Managing social media accounts for you and your clients can be overwhelming. You have a lot of choices in tools to help make your life easier and your day more efficient. But some of these tools can actually be a huge distraction.

You can use efficiency tools to schedule posts, check multiple social networks from one site, setup smart automation of tasks, and create images. Here are our favorite tools in each of these categories.

Scheduling Tools
Scheduling out social media posts will save you a ton of time. Once you create a content calendar, scheduling out the posts for a month or more will take much less time than if you had to login to multiple networks every time you have to post something. For social media scheduling, we recommend tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Both tools are great for scheduling out posts on multiple platforms, and they also offer analytics so you can analyze which posts perform best and spend your time building content that gets better results.

Check multiple social networks from one site
Managing multiple accounts and multiple social networks for a client can create a lot of work. Tools like Buffer and Hootsuite allow you to login to one dashboard and monitor activity on multiple accounts. Think of the time you’ll save in not having to login to all of those sites separately!

Setup smart automation
You probably notice that there are certain tasks that you execute for your clients over and over. Use smart automation to automate tasks and save time. IFTTT (If This Then That) is a site that helps you automate certain processes (called recipes) between apps and devices. For example, you can setup a “recipe” to automatically post a new blog to Facebook.

Create images
There are a lot of talented graphic designers out there, and we love them. But there’s a time and a place for everything and sometimes you need to quickly and efficiently create images without a long process or high costs. Especially with the ever-churning pace of social media, you need tools to help you make great content fast. Canva is a site that allows you to design beautiful images using templates through a user-friendly interface. In fact, most of our blog post images are created in Canva.

Whatever tools you use focus on tools that improve your results or save you time.4