Social media is an integral part of building a successful online business but remember, social media will not fix a broken business. Automation is a hot topic at the moment and for most small business owners, it is one of the best ways to save time, and still get desired results.

One thing you do need to think about when automating your social media posts is that every network needs to be approached differently. While you can post to multiple social media accounts at the same time, it doesn’t mean you have to. What works on Twitter in 140 characters, won’t work on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+ and vice versa. Think about how visual Facebook and Google+ is and how you have the freedom to post longer pieces of content. Also be aware that Twitter will cut off some of your content if it is longer than the given character limit.

The tool I use to do all of my social media automation is Hootsuite. You can track every single conversation that happens within each social network. You can schedule for each network at different times without it being costly when managing your time. Hootsuite does support different types of content and will show you a preview of how it will look on Facebook and Google+.

There is one downside to Hootsuite. It doesn’t allow you to automate posts on Instagram or Pinterest. If you want to automate these two networks, you should consider using Schedugram for Instagram and Viralwoot for Pinterest.

Something which I have spent my time building is a seven day social media marketing strategy. Myself and my clients find this document extremely effective as you can clearly see what message is to be sent at a specific time of day, which hashtags to use and on what social network the post is going out on.

You can download my seven day social media marketing strategy here and it gives you the step-by-step actions to take to help you save time on your “push” marketing to focus on growing your business.

To take it one step further and to understand how important this is, along with all the other templates I have for you to download, purchase my book Think #Digital First; a Modern Day Entrepreneur’s Guide to Growing a Business.