10 Social Media Automation Tools for Busy Moms

One of the biggest concerns moms have about starting a work from home business is that there simply isn’t enough time. 

Whether it’s because you’re a stay at home mom, or you have a 9 to 5 job, the thought of adding something as big as business ownership to your schedule naturally feels pretty overwhelming.

The other top concern is money. There’s that whole, “you have to have money to make money,” and even someone with no experience knows advertising is expensive.

Thinking you don’t have the time or money to start a business are valid considerations, but neither barrier should keep you from launching into your dream.

Truth is, with proper mentorship (like we provide here at Kids Party Characters), neither time nor money needs to be a barrier to building a successful work at home business.

One of the cheapest ways to advertise your business is through social media. 

Social media is not only free, it allows you to do the best kind of advertising there is -- develop relationships with people while educating them about your business so they’ll form the know, like, and trust bond that leads to sales.

The “price” of free social media advertising is your time, of course. And the thought of posting daily across several social media networks, in addition to the other responsibilities you have in your business, can make this option seem pretty unappealing.

That’s where social media automation tools come in to save the day.

There are literally hundreds of options out there for tools that find content for you to post, track what’s popular, and allow you to schedule what you post hours, days, or even weeks in advance.

To save you the time of sifting through which tools are good and not so good, we’ve gathered a list of 10 tools that are free or low cost, and will significantly decrease the time you spend on social media marketing, without sacrificing the results.

1. Buffer

Buffer is one of the “must have” tools that’s easy to use and comes with a free plan that will do everything you need. 

You simply add your content to your Buffer queue and it will publish the content for you at the ideal times for having the greatest impact (or whatever times you choose).

You can publish content to three accounts with the free plan, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For $15 a month you can also post to Pinterest, and can post content on up to eight social media accounts.

Buffer also suggests relevant content to add to your queue, and has an image creator called Pablo you can use to easily create images to go along with your content.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another tool for automatically publishing your content. There is also a free plan here that will likely meet your needs, as it allows you to post to three social media networks.

It has a few more robust features than Buffer that will prove to be really time-saving as you join more social media conversations.

Most notably, you can set up streams within your Hootsuite dashboard that track every time your username is mentioned on your chosen platform, meaning you won’t miss mentions and will be able to respond quickly to them. 

You can also track certain users, keywords, or hashtags, which saves the time of combing through your social media feeds looking for what’s most relevant for you.

Hootsuite is integrated with all the major social media networks, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn.

3. SocialOomph

If you’re a Twitter user, SocialOomph is the way to easily automate your tweets and get the most out of your Twitter account in the least amount of time.

With a free account you can schedule tweets, track keywords, view your mentions and retweets in one spot, and create templates for text or URLs you frequently use.

If you find that you love SocialOomph, you can use it to manage all of your social media networks by upgrading for $18 every two weeks. It’s not something you need now, as other tools serve your current needs for free, but you’ll learn that when you find a tool that you really like, it’s worth paying for.

4. Social Pilot

When it comes to paid plans, Social Pilot is the most robust alternative for the lowest price. There’s no free plan, but there is a 14-day free trial, and the individual account is just $10 a month. 

You can connect up to 10 social media accounts and publish up to 50 posts a day, so you’ll never feel limited on your content like you might with some of the free tools.

Some other features worth paying for is the ability to have five RSS feeds that you can automatically or manually post content from, a content curation tool that works well, the ability to schedule video posts, and nice-looking url shorteners. 

If the free accounts from other tools aren’t allowing you to schedule as much as you want, this is the alternative to try first.

5. Post Planner

If you are someone who likes to curate content on social media, which means post quality content from other people, at $36 a year, Post Planner is really a must-have.

There’s no free trial, but you can get a feel for Post Planner by using their free app.

Basically, Post Planner helps you find the best content to share, and the best time to share it so you can get as many eyes on it as possible. 

It also allows you to recycle the most popular content, and to view your analytics so you know what people want to see more of and what they’re less interested in.

You can of course also schedule your own content in to be posted through Post Planner.

Right now, you can only schedule content to Twitter and Facebook, but LinkedIn and Instagram integration is in the works.

6. Crowdfire

Crowdfire allows you to automate the sharing of your content, but what it does well that most other tools don’t is help you track your followers. 

You can follow your competitors’ followers, unfollow inactive users, see who isn’t following you back and who’s recently unfollowed you, and follow people who are posting about keywords you’ve deemed relevant.

It has the other common features such as helping you curate content, allowing you to connect RSS feeds, and showing you the analytics for each post, and even has a nice feature that helps you curate images for Pinterest and Instagram.

There is a free plan, but it only allows you to connect one social network, so it’s not a realistic option past just testing the platform to see if you like it. The free plan does give you limited ability to use the follower management tools, so it’s worth testing to see if you find that service helpful.

