Automation is something that businesses are embracing more and more, whether they are multinational corporations or sole traders. The huge benefit of automation is that it saves time, leaving you free to spend that time on doing things that will push your business even further.

These four social media automation tools will do just that, allowing you to spend less time on your Tweets and more on running your business.

Buffer

This is a fantastic tool for writing a social media post once and then getting it out to all of your networks at once. You can connect Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook – and with a premium account, you can connect more than one page for each. This is ideal for larger businesses, or for sole traders who might want to share things on a personal page as well as a business page.

You can also queue up posts in advance, letting them go out on a pre-determined schedule of your own choosing. Buffer’s tools will help you to decide what that schedule should be based on your previous posts’ performance.

As if all of that wasn’t enough, they also allow you to analyse the statistics for any of your posts made through the system, whether queued or posted immediately. You can then easily re-add them to your queue, making tweaks if you feel it is needed. All in all, it’s a robust posting tool that does everything you need.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the other posting option that you might choose instead of Buffer. The two have risen to a point of dominance in the industry, but both remain popular.

Hootsuite’s tools are very similar to that of Buffer. One key difference is the search function that it includes: you can search for influencers in your niche, as well as looking at your brand replies and mentions. This means you can do a bit more social listening right through the app.

This is another great tool for cutting down on the time that you spend posting, so it’s really useful if you want to be very present on social media without having to spend hours on it daily.

Crowdfire

If you have used Crowdfire in the past, you might know it as a tool that you can use to monitor and manage your followers on Twitter and Instagram. However, it has gone through an update to add more functions which means it now adds a lot more benefits to your arsenal.

You can find inactive Twitter users and unfollow them, which helps to tidy your counts up a bit. You can also look into who followers another user by utilising their ‘copy followers’ feature, and there are curated posts available that you can share easily with your audience.

Crowdfire also now allows for cross-platform posting, as well as figuring out what would be the ideal time to share that content with your followers across either of the networks.

Social Alert

Social listening can be very time-consuming. As well as tracking mentions and uses of hashtags relating to your brand, you will also want to spend time looking for uses of your brand name and perhaps even complaints about your competitors that you can answer.

Social alert allows you to track keywords and hashtags in real time, so you can see whenever these certain words and phrases are used. That means you don’t have to search for them, but can find them in an instant. You can use this tool to collect user-generated content to share, monitor your brand performance, find influencers in your niche, and so on.

You can filter results by time, location, and even the sentiments being expressed alongside them. You can also export your reports into a CSV file, allowing you to analyse them at a later date or offline.

There are a lot of automation tools out there, but generally speaking, these are some of the best. Social media is all about being genuine, but that doesn’t mean you can’t plan it ahead of time. Reacting to conversations and staying on schedule is easy when you can automate every part of the process.