Social Media Automation Series - Part 5: Social Pilot

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I must admit - Social Pilot is one of my favorite scheduling tools.  You can view posts in a monthly calendar in the free version.  You can post 10 things per day in the free plan and schedule up to 30 total posts.  You can connect 3 social profiles including Pinterest!  Unfortunately, you can't curate content, but they do have a fantastic chrome extension so can schedule on the fly.  

With the extension, you can just click to add to your queue and it will post according to the schedule you've established. You can also schedule based on custom timing and repeat posts with whatever frequency you desire.  Even better, you can add an image just with an url!  You don't have to download the picture and then upload it!  I love this feature!

Unfortunately, you don't get analytics with the free plan, but at least in terms of starting off, Twitter analytics and Social Bearing work and are easy to understand.  Social Bearing is free analytics tool and it gives you the option to download tweet info in csv format but ONLY IF you go to https://socialbearing.com/search/user/USERNAME.  I've highlighted the csv download in the picture below

Social Bearing snapshot

It provides hashtags clouds, word clouds, where your tweets come from, all sort of great info.  One thing to note: Social Bearing counts the retweets of the retweets you post.  For example, I RT'd a post on the royal wedding and it was retweeted 80K+ times but they weren't all mine.  This skews your numbers a bit but when you compare with Twitter analytics you can get a more evened out pictures. 

Twitter Analytics stats

Sorry got a bit off on a tangent with Social Bearing and analytics.  The long and short is Social Pilot is a great tool for manually grabbing and scheduling content to your feeds.  The calendar view also enables you to repost previous posts from earlier in the week or month.  They have an app for your phone as well which works well.  One drawback and why Buffer, in one way, is better is Social Pilot doesn't allow true retweets.  It posts them as original tweets even when you click within the Twitter browser interface.  Scheduling retweets is something I consider a very necessary; otherwise, you inundate your followers.  That, however, is the only drawback.  

Next: more on analytic and automation tools!