Managing social media expensive. If you’re not paying in cash, you’re paying in time.
The first step to recapturing your time is to start using some of the many free social media management apps out there. Eventually, though, the opportunity cost outweighs the price of the premium apps.
This list is for organizations that are ready to improve their social media efficiency in exchange for a bit of cash.
Social Media Management: Buffer
Upgrade from: Buffer Free, Hootsuite Free
Price: $10-400/month
One of the reasons we love Buffer is its clean, simple interface and convenient auto scheduling. It makes queuing up posts quick and straightforward.
Why pay? The free version limits you to 10 scheduled posts. A growing organization with active social media channels would need to top off the queue a few times each week.
Paid tiers allow 100-2000 queued posts – making scheduling much more efficient.
All paid tiers also allow:
- Additional social media accounts (up to 150 at the highest tier)
- The ability to add RSS feeds which enables direct sharing of content from your audience’s favorite websites
- A calendar view for your scheduled posts.
Social Media Promotion: BuzzFrenzy
About BuzzFrenzy • BuzzFrenzy Pricing
Upgrade from: Manually boosting Facebook posts and managing Audiences
Price: $50-500/month
BuzzFrenzy is a unique platform that makes the paid promotion of Facebook posts a breeze.
Why pay? BuzzFrenzy automates the targeting and boosting of posts with hashtags.
When you set up your Buzztag, you set your Buzztag (a specific hashtag used to trigger boosting), industry, and location you’d like to target.
BuzzFrenzy then watches your Facebook feed for the specified Buzztag. Tagged posts are boosted to the relevant audience. Automagically.
Social Media Automation: Zapier
Upgrade from: IFTTT, Zapier Free
Price: $20-250+/month
Zapier is an automation platform that lets a myriad of apps work together via Zaps. Zaps are made up of a trigger, and one or more resulting actions.
You set up Zaps, and invisible robots do all the work from that point forward.
When it comes to social media Zapier can do things like:
- Post your blog posts to each of your social media accounts (or add them to your Buffer queue)
- Auto post new Instagram photos to Facebook or Twitter (as a native photo)
- Share posts with specific hashtags to different platforms
- A lot more non-social media stuff.
Why pay? Paid plans allow you to make more Zaps (sets of automated tasks), run them more frequently, and create multi-step Zaps.
The lowest tier increases the Zap limit from 5 to 20, and with the ability to create multi-step Zaps you can get a lot of work out of each one.
I’m sure you can already envision the potential synergies between these three apps.
What are your favorite social media apps, paid or otherwise?