The paid plan is $10 a month, and still only allows you to connect two social media networks, which may be enough for now. And, once you start getting a larger following, having this tool just to manage your followers is worth the price.

7. IFTTT

IFTTT stands for "If This, Then That," which basically describes what the tool allows you to do. If you take action A, action B automatically happens.

This is not a social media sharing and management tool like the others, but rather a tool that has “applets” that allow you to automate specific tasks. 

This tool goes far beyond social media sharing, but for our purposes today, there are 15 social media applets.

For example, you can set up an applet that automatically shares your Instagram photos to Pinterest, or posts tweets with a specified hashtag to Facebook, or tweets your Instagram photos as native photos on Twitter.

It’s a free service and a lot of fun to play with. The best thing you can do is head over there and check it out, you’ll get suggestions from IFTTT on how the tool can be most useful for you. This is one of those tools you’ll find more use for as time goes on.

8. Socialert

If you are a big Instagram or Twitter user, Socialert is a time saving tool and will give you data you couldn’t get just trying to track things on your own.

You won’t need this starting out, but it’s worth mentioning so you can go take a look at their free trial and see what the service can do for you once you’re fully engaged in social media marketing for your business.

Socialert allows you to track hashtags, keywords, and social accounts to identify the most active and influential accounts in your market, get data on what’s working well, and see how your posts are performing.

The tool features real-time tracking, which means when your hashtag or keyword is mentioned, you can instantly jump in and become part of the conversation. 

For $10 a month you can track two hashtags and two social accounts, which is pretty cheap considering all the free advertising you’ll get from being at the heart of the most relevant conversations in your market.

9. Scoop.It

For content curation, Scoop.it is a free tool that’s powerful and easy to use. It’s one that you should set up from the beginning because there’s no learning curve to it and it will always keep you full of quality relevant content. 

Just in case you’re wondering why you’d want to curate content, let’s talk about that for a minute. Coming up with content to post on social media every day is very time-consuming. It can be a full time job on it’s own. 

While your audience will want to see your original posts, they also just want to be kept up to date and educated as to what’s going on in your market. Rather than having to read 20 different blogs every day, they’ll love you if you can be the one person that brings them all the best information, and they won’t be mad at all that you didn’t write most of it.

Back to Scoop.it . . . it’s enough to have a free account there, grab the relevant content from the specific topic page you’ve set up, and dump it into whatever tool you’re using to automate distribution of your content.

10. Pocket

Pocket is a life-saver for busy moms. Think of it as taking anything you find online that you want to read, look at, save, or try out, and putting it in your pocket for after the kids are in bed, as you’re waiting in the pickup line, or between soccer games.

The beauty of Pocket over your actual pocket is you can organize things into lists and apply tags so you don’t have to scroll through a hundred items trying to find what you’re looking for.

Pocket is a good content curation tool too, as it has a simple search feature that allows you to search through the over two billion posts that have been saved there so far. 

The free version is all you need, and like Scoop,it, this is a good place to find content to put into Buffer, Hootsuite, or whatever tool you choose to automate your social media postings.

The Best Way to Use Social Media Automation Tools

Don’t think you need to use all these tools, you don’t. Spend a few hours playing with them and figure out which ones seem easiest and most helpful to you. Two, maybe three, will do the job.

Test them out and stay with the ones that make your life easier.

None of these tools are hard to understand or use, and can instantly start discovering relevant content for your audience and automating it, along with your own posts.

One important reminder, however.

Just because you’re automating the distribution of your content doesn’t mean you can schedule things and walk away. You need to plan a few minutes twice a day when you can go in and engage with people who have commented on your posts, and to do your own liking and commenting on other users who you’ve identified as relevant through the use of these tools.

There is no substitute for, or automating of, the engagement part of things. And no tool or strategy will work if you don’t engage.

When you’re first starting with social media marketing in your business, it can seem a little overwhelming. You may not even be sure what some of the features we’ve mentioned today are, or exactly how they’ll help you make more money in your business.

That’s okay, you’ll learn by doing. And if you want to cut down the learning curve and take advantage of a mentor who knows how to use social media to grow her business, take a look at the opportunity Kids Party Characters owner Cheryl Jacobs has put together specifically to help busy moms who want the rewards of owning a business.

Cheryl’s offering memberships to Kids Party Characters that give you an exclusive territory in which to book parties, the right to use our 200 plus costumes, and access to our acting coach and casting director.

In addition, you get step-by-step training from Cheryl on how to set your business up for success.

Schedule a free, no-pressure chat with Cheryl right here and she’ll answer all your questions and give you her insights that come with having a hand in starting 10 different businesses.

Want to learn more about Kids Party Characters? Connect with us on Facebook for daily updates on the magic we bring to children’s parties, as well as our best strategies for building a successful business while raising a happy family.