How do you manage multiple social media accounts? Our 12 best time-saving tools and strategies

Perhaps your routine sounds pretty much like this: Log in to all your networks to compose and post content, checks the feeds, follow up on follower requests and conversations and essentially perform other social media management duties on your plate.We'd love to share a few adjustments that you can make to ease your load when juggling your personal and company profiles.

The six top social media management tools

1. Buffer – the social media dashboard

The biggest time-saver is using a management dashboard where you can run all the social platforms from a central place. Buffer aims to maintain a modest, clean and instinctive tool inspired by Sprout social and Hootsuite to lend a hand.Benefits:

You can execute several actions from the same spot – scheduling, sharing and analyzing.
You log in only once to run everything

Supporting networks: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google +Tools akin to Buffer:Everypost, Hubspot, Hootsuite and Sprout Social

2. SumAll – for social media reports

Upon connecting all your social media accounts to SumAll, the software starts pulling insights and data from all your platforms and dropping figures into a dashboard of analytics. You can analyze these numbers by requesting for daily or weekly emails or visiting the app for all the information.Benefits:

Single out the figures that matter
Reports come directly to you – no extra hunting or clicking

Supporting networks:Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Google +Tools similar to SumAll:Sociallight, Social Express

3. Feedient – Unified social media streams

Feedient assembles your social media feeds and publishes them from inside the app. Feedient makes use of columns to display specific channel content, akin to how Tweetdeck arranges lists and feeds for Twitter management.Feedient allows you to organize and rearrange as you wish while also allowing for engagement with updates and shares from within the app.Benefits:

Promptly engage with your favorite updates
Browse various social streams from a single location

Supporting networks:

RSS, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

4. SocialHunt – a summary of your favorite user's activity

One way of saving time when running multiple social media accounts entails cutting down on the frequency you visit each one network individually. Pulling updates specifically from your favorite accounts on social media right into your inbox is one such way. Social Hunt links with Twitter to gather updates only from people you select – with digests sent instantly, every three hours or even daily.Benefits:

Follow a group of selected profiles (brands, people, etc.)
Never miss out on an update from a favorite user

Supporting networks:TwitterTools similar to Social Hunt: Nuzzel, Brook

5. SocialCount – for tracking content shares

SocialCount provides a quick and easy way to track your content's share count. Plug your primary URL into the app and obtain the results. SocialCount reveals the top shares for every unique article posted on your website, summing data from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.Benefits:

Displays the articles that perform well across several channels without the need to regularly track multiple social platforms
Entering one URL fetches all results

Supporting networks:LinkedIn, Twitter, FacebookTools similar to SocialCount:BuzzSumo, Quick Sprout, Shared Count

6. BuzzSumo Alerts – gives notifications when your content goes viral

You'll have a great time working with BuzzSumo in conducting keyword or phrase and idea research for your blog posts. BuzzSumo's alert tools bear great applications for running several social media channels as well. Rather than visiting individual networks to identify mentions, you can request BuzzSumo to send you email alerts anytime your business name appears in overly-shared blog posts.Benefits:

Assess the value of your content on social media without the need to login to social media
Effortlessly stay in the loop of your content's virality

Supporting networks:Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedInTools similar to BuzzSumo Alerts:Social Mention, Topsy, Mention

Best time-saving strategies

1. Add your social media channels to a dashboard

The most significant development in running many social media platforms is the capability of accessing all accounts from a single location. Visualize it like food shopping: You will save time by picking up juice, bread and ice cream at one store than shopping at three different places.Dashboards such as Buffer - mentioned earlier – are perfect for this role.

2. Slate posts beforehand

Scheduling your content is beneficial in two ways:

Helps you save time by enabling you to post all updates simultaneously and share content at several, best times in a day.
It allows you to maintain a regular publishing timetable.

The tools mentioned earlier (Sprout Social, Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.) allow for slating. Buffer's queue system enables users to set up a sequence of best times ahead of time and publish queued content at specified times.

3. Views interactions on your posts

Engagement stats like replies, reshares or retweets are excellent indicators that people are intrigued to connect with you. Replying to users is an excellent social media strategy eased by your ability to access all interaction from a single place.You can click on analytics for replies/comments and retweets/reshares on Buffer to see the list of all interactions.

4. Divide your audience to enable you to follow easier

Let's assume you follow 1,500 people on Twitter, 50 people on Instagram and 400 people on Facebook. That's a lot of content to keep abreast with every day.One way to ease the load in such a case is placing the channels you regard as crucial in individual silos.

On Facebook, add pages and people to interest lists
On Twitter, track a topic using an already saved keyword search or create a Twitter list of your followers

5. Measure your stats against a benchmark

A conventional method of revealing stats on multiple social media accounts is displaying them as week-over-week gains, and this is great in many ways. Still, sometimes such analysis can be confusing. What if you have an exciting week with a few happenings and unique events? It might skew your assessment in the next weeks.Formulating a reference point is a more straightforward way to gauge performance post-over-post and week-over-week.The post-over-post analysis is notably helpful. For example, you can classify well-liked tweets as those that garner at least 200 clicks. Therefore, when it comes to checking the stats, it’s easy to see the posts that met the criteria at-a-glance.

6. Automate as many chores as you wish

Tools such as IFTTT and Zapier allow for the synching of several applications so when an activity takes place, it kicks off another action in a different app.