style=”color: #808080;”>It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Josh Ludin – Enjoy!

A friend of mine, and fellow small business founder, told me a funny story recently. He had a meeting scheduled with a bank to secure a loan – his very first meeting of this sort – and during the meeting, the loan officer asked him “So what is your position? President, CEO?” My friend sat back, thought for a second, and replied “well last night, I was the Janitor!”

As a small business owner, we wear many hats and are in charge of managing many aspects of our business simultaneously. Whether it’s customer service, bookkeeping, sales, fulfillment and distribution, or any of the other necessary tasks required to maintain a business, time is of the essence. And now, with so many social media channels available to communicate with our customers and build a pipeline of leads, it’s extremely time consuming to stay on top of your game. So, I wanted to give you a cheat sheet of tools that will make automating your social media so much easier and consequently, more effective. You will love this list, but I want to preface it with this note, which somebody advised me of years ago and I couldn’t agree more; don’t try and tackle all social media channels at once, but rather develop 1 or 2 at a time until you have a strong following and are managing them without too much of a headache. If you try and dive into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pintrest, LinkedIn, Google+, and so on, you will just be spinning your wheels. So to the cheat sheet…

1. TweetAdder

Building a twitter following is tough, and then once you build that following, you really need to be posting 3-5 times daily in order to really remain relevant. But Twitter can be such an amazing tool for lead generation, and it is by far the easiest tool to use to communicate with your customers. TweetAdder is great because it allows you to completely automate your tweeting. You simply upload a list of tweets you want to send out (I usually do about 50 at a time) and then you tell TweetAdder the intervals of time between tweets and you’re done. Additionally, you can pick other Twitter accounts to retweet at set intervals as well. And then on top of that, it makes it easy to add people that are part of your target audience. You can search for people who are using certain keywords, and start following them, and then about 15% of those people end up following you back (and, you can unfollow people who don’t!). This tool has helped me build up my twitter following, and manage my communication with ease.

2. Dlvr.it

When you write a new blog post, you know that you need to share it across all of your social media channels. But that takes a lot of time. You have to create a new post for each and every one of the channels, so Dlvr.it created an application that makes it much easier. You select your RSS feed and assign it to each account that you want to share your new posts on. And then, whenever a new post is created, the RSS feed automatically distributes the post across all of your social media channels. You can be completely hands off.

3. AWeber

We’ve all heard the saying before “The Money is In the List” – but once you build up your email marketing list, how you reach out to your new leads is key. AWeber allows you to send new leads emails in pretermined intervals so you can lead your potential customers right down the sales pipeline as you would like, every time.

4. Zapier

Zapier allows you to ‘Zap’ new posts from one online tool to another – and works with almost every online platform out there. For example, if you post a new video on your youtube channel, it will send out a Facebook message. So you can automate events to take place on one platform when another specified event happens on another platform.

As I mentioned, social media management is extremely time consuming. Fortunately, all these headaches have been experienced by others, so now we have amazing tools at our disposal. Automating this aspect of your business is a necessity – suggestions for any other tools that I missed would be greatly appreciated!

Josh Ludin is the founder of the subscription box Blind Surprise and writes about his path to making money online, and more importantly his mistakes to avoid, at NeverJobHunt.com. He is determined to motivate aspiring entrepreneurs to take the leap of faith and begin building businesses and create the lifestyles many only dream of from the confines of their cubicle. Additinonally, he writes about start up advice and hacks to help young businesses get over that first plateau and find profitability.