6 best tools to auto share posts on social media
Promoting your post to social media channels is as important as creating an engaging content to improve readership.
Syndicating your posts to your relevant social networks can significantly enhance visitors to your site. This will help you improve your overall search rankings.
For your content to be found, no matter what topic it is, you must be active on social media.
So, it’s important to publish your posts to your own social networks every time you add a new content to your site.
Unfortunately, not all bloggers have the time in the world to promote their new posts to G+, Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.
The best solution? Use auto-posting tools.
Automating the way you promote your latest content to your social networks is now possible through social media auto-posting plug-ins. There are hundreds of solutions that can automatically promote your blog posts to your social media networks but these are the most popular ones:
6 Tools to Automate Sharing To Social Media Networks
1. Hootsuite
Why use Hootsuite when you’re already using Buffer? Is Hootsuite better than Buffer and vice versa?
Hootsuite and Buffer are good services that can automatically share your posts. When it comes to social networking support, Hootsuite has wider coverage.
Cool features I love:
- Auto post to: Facebook groups / profiles / business pages, LinkedIn company pages / groups, Google+ pages, Twitter, Foursquare, WordPress, Mixi.
- Ability to share from: Youtube, Flickr, Instagram, Tumblr, Blogger, StumbleUpon and much more.
- Auto post updates from RSS feeds.
- Schedule multiple posts in bulk.
- Determine how people share their posts. For example, if someone shared a post from your site using Hootsuite, you’ll be able to track that they used Hootsuite to reshare your post.
- Monitor activities of multiple social accounts – all at once in one dashboard. Here’s an example (click for larger size):
See how I can view my Twitter mentions, Facebook group activities and Google+ feed from one single dashboard? Instead of opening and closing a new window back and forth, I can view these information and even interact easily using Hootsuite! Such a time saver, right?
- Share links and photos. It uses the ow.ly hosted server for link and photo sharing.
Some more info:
- Pricing: Free / Pro (From $8.99 a month) / Enterprise
- Post through: Chrome extension / Firefox extension / iPhone app / iPad app / Android app / Even if you’re not on chrome, you can just drag and drop their icon to your browser.
With basic account, you’ll have message scheduling and can set up 5 social networks. Its pro version has unlimited social networks, atom feeds, and stats history. It also allows bulk scheduling. But you don’t have to rush into getting a pro account as its basic version is already enough to automatically share posts to your important social networks.
For personal and professional use, this auto-posting tool is worth a try. It’s great if you want to establish a market on your online brand.
2. Buffer App
It’s one of those apps that can help you out in posting stuff to your social networks. You’ll learn how to do publishing posts automatically to your social networking sites and embrace this useful tool. What I love the most about it is its clean and easy-to-use interface.
With this app, you can:
- Set up buffering patterns for different days of the week. For instance, on Mondays through Fridays, you post an update every 4 am, 5 pm and 6 pm. And on weekends, you can publish update every 4 hours.
- Find out the times of day that your post gets the most engagement and the type of topics your audience like the most.
- Track which updates get the most engagement. Analyze which of your updates get the most reshares/retweets, mentions, clicks and favorites.
- Shorten or not shorten your links. Available shorteners: buff.ly / bit.ly / j.mp
- Use Google Analytics to see how much traffic you get from social media posts.
- Buffer adds content suggestions that you can post to your social networks.
Buffer info:
- Pricing: Free / Awesome ($10 or $102 a year) / Business ($50 – $250 month)
- Post updates through: Buffer’s dashboard / iPhone app / Android app / Chrome extension / Firefox / Safari
- For free account, you can already manage multiple social networking accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn.
- The free account allows you to provide 10 updates per day.
3. TweetDeck
TweetDeck underwent major tweaking. The most noticeable one is its overall interface. Its new dashboard is now in white that resembles that of HootSuite. With its new interface, you now have more options depending on the number of social network accounts you’ve added.
Unfortunately, this app no longer supports Facebook integration. So, if the majority of your audience is on Facebook, then you better use HootSuite or other auto-posting tools on this list.
However, if your audience spends more time on Twitter, then this could be a great app for you to provide automatic updates for your followers.
Key features:
- Available in: Mac / Windows / Chrome app / iPhone / Android
- View and monitor lists, searches, activity and more – all in one single dashboard.
- Ability to select what kind of tweets to display in your stream, exclude unwanted terms from any or specific users.
- Manage multiple Twitter accounts.
4. Dlvr.it
From the term suggests, Dlvr.it will help you connect with your readers by delivering your content to various social networks. Yes, just like the other options mentioned above. But what’s unique about this app?
Key features:
- Auto-share content of your favorite sites (through RSS feeds) to your social networks. Take a look at this example. See how I was able to distribute the feeds of my favorite sites? Every time they post a new content, my social accounts will automatically update with the link + title (and the author as well) to their new posts:
- Promoted stories. It’s the promoted stories feature where you can pay $1 for a story that you want to spread to a wider network base. For such amount, your story will be delivered to search engines, like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Your content will also reached top news sites and feeds, such as ABC news, Boing Boing, etc. Of course, it’ll reach your social networks. However, the $1 is only applicable to your first story. The next time you promote another story, you’ll have to pay $10-$30 (depends on your plan). It’s still a good deal though. Click here for more info.
- Ability to filter the content that this app shares. You can filter it by categories, body content, title and URL. It’s a useful tool if you only want specific authors or categories that you want to be shared.
- Plus, you can set up your Google Analytics’ custom tracking codes to effectively track your click-throughs and conversions, among other things.
5. SproutSocial
It’s one of the social management tools that let you fulfill most (not all) of your social-management needs. One of the striking things about this app is its simplicity. Unlike HootSuite and Buffer App, this one doesn’t have learning curve. From the moment you open an account to the minute you make your first update.
Although it’s a one-stop shop for your Facebook, G+ pages and LinkedIn social network accounts, it emphasizes more on your Twitter account.
Key features:
- Sexy dashboard. Really sexy.
- In-depth reporting system. You have the ability to view your social media performance such as how people are engaging with your posts, # of new followers, fans, retweets, mentions, etc.
- RSS scheduler. Like Hootsuite and Dlvr.It, you can set up feeds to auto-publish posts to your social networks when new blog posts are live.
- Discovery. It’s also capable of helping you discover interesting people to follow and not so engaging networks to unfollow. All tabs are self-explanatory.
- Sync feedly account. You can connect your Feedly account and view the latest content right from your Sproutsocial RSS reader.
- Available in Chrome / App Store / Android / any browser using their bookmarklet toolbar.
- Plans: Deluxe ($59 per month) / Premium ($99 per month) / Enterprise ($1500 per month) – with 30 day trial in each plan
6. Rss Graffiti
It’s a Facebook app that can work with your personal profile or fan page on Facebook. This app is specially designed to share your own blog’s RSS feeds on your Facebook wall.
When setting up your scheduled posts, make sure that you won’t be posting several updates on your wall as your followers might find them annoying. You can choose the number of posts this app will share in one day once it goes live.
You can also use this app to post updates for your Facebook groups. And connect your Graffiti account to your Twitter so it’ll auto-update your posts to said networking site.
Info:
- Plans: Free / Broadcast Add-on ($5 per month) / Optimize Add-on ($50 per month) / Express Add-on ($150 per month)
- Free account can post unlimited feeds, unlimited Facebook targets, up to 300 posts per page, per month
I suggest trying out the free account. It caters to most of your social-management needs. However, if you need to update more than 300 posts each month, then subscribing to one of its premium plans could be a viable option.
What about you? What’s your favorite auto-sharing tool?