As a PR officer for on-college campus groups, knowing social media is key to success. But when you’re doing 18 credits, two extra curricular activities and juggling a social life, who has time to churn out a tweet and a Facebook post every two hours? We’re busy people! Thankfully there are social media management platforms that post periodically for us while we’re busy with other things. Which one should you use?
I used HootSuite at my first internship to schedule our tweets and Facebook posts throughout the week. It helped because I worked in the office twice a day, but still promoted our articles every day during the school week. Its format is visually helpful—a column for each social media platform you’ve connected it to and the option to have additional columns for mentions, your timeline and other accounts you may be monitoring.
HootSuite allows you to engage with your audience in the now and schedule posts for the then. You can use HootSuite to manage up to five social media accounts for free , but if you sign up for HootSuite Pro, you can manage up to 50 accounts and send up to 350 messages at a time.
fferAppBuffer allows you to set up posts that will release gradually throughout the day. I’m new to Buffer, but it seems like it has the potential to be pretty nifty if you’re willing to pay $10/month. The “Awesome Plan” allows you to sync up to 12 social networks at once, but the Individual Plan only allows you to link up one account for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; so if you’re handling multiple accounts like I tend to, this program may not be for you.
Buffer syncs with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ and allows you to monitor the reach and analytics of your posts if you have the business model. The Awesome Plan also allows you to schedule up to 200 posts whereas the free version only allows up to 10 posts per profile.
If you’re a Mac user like me, make sure you take advantage of TweetDeck, a free app that lets you manage different Twitter accounts. It has a similar interface to HootSuite, but in my opinion I think it’s more user-friendly. You can have as many columns as you want ranging from your own timeline to notifications, trending topics, mentions and your followers. It’s Twitter exclusive, of course, but if you’re a broke college student like me who likes to afford some form of useful social media management, TweetDeck is perfect.
TJ Digital Creative 