Is social media marketing becoming a time suck for your small business? These time management tools will up your efficiency, increase your reach, and improve your ROI.

For a small business owner, monitoring, engaging in and contributing to social media marketing can eat up a lot of valuable time. (Just the required five hours of Photoshop time I spend every time I upload a new Facebook profile picture of myself severely cuts into my productivity.)

Here’s a list of social media time management tools to help you become more efficient with your marketing and get better results at the same time.

Nutshell Mail: This nimble little tool sends you email digests of all your online activity. You can see recent posts from your network on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more. See the activity on your Facebook business page. And perhaps my favorite bit: it shows you all of the people who recently started following you, and unfollowing you! (Not for the faint of heart or thin skinned.)

Tweetdeck: While Nutshell is a god-send, and can keep you entirely off the social networks while you make take phone calls, write your proposals and pound your fourth cup of coffee of the day, sometimes you need to keep your finger on the pulse in a more “real time” fashion. For you, my friend, there’s TweetDeck.

Tweetdeck allows you to pull in not just tweets, but friends’ Facebook updates, LinkedIn updates and more. It’s also great for creating searches around keywords you’re targeting, like accountant, massage, or singing telegram.

Also, it allows you to immediately engage with your network, posting and responding to tweets in real time. In my office at work I have two monitors: one for “work” and one for Tweetdeck.

An alternative to Tweetdeck is Hootsuite. One of the nice things about Hootsuite is that it runs within a browser window. Tweetdeck is a Adobe Air app, and I’ve noticed that when it’s running my laptop battery drains noticeably faster.

Ping.fm: Once you’re active on multiple platforms, creating the same update over and over again for each platform gets real old real fast. This is where Ping.fm comes in. This free service allows you to post once to Ping.fm and it will distribute your status update across all of your different networks, or any subsection of networks you choose.

Two caveats: Some platforms–Facebook in particular–diminish the importance of posts from 3rd party apps like Ping.fm. If getting into your fans’ newsfeed is critical to your success, you may need to balance automation with the few extra moments it takes to copy and paste your message directly to your wall or profile.

The second issue is that updating Twitter several times a day (or even the hour) may be the norm, but not so much at LinkedIn. Save Ping.fm and similar services for when you have a message that all of your networks may be interested in.

RSS: Short for Real Simple Syndication, this is a standard feature on all blogs. Although RSS readers never became more than a niche tool, RSS makes it easy for people to subscribe to your content, so that one quality piece of content can appear in multiple places, reach a wider audience, and improve your ROI.

NetworkedBlogs, a free Facebook app, will read your RSS feed and publish your most recent blog automatically to your wall. LinkedIn can read your RSS feed and publish the same post to your profile. Tools like Feedburner, AWeber, and a host of other services offer RSS to Email, turning your most recent posts automatically into an email newsletter.

There are also tools that automatically update your Twitter feed (although this can sometimes be a turnoff if your only tweets are recent blog posts.) And, of course, millions of people use RSS readers to subscribe to multiple blogs at once, so they can quickly scan updates and emerging trends in their industry.

Each one of the boxes in the image above is a blog, showing the titles of the three most recent posts. Clicking the title takes you to the blog post, clicking the + allows you to read the blog post from right within this window. Pretty efficient way of keeping tabs on your industry, your customers’ industries, and your competition.

Google Alerts: Speaking of keeping tabs on your industry, nothing beats Google Alerts. You can choose a targeted keyword (“stamp collection” or “HR”), your industry, your competitors’ names or your own. I have alerts both on Rich Brooks and flyte. It’s not because I’m a megalomaniac.

OK, it’s not just because I’m a megalomaniac.

These alerts have tipped me off to people talking about me and my company on different websites and blogs, and have also shown me a number of times when people have used an article without permission.

This alert provides fodder for the new blog we started for our Zombie Ipsum site.

TubeMogul: This site is like the Ping.fm for online video. Post your video to TubeMogul and it will distribute your video to multiple video sharing websites.

What’s even better, is it will tell you how many views you have across different platforms. While there’s a pay model, the basic tools are free.

If you’re serious about YouTube marketing, I’d recommend not using TubeMogul to upload to YouTube. There seems to be some evidence that this counts against your YouTube visibility in their algorithm. Although I haven’t seen this myself, I’d err on the side of caution, as YouTube serves up an outright majority of online video.

A Word Of Caution

Tools for social media automation should be used with restraint. As mentioned above, certain platforms frown on 3rd party apps. There’s also the potential problem that if you’re automating tweets and updates, and a prospective client responds but you’re not there to hear it, it can damage your brand.

These efficiency tools are powerful, but they’re not right for every job.

Now it’s your turn: what tools do you use to improve your efficiency and manage your time with social media?

Rich Brooks
Web Marketing for Small Business

P.S. I was reached out to by Visa Small Business to write a blog post. Follow @VisaSmallBiz and discover more at http://visa.com/business.