CoSchedule. This allows you to share a new piece to the social platform of your choosing with just one click.
This tool also comes with a handy Best Time Scheduling tool so you’ll know when to publish your social content for maximization. You’ll be informed about the highest traffic time for sharing your content. You can also schedule dozens of social messages in bulk and immediately share content to your followers anywhere on the web.
Likeable Local is a social media management and marketing solution designed for small businesses and agencies. It’s a collaborative tool that handles everything, helping you be more productive on social.
This tool helps with creating content, scheduling posts, and running social media ads. The tool also comes with a scheduling calendar so you and your team know what’s being published on specific social channels. There’s also a convenient messaging center. Every message, comment, and review you receive via social media can be accessed in one location.
Likeable Local also provides insights. You’ll receive analytics on metrics such as clicks and likes for individual posts, enabling you to see how your social pages are growing.
Likeable Local offers four different plans:
- Automated: This is perfect for those just starting out on social media because it focuses on post engagement and page growth.
- Custom: This is another starter package that focuses on custom posts and leads.
- Lead: This plan is for anyone who wishes to generate leads.
- Social: This package manages all aspects of a social media campaign to achieve social media dominance.
4. Buffer
Sharing content is a must if you want to build a following on social media. With so much content being published throughout the day, finding content that will resonate with your audience can be a time-consuming task.
Thankfully, the Buffer app solves this problem. With Buffer, you can schedule posts at various times of the day, even if you’re not online. It’s incredibly easy to use, and it integrates with popular browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. This allows you to access Buffer from your social media profiles instead of switching between each channel separately.
Buffer can also grab posts from Facebook and Twitter so you can quickly and easily share content that’s relevant to your followers. As if that weren’t enough, Buffer allows you to schedule your various social media posts in one dashboard.
Buffer permits up to 25 team members to access your account. You have the option to set individual access levels for these team members as well. You can review your social media performance, thanks to analytics that highlight how you can improve your results.
The point of being on social media is to develop and build meaningful relationships with your audience. This can be a lengthy and time-consuming process. Sprout Social speeds up this process by helping you identify and strengthen these relationships.
Sprout Social is equipped with a Smart Inbox. Through this, you can engage with and monitor all the messages and comments you receive on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn via one inbox.
You can also monitor your brand by keyword, hashtag, and location searches. Sprout Social gives you the opportunity to convert messages into actionable items and identify influencers. It also offers the ability to receive automated reply suggestions, thanks to machine learning.
Sprout Social provides a social CRM and the ability to plan and publish content across your various social channels. There are also reports that enable you to see how your efforts are performing so you can adjust accordingly.
6. Hootsuite
It’s unlikely that you have just one social media profile; each channel serves various purposes. Your audience may be spread across several platforms. That’s great — except for the fact that managing and updating all these profiles can become a time suck.
Hootsuite solves this problem by allowing you to handle multiple social media accounts through a single dashboard. Through a free account, you can view, schedule, and post messages to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube accounts. It keeps you logged in — you won’t be constantly logging in and out of each platform.
There’s also a content calendar so you and your teammates know exactly when a specific piece of content will be published. Need to curate content? No problem. Use Hootsuite to search streams by hashtag, location, or keyword. You can quickly find riveting content for your audience to consume. If you stumble across a piece of content you dig while browsing online, it can be shared instantly from the webpage.
Like most other social media management tools, Hootsuite provides analytics to measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
Remaining active and engaged on social media isn’t just important for your fans; it’s important for your brand, too. To avoid sacrificing your time or winging your posts, invest in tools like these six. The only way to strengthen your social media presence is to track it and adjust your behavior to match what your followers need and want.
SME Paid Under
Sitetrail Research Team 
Doug Brown