The Easiest Tools to Save You Time
As a business owner, there are many tasks you perform every day. How can you save yourself time on daily jobs? Here is a list of some great tools you can use to save time and energy working on your business.
Social Media Tools
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is essential if you are in business and prefer to work smarter, not harder. You most likely are on some form of social media. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or one of the many other social media platforms, Hootsuite allows you to type in your written content, schedule, and interact with your followers on your social accounts – all on the same page. (Real-life interaction is important on social media but I’m not discussing that here today!)
In Hootsuite, you can use up to three platforms on their free site. With their Pro subscription, you can add many more platforms and contributors and you’ll have access to several other great tools providing the ability to schedule 350 messages in advance and measure social media performance and ROI with analytics, to name a couple.
Buffer
Now, we do not use Buffer at the present time, but it is similar to Hootsuite. I’ve heard that Buffer is better at automatic scheduling than Hootsuite. It, too, has some great additions when you subscribe to their Buffer for Business plan.
These two programs are great for all things social media. They are the top two Social Media management tools used by companies to run and manage their social accounts. While they are both similar, they have their own unique dashboards and tools within their programs.
Depending on what you plan to do, I would check out each of these systems before deciding on which is best for your needs to help manage your social accounts.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a Twitter only platform that will change your mind about Twitter (if you’re not a frequent user). If you have multiple accounts you can mange them all in one easy location.
You have the ability to create specified Twitter feeds for your timeline, specific hashtags you want to follow, another Twitter account that is special, your notifications and mentions, and even one for a Twitter list. This is one of the best ways to follow interactions and conversations between your account(s) and your audience.
RSS Feeds
Feedly
Now, if you read our blog last week you might remember that I talked about feedly. Feedly is a tool that will gather all of your favorite RSS feeds together so that again, you can see them all on one easy-to-read page.
Another great part of this tool is you can manage all of your feeds by separating them into categories. This way you can break your feeds down into smaller, more easy-to-digest lists. For example, I have a list that includes marketing, entrepreneur, and others.
This tool is great because you do not have to run around and visit 5-10 different websites each day to stay on top of your market or do research on new ideas.
Combo Tools
IFTTT
If you have never heard of this tool you need to visit this site right away. IFTTT stands for “If This Then That.” What it does is create a formula, what they call a recipe, for specific tasks that are repeated.
For example, every time that you post a new blog post on your WordPress site, IFTTT will tell Bitly to create a new link to that specific post. For every tweet you send out, you can have IFTTT create a spreadsheet and archive the tweets in Google Drive. There are many more recipes that have already been created in their channels and you can create your own recipes for a number of apps and tools including Twitter, Facebook, Google Drive, Android devices, Apple devices, Spotify, and many more.
Do you use any of these time-saving tools? While they do save you time – as a business owner your job is sales and bringing in customers. We can help you write the content and create and manage your strategic social media campaign.
Until next time,
Pete (& Colleen)
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