PP 009: 4 Social Media Apps to Save Time, Money, and Sanity

Regardless of what situation you’re in as an entrepreneur, it’s important to find apps which allow you to conserve your energy, so that you can be putting your best effort towards the activities that really matter. In today’s episode, I share my 4 social media apps to save time, money and sanity!

Systems and support can make or break our businesses. In today’s episode, I share 4 social media apps I use on a regular basis which save me time, money and sanity. https://thekimsutton.com/pp009/ #positiveproductivity #podcastClick To Tweet

Resources Mentioned

To grow Twitter: Crowdfire – crowdfireapp.com
For scheduling posts on Twitter and Facebook: Edgar – meetedgar.com
To grow your Pinterest awareness: BoardBooster – boardbooster.com **
Instagram awesomeness: Later – later.com

** Please note: BoardBooster has closed since this episode was published. I now use Tailwind which is amazing for both Pinterest AND Instagram!

My 4 Social Media Apps to Save Time, Money and Sanity

Hey there, and welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. This is your host, Kim Sutton, and today I want to discuss my 4 social media apps to save time, money and sanity.

Regardless of what type of small business owner you are – if you’re a solopreneur, or if you have a team, if you’re a mompreneur with five kids like I am – it’s always important to find apps which help you conserve your energy so that you can be putting your best effort towards the activities that really matter. 

And in my case, I found that these four apps help me tremendously in staying focus on client activities while my business continues to market itself in the backend.

Social Media Apps to Save Time: Crowdfire, for those who need a follow back on Facebook

The first app I’m going to talk about is Crowdfire and you can find those at crowdfireapp.com.

For those of you who use Facebook Ads, you may know that when you’re setting up your ad and setting up who you’re going to target, you can choose to target people who are following other industry influencers, or your competition, or your peers. You can only do this if they have pages or if they’re really recognizable on Facebook. The great thing about Crowdfire is that you can be using the same type of targeting strategy to grow your Twitter network as well.

What I mean by this is, I can say that I want to follow the followers of my competition, my peers, and any of the media outlets that my prospective clients may be following, and after I do follow them, then hopefully they will follow me back.

I’ve been using Crowdfire for over a year and a half now, and in any given week, 25 to 50 % of the people I follow on a daily basis do follow me back. Now to put this into some type of perspective for you, I am following a thousand people a day using Crowdfire – and I’ll get into that in just a moment so you’re not thinking, “Oh my gosh!” – But anyway, I’m following about 1000 people a day.

So, that means between two and five hundred people are following me back each day.

And that’s huge! 

Crowdfire makes this really simple because all you need to do is go in, have the user name of the person who you want to target their followers, you put it in the appropriate field and then it gives you this little button where you can just go click, click, click, right down the list and follow any people that you choose to.

Now I’m not so selective in my methods, and a lot of the time my team is actually doing this for me, but the whole process every day takes maybe five to 10 minutes. 

Crowdfire does come in a free option. However you can only follow 25 people a day – I believe they may have updated this recently – but you can only follow 25 people a day, which given the same ratio, would mean that you would only maybe get 6 to 12 people following you back.

So if you want to see higher numbers you’re going to want to go with at least their Pluto plan, which at the present time of this recording, costs $9.99 a month and it allows you to use the strategy on up to two accounts. I personally use the Neptune account, because not only am I using it for my Twitter accounts, I’m also using it for the accounts of my clients.

Again, you can find Crowdfire at Crowdfireapp.com

Social Media Apps to Save Time: MeetEdgar, to easily publish content on Facebook and Twitter

The next social media app that I really love, and I use it in conjunction a lot with Crowdfire, is Edgar, which you can find that MeetEdgar.com. Edgar is a product developed by Laura Roeder and her team. You may previously know her from LKR Social Media.

And the reason why I love Edgar so much is because it allows me to fill my library with content to be posted to my Twitter and my Facebook accounts, and then I set a schedule for which I would like it to be published on Facebook or on Twitter.

