Social media made easy with the right tools

Social media offers a powerful opportunity to build an audience and connect with your customers. Unfortunately, managing social media can be quite the hassle and many small business managers already have a lot on their plate. Fortunately, with the right tools, you can make things much easier to handle.

You can manage your profiles the old-fashioned way — namely logging into, say, Facebook, writing up a post on the spot, and then sharing it. Then you might log into Twitter and start the whole process over. Talk about tedious, and many would-be social media stars end up abandoning the process because it’s simply too much work.

Fortunately, you can now use dashboards to manage your profiles. With Buffer and Hootsuite, among others, you can manage all of your social media profiles in one place.

Many social media dashboards also allow you to schedule posts in advance. So instead of sitting down each day to write posts for each profile, you could write all of them for the week on Sunday.

Then you can schedule and forget.

The best social media dashboards also allow you to monitor tweets, likes, and other engagements right from the platform. Instead of logging into each profile to analyze data, you can do it all right from one place. This also makes it easy to compare engagement across channels.

Of course, you might wonder what you should post about. You can uncover hot topics at trends.google.com. Discussing timely, trending topics can boost engagement and make your business more relevant.

Images help when posting on Facebook and other platforms. Your own photos often work best.