Keeping on top of your Instagram and Twitter presence is essential for promoting yourself and your content — and getting the fans and followers to make a successful cam career. But constantly checking and posting on your social media accounts takes away from time you could be creating the content your fans want to see.
Here are a few social media management applications that can streamline your marketing efforts and leave you with more time to spend on yourself and your fans.
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media managing programs. Most users can accomplish their Instagram and Twitter goals with the free plan — that allows you to connect 3 social media accounts and schedule up to thirty posts at a time between them with no monthly cap. Their cheapest paid plan, at $29/month, increases these limits as well as providing access to more of Hootsuite’s top features.
Much of Hootsuite’s utility is in its Streams function. Once you connect your accounts to Hootsuite, the Streams page will display a tab for each one, allowing you to view all your accounts in one spot. You can add up to ten streams to each tab, which allows you to view curated content for that platform, including mentions and likes of your content, your Twitter lists, and more.
You can easily schedule each post as you compose it, or let Hootsuite choose the best time to post with the autoschedule function. There is also the Planner tab on the Publisher page, which features a visual calendar of your posts, past and future; from here you can click on the day/time you want a post to publish and then create your content as usual.
Buffer is another very well-reviewed tool. Like Hootsuite, their free plan also allows only three linked accounts, but they have a queue limit of 10 scheduled posts (still with no monthly cap). However, Buffer’s Pro plan, which increases your limits to 8 accounts and 100 scheduled posts at a time, is only $15/month.
Buffer’s best feature is the ability to create a posting schedule for each account. This lets you set specific times to publish, and Buffer automatically drops queued posts into the next available slot according to that schedule; this means that once you’ve set the schedule for each account (say, every half-hour during a platform’s peak posting times), you can simply select “Add to Queue” rather than manually choose the publish time for each new post.
You can create your own original posts through the app or web dashboard, and share the same post to all your accounts, or tweak the content to fit different platforms. Buffer also has a very convenient browser extension that lets you share links, images and videos from around the internet by adding them to your buffer.
Later seems to be less well-known than Buffer or Hootsuite, but it’s a crazy good deal for how much utility it has. The free version of later allows one account per platform (so, one Twitter account, one Instagram, etc.), and lets you schedule up to thirty posts per month on each platform. But just $9 a month gets you up to 100 monthly scheduled posts per platform, as well as unlocking more advanced features.
It has a drag and drop calendar like Hootsuite, so you can easily make and schedule a month’s worth of posts at once. Its visual content planner for Instagram posts also lets you preview how your feed will look to ensure it’s well-balanced, and its saved captions feature lets you store text and hashtags you use often so you can add them to posts in an instant rather than typing them out every time.
Later also has a browser extension, though theirs is only available on Chrome, which allows you to collect content from the web and save it directly to your unlimited Later Media Library for easy access.
Which one do you pick?
Ultimately, which social media manager works best for you depends on how you use your social media and what you want out of it. Tools like these are necessary for professionals like you, for whom followers can translate into dollars by getting more eyes on your content.
These three all offer free versions, so try them out and see which features are most helpful to you, but there are dozens of options out there, so if you don’t find what you need, it’s sure to turn up with a bit of research.
—
Monday Lovelace is a queer Black writer and graphic designer out of the Pacific Northwest. They’re out here to live their best life and help others do the same. Contact Lovelace via monday@ynotcam.com.
Header image via Unsplash here.
