Posting to many different social media platforms is such a chore, isn’t it? They all require a slightly different format for your post, so you end up rewriting your post excerpt and rejigging your content to fit the requirements of the platform. This can become a full-time job on its own.
Then there’s the way that each social media platform requires a slightly different header image for your page. LinkedIn has one set of dimensions, Facebook has another, and Threads and BlueSky have different requirements too.
Thankfully, there are tools to automate all this and make it easier, but they can be expensive. Sometimes it is hard to evaluate which of the tools you actually need, and how to keep track of them all.
Key considerations
What are the use cases where you need an automation tool? What level of technical knowhow do you have? Think about what features you want before you go shopping. Do you want…
- Your automatic social media posting tool integrated with your CRM (customer relationship management)?
- A tool that connects your blog to your social media accounts?
- To be able to schedule social media posts in advance?
- To automatically push newly published blogposts to your socials?
- An analytics tool that will tell you how many people opened your posts?
- An AI caption generator?
- An AI Copilot which can generate an entire social strategy for you?
- The option to bulk upload content?
- The ability to recycle popular posts?
- To automatically share from RSS feeds?
- A social inbox to notify you of comments and messages?
Different automation tools will have some features but not others, so it’s important to decide what you want and then shop around.
Some automation platforms will only offer some features on their more expensive plans, so check that the features you want are available within the plan that you can afford.
Always do a search for lists of tools by independent bloggers. The makers of automation platforms write these lists, but they usually rate their tool as the best (quite understandably), so review lists by impartial authors.
Leave a Reply