If you use social media sites as part of your marketing, no doubt you know how effective creating relationships with customers via sites like Facebook, Twitter, and even Pinterest, can be for your business. However, utilizing social media can be quite time consuming especially for small businesses and start-ups! You may find that in order to fully utilize social media you are spending too much time online and not enough time at work. Luckily, there are several powerful tools that help increase your productivity and streamline your social media presence.

Hootsuit.com is a great social media dashboard that allows you to connect multiple social media networks to one streamlined page. Rather than being a social network, HootSuite allows you to easily manage your online presence from several other social networks all from one page. You can launch marketing campaigns, identify and grow an audience, and distribute targeted messages across multiple social media channels.

Even better, you can collaboratively schedule updates to Twitter, Facebook, and other sites with your team. And you can do this via web, desktop, or mobile platforms. Since Hootsuite.com recently allowed for integration with Google+ pages as well, you can use this quickly growing site to track campaign results and industry trends, keep a sharp and effective web presence, and have fun while doing it!

Bufferapp.com is another great tool to help you create a relevant and interesting social media presence. The site allows you to “buffer” your postings; you can queue articles, pictures, videos, and posts to your Buffer, and the site automatically shares them on your social media profiles throughout the day.

The real draw is the fact that you can post to multiple accounts, so you can use bufferapp.com for your personal and business lives, posting to separate Facebook and twitter accounts without having to log in and out of them! With new mobile apps and Google Chrome web browser extension, Buffer gives you a free and efficient way to get detailed analytics, post rich and relevant content, and create powerful marketing campaigns.

Another site that provides great Social Media insights is Crowdbooster.com which also allows you to integrate Facebook and Twitter, and provides compelling analytical data and dashboards of your social media metrics. Crowdbooster looks at major metrics and helps you report on your audience, reach, and engagement through a streamlined dashboard of social media interactions. Being able to look at follower and fan growth is a great tool as you launch and perfect an online social marketing campaign.

Followerwonk.com, a site recently acquired by SEOmoz, is another popular and powerful tool to use as you explore social media and use it to grow your online presence. FollowerWonk advertises that they:

• allow users to dig deeper into Twitter analytics and understand their location and their social media usage trends;
• find and connect with influencers in your niche market;
• provide you with high quality visual reports to understand your social media metrics;

SEOmoz’s popularity as a leading SEO software and easy to use tools make FollowerWonk a perfect addition to your portfolio of Social Media tools.

Dlvr.it is another social content optimization platform that allows users to target their online content and connect multiple accounts. dlvr.it works by pulling content from existing feeds, and formatting and delivering it to social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. It also allows users to:

• Perfect your posts through automatically finding and replacing/removing text to fine-tune the wording of posts to make sure they are professional and reflective of your brand.
• Add hash tags automatically by scanning your posts for relevant trending information.
• Automatically tweeting your content throughout the day.

With so many free sites it is no surprise that integrated social media dashboards and streamlined content delivery are a powerful way to increase your social media presence, and make sure you are delivering relevant and interesting content to your consumers. Whether you have a one-person home business or a major corporation, increasing your social media presence is simple, easy and fun with the many free tools available!

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•  License: Creative Commons image source

Shannon Ryan is a freelance writer and Social Media enthusiast. She is the online community manager for the NuSite Group, a specialty trades contracting group specializing in mold removal and environmental contracting.