Two Free Social Media Tools to Help you Keep Up

Social Media is still a major sore spot for many businesses. Just getting started seems to be the tricky part.

While there are month-long seminars about understanding the power and influence of social media, I would like to introduce two simple tools that make it much easier to get out of the gate. After you find a rhythm you can begin to get strategic. For now, let’s look in the toolbox.

Tools of the trade

Feedly and Buffer are social media tools that I use every day to manage all of my social media accounts and the profiles of my clients. These two apps are my secret weapons for keeping audiences up to date on my work, marketing trends, news, local tidbits and other related content.

There are literally dozens and dozens of applications available that help you manage your social media profiles. These two, however, have stood the test of time and continue to release new features that make sharing just a little bit easier. Let’s begin with Feedly.

Feedly

www.feedly.com
Cost: Free with a $5.41 pro version

Feedly is an application that allows you to organize, share and read what matters to you. Feedly serves as my ongoing newsfeed on topics I choose. I follow marketing blogs, design inspiration, tech trends and local and national news. If the website has a blog, you can add it to your Feedly dashboard.

I find Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms way too cluttered and a bit unpredictable as my news feed. Feedly allows me to create targeted news feeds where I can see headlines and snippets at a glance without distraction. If I’m interested in the article I can click a button to read the entire article on the website where it’s published. If I like it enough to share it, I can do that right from within Feedly.

As a standalone news feed, it’s perfect, but where it really gets good is its sharing feature. Built into Feedly is a robust sharing tool that allows you to share articles and blog posts on all your social media profiles. You can also save it for later or email it to a friend. You can also add it to Buffer, which is where the magic happens.

A quick look at my Feedly dashboard

Buffer

www.buffer.com
Cost: free up to 1 social media profile on each platform.

While Feedly does have some nice sharing tools, Buffer has way more features. One of the most notable is the ability to schedule posts in advance. Each connected social media profile has a unique calendar where I can set the perfect date and time I want updates to go out to my audience. You can even schedule posts to deliver multiple times per day. Each social media profile can have its own unique schedule because what works for Facebook doesn’t always work for Twitter or Instagram.

Every time you add something to Buffer it drops it into the next available timeslot. You could easily create a month’s worth of updates in just a couple hours of surfing your news feed in Feedly.

Another great feature of Buffer is the analytics dashboard. I can view all kinds of data including likes, comments, and shares. This allows me to see which posts were successful and compare them to other previous posts.

Buffer’s sharing popup window.

Using Feedly and Buffer together

The idea behind using Feedly and Buffer together is to simplify and streamline the content you share on all of your social media profiles. My typical strategy is to open the Feedly app in the morning and read through the headlines. If I see an article that I think my audience would enjoy, I add it to Buffer. Rinse and repeat.

I’ve been using these social media tools for well over 5 years now and it has served me well. There are a dozen other ways to share and organize your news feed, but the Feedly/Buffer combo seems to work pretty well for my needs.

Let me know how it goes. They both offer free accounts to get started so now there are no excuses to start growing your brand on social media. If you have any questions contact me directly or leave a comment below. Thanks for reading!