5 Web Based Services to Save You Time

Bowling center owners, family entertainment centers and other entertainment venue owners who are using social media, often need some help.  Fortunately help is here.

These time-saving tools and services make social media easier and more effective. Taking advantage of these tools can mean the different between having time to make social media marketing work for your business or not.

So here are my five favorite web-based services that are being used by some savvy entertainment venues as well as other small businesses to keep their time commitment in check, while leveraging the power of social media. Some have similar features so it’s best to try them out and see what works best for you before deciding which to use.

• Shortstack (www.shortstack.com) is a service that helps businesses design a better looking Facebook page and customize it with such things as contests, forms, videos and more.  The service is free for pages that have up to 2,000 “likes.” Beyond that, a tiered pricing system kicks in.

• Buffer (www.bufferapp.com) is a great way to schedule your social media activity. The service lets you add posts and tweets to your “buffer” from anywhere and have them automatically distributed throughout the day.  By keeping your buffer topped off with content, you can be assured of having a fresh social media presence for an entire week or more.

• Postling (www.postling.com) was designed with small business users in mind and provides easy-to-use tools, alerts and insights that will help you get the most out of social media marketing. Postling lets you publish to all of the major social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr and Flickr and schedule your posts in advance.  It also pulls comments from all of your social media sites into one place which saves a lot of time and effort for responding.

• TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com), which is owned by Twitter, is a “dashboard” from which you can manage a variety of social media. It allows you to monitor and manage unlimited accounts, schedule tweets to suit your audience and filter content to focus on what matters to you the most.

• HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) is similar to TweetDeck and lets you manage all of your social media accounts on a single dashboard.  This is a good solution if more than one person at your business posts to your social media accounts.

Please review these time saving sites. Its the answer to the "I don't have any time for all this social media stuff" scream!!