For example for every blog article that I write, I compose at least three to five, sometimes even up to 10, tweets that I would like to be occasionally tweeted out for that article. I then load them into my content library on Edgar, and I have a category set up just for blog posts. I have a schedule set up within Edgar, which designates the times that I would like those blog post tweets sent out at on a daily basis, And Edgar does just that.

When a time comes up that it is supposed to tweet out one of my blog article tweets, it pulls the top tweet from the content library, tweets it, and then it puts that tweet back at the bottom of the queue. Now if I publish a new blog article in the meantime, those new tweets will be put at the top of the queue, but Edgar does have a shuffle function which allows any new tweets to be shuffled in with all the rest of the content that’s already there.

And all this can work the same way with Facebook for both pages and groups. I do want to mention, however, that this is only for groups that you personally own. You can not set up posts to be posted to Facebook groups which you do not personally own, or have admin rights to.

Edgar starts at $49.99 a month for 10 accounts. It is less expensive if you sign up for an annual plan, but again it’s $49.99 a month for 10 accounts, and you can find out more information at MeetEdgar.com.

Social Media Apps to Save Time: BoardBooster, for repining and looping content on Pinterest

The next tool that I really love and use often – actually I don’t even have to use it because it’s taking care of itself in the background – is BoardBooster, which you can find out BoardBooster.com.

BoardBooster is a great Pinterest tool which has a variety of functions, but the one that I really love the most is the looping tool. What looping does, is that after I designate which boards I would like to be looped, it goes into those boards and repins on a daily basis a certain number of pins back into that board.

It gives those pins a couple days to work their magic, and then it will look at the original pin and the repin to see which one converted better. It then deletes the pin that did not perform so well, so even the older pin may not have converted as well, and it gets rid of that pin.

BoardBooster has a lot of other great functions, but I do recommend checking out the looping feature, as I just mentioned, and you can do that again at BoardBooster.com. Plans starts for as little as $5 a month, and that gets you 500 of these looping repins as I just mentioned.

Social Media Apps to Save Time: Later, upload content to IG semi-automatically

And for those of you who especially love Instagram, I think you’ll really love this last social media app. It’s called Later and you can find it at Later.com, and what it allows you to do is schedule your Instagram posts directly from your Mac or your PC. So rather than having to design your image, upload it to Dropbox, download it to your smartphone, and then push it through Instagram, all you have to do is design it, schedule it into Later, and then Later will push through a notification on your phone.

So yes, you still do need to push the post through your smartphone. But the great thing is that you can even put the caption for your image into Later, and it will automatically copy that caption, and you can paste it as part of the posting process on your phone.

That is one of my biggest headaches when I’m trying to post an Instagram post from my phone. For example, in a picture that I snap on the fly – maybe have me working or of my kids – sitting there and typing out using my iPhone, the caption… That can be so time consuming, especially when you don’t notice that there’s a typo and that auto-correct does something funky. Oh, that drives me crazy.

Anyway, Later lets you take care of the captions directly within their app, and it copies it as part of the process, and you can just push that through, saving so much time. Of course, if you are speedy typing on your phone then you may not care about this as much as I do, but I so much prefer typing on my keyboard than on my phone.

Later does come in a free version, but that does limit you to 30 Instagram posts per month. And you can find Later, again, at Later.com.

If you found any of these four tools helpful, I would love to hear your comments. And I would, even more, love to hear your comments if you have any other apps that you especially love.

All the apps I just mentioned will be in the show notes which you can find at theKimSutton.com/PP009. That’s for Positive Productivity 009. Or you can simply go to theKimSutton.com/podcast and find the link for my four social media apps to save time money and sanity.

I would love to hear what you think about these four apps, and I’d also love to hear if you have any other apps that you love to use on a daily basis. And again you can leave that feedback and give me your comments at theKimSutton.com/podcast.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, and I thank you for joining me for another episode of Positive Productivity.