5 Tools to Help You Manage Your Social Media Marketing Time

An enormous part of making your blogged-book or blogging efforts successful revolves around tying your posts, as well as your blog, into your social media networks. As with any book, you have to market it. Blogging a book gets you involved in one of the most important and effective marketing activities: blogging. But blogging works best when coupled with social media marketing.

Over and over again, I hear all types of writers complain about the enormous amount of time they spend on social networks and promoting their work via these sites. Indeed, it can be quite time consuming.

There are a number of great options available to help you manage your social media marketing, however. You may find you like some more than others. Today, I’d like to share with you the five I like and use most consistently.

1. Hootsuite.com: Many people use the free or paid version of Hootsuite to both share their blog posts and curated content as well as to keep track of activity and followers on their social networks. I don’t actually use it for the latter activity, but I do use it quite often when I want to share a particular piece of content across several networks, such as LinkedIn and Twitter, at once. I also will schedule posts here. If I need a quick link shortened, it’s an easy tool that allows me to do so and to post to a few sites at the same time. I don’t use it for Facebook unless I’m in a hurry, since updates to Facebook are best made manually.

2. Tweetdeck.com: I use Tweetdeck to follow the influencers in my subject area, many of my colleagues and particular topics (by hashtag) on Twitter. I love how easy it is to add columns and to review these to find content to curate, mentions and all types of interesting activity. This program helps me be more social on Twitter because it’s easy to reply right from the program. In particular, I find it very useful to find content to share and to schedule that content using the retweet function.

3. Nutshellmail.com: Nutshellmail is super service if you prefer to get email notification about activity on your social media accounts. Once or twice a day you receive an email that offers information on your Facebook page likes, posts, comments, and analytics. It also provides updates based on your Facebook profile, such as birthdays, friend requests, all posts, events, and group invites—even messages. For Twitter, it keeps track of new follows and unfollows, mentions and tweets. You can respond to almost everything—even a direct message—from that email.

4. Socialooph.com: This service is my new all-time favorite for scheduling posts. Socialoomph is a paid service, but well worth the expense. You can schedule your social media posts, set up batches of recurring tweets and LinkedIn posts (I mostly use it for Twitter), track click-through rates and keywords, find followers, and even check some analytics. It also will mimic another Twitter user’s account to help you find friends. I love the ability to batch my tweets by subjects and schedule them.

5. Rescuetime.com: When I feel I need to get a handle on where I’m spending my time, I use Rescuetime. Even the free version, which is all I’ve ever tried, will give me ample feedback on if I’ve gotten lost in the social media zone. It’s so easy to do! Discover what percentage of your time is spent on producing your blogged book and how much is spent on social media marketing or on other tasks. You might be surprised what you discover.

If you want to find more ways to use social media more effectively as you market your blogged book—as you write it and once it’s finished, purchase a copy of Avoid Social Media Time Suck: A Blueprint for Writers to Create Online Buzz for Their Books and Still Have Time to Write by Frances Caballo. It contains a huge amount of resources to help you manage your time as you continue your social media marketing efforts.

Image by marish | stockfresh.com