The Best Social Media Tools For Saving Time

One of the major things that prevents restaurants from delivering a solid social media strategy is a lack of time and resources. For restaurant owners who manage their own social media presence it often becomes an afterthought, something that only gets attention if there is time. The truth is, there is rarely time to give it the attention it requires. If outsourcing or assigning to another member of staff isn’t an option, then time-saving tools like these become your best friend.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one the most popular tools, over 10 million professionals use it and they’ve stirred up quite a ‘hoot’ in the social media industry. It doesn’t matter whether you own an independent restaurant or a chain of restaurants. Hootsuite can assist with the day-to-day management of multiple social media profiles, for multiple brands.

Here are some of the things you can do with Hootsuite:

Schedule and post content to different social channels at once

Run social media competitions

Access to a content suggestion feature

Bulk schedule posts (e. g if you have a long list of tweets)

Pull data from RSS feeds on other websites and schedule content directly from there

Analyse the performance of social media campaigns

Manage teams of social media managers for working on collaborative social projects

Hootlet is a chrome extension which allows you to quickly schedule content directly, from any page on the web. This is ideal if you want to share articles or links from your website.

Crowdfire

One of the unique ways you can grow your follower base on platforms like Instagram and Twitter is by following other people first. Crowdfire will show you who isn’t following back, and it will collect the followers of other relevant accounts. This allows you to target people following a profile that is similar to your own. For example, people following an account tweeting about local events in your area. This suggests those people might be interested in your local restaurant.

 

Meet Edgar

Meet edgar sets itself apart from other social media schedulers because it provides a way to recycle previous content, as well as schedule in new posts. Meet Edgar monitors the way in which your fan base engages with previous content, allowing you to add the most popular posts back into a library or queue of updates. To make things even more organised the library can be segmented into categories that best suit the type of content you’re sharing. For recycled content, you can view the queue that Edgar has created for the upcoming two weeks.

The fact is, evergreen content (content that never goes out of date), can be reshared again and again. New followers won’t have seen your older updates and only a small percentage of your existing fan base will have seen it the first time round.

Social Oomph

Social Oomph is another nifty social media management tool that combines a different elements to offer more than one useful feature. It does all the standard expected of a management tool; multiple platform scheduling etc,.

It also includes a keyword research tool which allows you to find relevant people to follow based on the topics they’re talking about. It also lets you follow other people’s followers by replicating this information and pulling it into a list. This is very similar to crowdfire, but of course you have a two-in one platform for growth and content scheduling. Pre-made drafts allow you to post even quicker when a template or previous tweet with suffice.

Although it’s great to automate some areas of social media, your social presence doesn’t actually want to look automated. You still need to reply to customers and interact on a more human level. It’s become so easy to automate our exchanges that some accounts have lost their human element. Try not to forget this when you start to use these tools.

Cyfe

Cyfe is a digital reporting tool. It can be used to see exactly what is going on across all social platforms. For example, it can tell you how many people your Facebook content has reached and it can split this between paid and organic content. It can tell you how many people clicked links, videos or photos within a period of time, as well as which content was the most popular.

Not only is Cyfe great for social media, it can also pull data from many other different areas of marketing, from SEO tools for example. If you use Google Analytics on your website to track visitors, you can also include this data in your Cyfe reports. This would be useful for seeing how many people have visited your restaurant’s website from social media.

bit.ly

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer shorten links to save characters, which is especially helpful when it comes to tweeting! A short tidy link looks neater and it’s easier for fans and followers to distinguish between the text and the link. If you’re not using a scheduling tool, you won’t have access to a link shortener. This is where bit.ly comes in. bit.ly is a URL shortener which tracks the clicks made on each link and reports this information for you.