What are the best tools to automate your social media?
If you want to drive more traffic to your website, your landing pages and your products so you can get more traffic, more people signing up to your email list and also be able to sell more products, you must automate some of your social media work.
And there are many tools you can use to do so, but they're not all the same.
Here are some of my favourite tools to automate social media posting:
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[Disclaimer: Some links in this post contain affiliate links. This means I get a commission if you purchase the product through my link at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases.]
This blog post was originally published in February 2019 and updated in October 2020.
I keep hearing that if you automate social media, you’ll annoy your followers. Or that you will be penalised by Facebook and the others and you won’t get as much visibility.
so, why automate social media?
The truth is that only a small amount of your followers get to see your posts when you first publish them, so why not give them a chance to see them again?
If you use these tools wisely and also curate other people’s posts, it won’t bother your followers.
Most people are not stuck to their Twitter or Pinterest all day; Facebook’s algorithms make sure you don’t see everything a Facebook Page posts, and not all your followers live in the same time zone either.
Repeating your posts will end up getting you more engagement and more traffic in the long run.
Because more people get to see your posts and, as your collection of posts increases, your fee stays varied and people don't get bored with your content.
Try creating variations so they don't look the same!
Last but not least, automating social media will save you hours of work each week and you will get a lot more done.
You'll need a bit of planning to automate some of your seasonal and recurring posts, but then they're all being posted at the right time when people need them.
why these tools?
There are many social media schedulers out there.
I started with Buffer and Hootsuite years ago, for example, and I know many people still use them.
But for me, I wanted something I could use for several profiles, cos I have more than one website, and I also wanted to be able to put some of my content on autopilot. And I didn't want to spend a fortune doing it.
So I've only included tools that I think are affordable for most people and will help you save hours every week on your social media outreach.
NOTE: Prices are correct at time of publication and are based on annual plan.
Best tools to automate social media
SocialBee
SocialBee is one of the tools I currently use to automate social media. Its greatest advantage is the number of posts you get in your queue.
Their cheapest plan at allows you to have 5 profiles, with 10 categories, 10 RSS feeds and 1000 posts in the queue and it currently costs $19 a month . You can post to Facebook, Facebook Groups, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and now Pinterest, though this is a bit tricky to set up for Pinterest.
You can create themed categories so you can have one for products, blog posts, services, affiliate marketing, tips and tricks, interactions with your followers, quotes, etc.
I also have some categories that are completely automated. You add one RSS feed to one category and set it up so every new post is automatically approved, so you don't need to do anything at all after you set it up.
The only thing is, don't abuse this, because you don't want to be posting things that are irrelevant or use it too often. So be selective with which rss feeds you use for this and limit this to 10-15% of the content you curate.
best for people with lots of content
Post planner
Basic, but one of the most affordable if you want to automate your social media, post mainly to Facebook and Twitter and don't have a big budget.
Its cheapest plan is only $3 a month and you can have 300 posts planned. Works with Facebook and Twitter.
It’s not very sophisticated, but it allows you to have evergreen posts rotated continually by deciding which type of posts can be recycled: Text, photos or articles.
TIP: It’s easy to set up recurring posts for weekly, monthly and yearly events and it will even help you to fill up your queue with suggestions for viral images, viral articles, status messages, etc.
best for people on a tight budget
Smarterqueue
Smarterqueue starts at $13.99 for 4 profiles and 500 messages in the queue and 10 posts per profile per day. You can use it on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Google+ and Pinterest are coming soon.
It's my favourite tool for automating social media posts for Twitter, though the queue is a bit short, to be honest.
In Smarterqueue you set up categories for your posts such as Products, Blog Posts, Articles, Tips, Quotes, Aff Links, etc. It takes a little while to load up your schedule with the different categories because you have to specify it post by post. So there is some work to do at the beginning, but the amount of time it will save you later is absolutely worth it.
It also lets you know what percentage of posts are dedicated to each category, so you are not being spammy. And Smarterqueue also stops posting if it’s running out of posts and would end up posting the same thing over and over again. So it’s great to keep a “healthy” feed of articles, own blog posts, affiliate marketing posts, etc.
