Feeling Overwhelmed? Consider a Dashboard to Take the Work Out of Social Media Marketing

While social media sites have opened new avenues for better engaging with prospects and customers, the daily grind of keeping up with others’ posts and comments, and posting and tweeting yourself, across multiple platforms, can be exhausting.

Enter social media dashboards – tools that can help you share content across multiple platforms and manage your social activities more effectively. At the least, such tools provide an “all in one” view of all your social media accounts and allow you to post to all of them at once, instead of individually. With some tools, you can even analyze the impact of and fine-tune your social media programs, as well as easily track what your competitors are doing.

There are a lot of social media management apps out there – a Google search will turn up scores – but they vary somewhat in what features they offer and how easy they are to use, as well as associated costs. Fortunately, many offer free trial periods so you can readily give them a try. Here are three we checked out:

· Hootsuite is the most widely used tool for tracking and managing your social media channels, boasting over six million users and versions in 13 languages. With it, you can monitor and post to social media sites, all from one place. Its key strengths include extremely simple advance scheduling of posts, robust analytics and the ability to monitor keywords.

· SocialOomph is another popular dashboard that lets you manage all your social media accounts from one place, including scheduling updates, monitoring for keywords and finding quality people to follow. Plus, it also lets you manage and schedule posts to your blog.

· SproutSocial features a polished, intuitive dashboard. It offers the ability to assemble activities from all your social networks into a single stream. It has strong analytics as well as a unique team management feature that lets you review the posts of others before they’re pushed to sites. 

Social media dashboards won’t write your posts, tweet or blog for you, but they will improve your productivity by eliminating the need to visit each social media site separately to post content and keep up with conversations. They’re also a great way to avoid “brain clutter” by keeping all your social media activities in one organized place. Many also offer analytics and other features that can help you wring more benefit from your social programs.

If you’re beginning to feel like social media is taking up too much of your life, or that you’re falling behind on it for lack of time, it might be time to try a management app out.

Are you currently using a social media management system? Which one do you like best and why?