Wouldn’t it be great if instead of spending an hour each day on social media marketing for your Kickstarter or Indiegogo campaign, you could automate the entire process? In this article, I’ll share a few free and paid tools that you can use to simplify tweeting, following/unfollowing, and direct messaging. You can also learn more about twitter marketing with The Tao of Twitter: Changing Your Life and Business 140 Characters at a Time
HootSuite
If you haven’t heard of HootSuite, it’s a tool that you can use to schedule tweets and facebook posts ahead of time on your phone or on your computer. With the free version, you can manage up to 5 social profiles with one login, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, FourSquare, WordPress, and more. This version also includes basic analytics so that you can see how many people click your Twitter links over time. Finally, you can configure your Hootsuite account to auto-update your social profiles from a blog/rss news feed (2 feeds with free account).
With Hootsuite Pro, you can manage up to 50 social profiles, have two logins for the same account (team members), and do bulk scheduling. You can also auto-update from an unlimited number of blog/rss feeds, have access to more advanced analytics reports, and use 24/5 help support or 24/7 self-directed training.
Example use case: You can schedule a week’s worth of tweets ahead of time (or posts on other social profiles) and make it so that whenever you create a blog post, it is automatically tweeted out. In addition, after that week, you can go back and see how many people clicked your links at various times of the day to help improve your marketing efforts next week. This way, you can spend the week doing the things that matter, rather than constantly logging on to your social accounts.
Buffer
Buffer is a Hootsuite competitor and lets you manage your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn social profiles. Buffer also has an app so that you can view your account on the go and post on several social networks instantaneously, but it does not allow you to modify your post schedule from your phone.
Both Hootsuite and Buffer have a chrome app so that you can easily publish updates and track activity. One of the things I like about Buffer is you can set it easily to post on Twitter at a certain time every day, rather than scheduling the timing of each tweet individually like on Hootsuite. One thing I don’t like is that you can’t have multiple twitter profiles on the same account without upgrading from the free version, whereas you can on Hootsuite.
As far as I am aware, the only pricing plan they have is $19.99 per month, which covers 12 social profiles and 2 team members. This is in comparison to $8.99 pro plan for Hootsuite at the time of writing.
TweetDeck
Tweetdeck is a simple tool for scheduling posts on your Twitter profiles. If you have a Twitter profile for your business, blog, and a personal Twitter account, you can use Tweetdeck to schedule posts on all of them. You can manage unlimited accounts for free and view mentions, direct messages, and your feed.
Tweepi
Tweepi is a tool you can use to quickly follow users, remove inactive users you are following from your account, and easily follow back people who follow you. I really like their feature which allows you to identify potential leads via generating a list of followers for a particular account that you can follow, or a list of friends of a particular twitter user that you can follow.
TwitterAutoFollowBack
You can use this website to automate direct messages to new followers, see who has unfollowed you, see who is not following you back, and more. Personally, I hate automatic direct messaging (whether to me or as a message when I follow someone), but you could try it out as a way to promote your campaign. Just be sure to analyze the results and make sure it’s giving you the intended outcome.
TweetAdder
TweetAdder is the ultimate tool to automate your Twitter marketing. Some of the features I really like are being able to locate users who match a certain search criteria (example: people who are interested in crowdfunding). These search citera can include: advanced search options, profile data, twitter lists, location, followers of users, and more.
You can also automate direct messages, schedule tweets from RSS feeds (like your blog), and automate re-tweets, and automate following or unfollowing. The software they provide is pretty much an all-in-one approach, though it comes at a steep price. Still, it’s a great investment to make for longterm value.
Ultimately, the price ranges from $55-188 depending on how many Twitter profiles you’d like to manage.