TIP: If you are a heavy Twitter user (posting +20 posts per day) the solo plan might not be enough so use another tool to supplement this such as Post Planner or get in touch with Smarterqueue to see if they can do you a personalised plan. They’re very flexible.
best tool for twitter engagement and growth
VIRALTAG
for their monthly plan for 10 profiles but you get unlimited posts. At first glance, it’s more expensive than the others. However, it gives you 10 profiles and unlimited posts makes up for that.
It works on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. It’s best suited for visual content and you can schedule videos directly from Vimeo, YouTube and Daily Motion.
The main advantage of ViralTag is that it allows you to have unlimited posts and you can cover ALL of your social media profiles with it.
To be fair, I haven’t used Viraltag much. But I have used it for Pinterest. It allows you to pin your own content in evergreen categories easily, so it’s a good traffic generating tool.
If you have a lot of visual content, this is a good option automating your social media posts.
ViralTag costs $24 per month.
TIP: If you want to save some money with it, write a blog post reviewing the tool and you will get 6 months for free.
best for visual content
If This Then That
IFTTT is a tool you can use to automate social media if you already use a scheduler but your plan is not big enough for all your profiles.
I am not going to go into detail here about how to automate your social media with IFTTT. What you can use IFTTT for is to connect one of your FB pages to Hootsuite's FREE plan.
This way posts shared on FB go straight to Hootsuite and then you can set it to post to a group or another profile.
It's quite easy to do so but you need to bear in mind that you only have about 30 posts you can use in Hootsuite's FREE plan.
best as a supplementary tool
Tailwind
Though some of the other tools allow you to post to Pinterest, I'd still recommend Tailwind as a separate tool.
It's $9.99 per account, although for people with more than 3 accounts, you might want to change to Smarterqueue.
When I originally wrote this blog post, it was not possible to automate your Pinterest marketing with Tailwind because they didn't yet have SmartLoop.
You could batch your scheduling and do a whole month of scheduling in one go, if you wanted, as I explain in this guide.
You can still do that, if you want but you might not get good results from doing this, because Pinterest now encourages fresh pinning, so creating fresh content is a lot more important.
This doesn't mean that old pins won't get you results. They still drive traffic to your blog and if people love them, they'll still pin them and click on them, but you shouldn't just add all your posts on SmartLoop.
And keep an eye on your analytics to see if you need to refresh and change the pins on your SmartLoop.
Automating seasonal pins
One thing you can do is add your seasonal pins to SmartLoop so they're being pinned at the right time. You can do this in advance.
Here's what to do to set it up.
It's not a set it up and forget it process, though. You still need to look at the analytics and decide what stays and what doesn't.
So after it's been running for a while, you can remove poor performing pins, add new pins, change schedules. And this you can do in 15-20 minutes once every month or two.
best for pinterest
Publer
Publer is a newer tool that you'll love if you have evergreen posts or you want to show recurring posts for your Facebook. It's a great choice if you have recurring posts for multiple accounts or if you are running a lot of sales.
It's pricing is flexible so you can build it to suit your needs, for example, for 5 profiles and a single user you pay $8 a month. But for 6 profiles and two users, you pay $10.40 a month.
If you are planning to have a seasonal offer or have seasonal blog posts, this would be the tool for you.
One thing I like about Publer is that you can share the same post to different accounts. Let's say you have a Facebook Page and a couple of Facebook groups and you want to add the same post, but you don't want it to be published at the same time.
You can set up Publer to share the post to one account and then share it after a delay to a different account.
You can also add comments to your posts directly from Publer before you publish them.
This is great for bumping up your posts in the feed!
Although Publer won't allow you to use the same post on repeat for Twitter, one thing you can do is use its Comments feature to write a whole thread from it.
best for ecommerce and sales campaigns
These 7 tools will all save you hours of work every week.
Isn’t that worth something to you? Think what you could do with an extra 3-5 hours work every week…
But before you decide which social media automation tool is the right one , let me give you ONE LAST TIP:
Before you decide and commit to any of these social media automation tools, don’t look at the number of profiles included but the number of posts you can have in the queue.
Are they sufficient for what you want? And remember, in most cases, paying for a higher plan might not be worth it. Use one of the free or cheaper tools instead.
