Best Tools For Social Media

Want to grow your audience on social media without spending hours a day glued to your phone? Nik Rawlinson reveals some social secrets.

- Nik Rawlinson

Social media just keeps getting busier and noisier. So if you want your personal profile to attract attention – or if you want your business account to perform as well as it possibly can – you need to make sure you’re posting regular content that’s worth interacting with.

That may sound like a lot to ask, but there’s a wealth of tools out there that can help with both sides of the equation. Here’s how you can spend less time posting and still attract a loyal, growing audience.

Cross-posting

Cross-posting – posting the same content to several platforms – is an obvious way to multiply your social media reach. But if you do it carelessly or to excess, it can backfire. If your followers connect with you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more, they’ll get fed up of seeing the same messages over and over again. And while cross-posting itself is easy, it becomes harder to stay on top of responses, as you’ll have to keep an eye on multiple platforms.

Still, cross-posting is a good tool to have in your toolbox, and it isn’t hard if you automate the process. Instagram is a good place to start, as it has built-in support for cross-posting your content to Twitter and Facebook. Since it’s owned by Facebook, integration with that platform is neatly implemented: your pictures will show up in friends’ timelines as if you’d posted them there directly. 

If you cross-post to Twitter, however, you’ll just get a link to the original Instagram entry, rather than a nice image. To post your picture directly, skip Instagram’s built-in cross-posting tool and head over to IFTTT instead (