by Joseph Armstrong

Social media can be a colossal waste of time, but it can also prove beneficial for business—especially for artists eager to build a following or for gallery owners wanting to promote their offerings. Marketing through social media can reach a vast audience. With so many websites, however, properly spreading the word can be time-consuming and downright onerous. Fortunately, there are plenty of social media- management tools that can help. Here are 10 tools that are worth a look.

Sprout Social allows users to simultaneously publish to multiple social-media sites. Other features include message scheduling so you don’t have to watch the clock, audience-response tracking, a customizable contact list and a help desk for your audience.

TweetDeck by Twitter is an app that manages an unlimited number of Twitter accounts. With TweetDeck, you can schedule tweets and track trends, and notifi cations allow you to immediately connect with your audience. Its customizable filters keep you on top of incoming and outgoing tweets.

One of the more popular sites available, HootSuite is a social-media dashboard that organizes messages and tracks results across multiple sites at once, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ pages and more.

Twitterfeed, a must-have for hard-core bloggers, feeds your posts directly into various networks, including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Users who don’t yet use blogging as part of their marketing strategies will have the time to do so with this app.

Seesmic, a mobile app on the Android market, simultaneously updates Facebook and Twitter feeds. Full access to feeds allows users to track timelines and to share photos, messages, posts, likes and more. Seesmic received an average 4.3-star rating with nearly 80,000 five-star user reviews. Available in the Google Play store. 

ScrOOn advertises itself as “all-in-one community management,” and that’s exactly what it is. It connects users’ social platforms and allows tracking across the web from desktop to tablet to mobile device.

Postling targets small-business owners, consolidating social platforms into one source and allowing for posts and responses, metrics tracking and post scheduling. Postling connects to users’ e-mail and produces a “Daily Digest” email that recaps recent network activity. It is also compatible with the iPhone.

Buffer connects multiple networks, allows users to add team members for work distribution and provides free analytics about recent activity. Buffer is compatible with all mobile devices and newsreader apps.

SocialOomph schedules tweets, posts and updates; tracks trends by keyword; and connects to users’ blogs and e-mail accounts. It links multiple accounts, provides activity data and has a spam fi lter. One key feature that sets SocialOomph apart from others is its automatic-response function: the ability to set up automatic follows, messages and responses.

The mobile-device-ready Spredfast app provides engagement analytics about users and their audiences, has a team-management feature and even provides audience demographics.

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