I hold these truths to be self-evident: people working in digital for charities are always really short of time, and social media can be one of the biggest time-sucks around. We need to use social media in a strategic way, to get a return on the time that we’re putting into it, but focusing your efforts on a system that is designed to distract you can be a challenge.
Hootsuite is an excellent free tool that allows you to set up a dashboard for your social media accounts, so you can post your updates, schedule your content, see your responses and monitor your issue all in one place.
Their free plan allows you to manage up to five separate social media accounts, making it perfect for small charities. As well as adding your accounts, you can set up ‘streams’ to monitor responses, keywords, accounts of key supporters, etc.
The dashboard can look overwhelming at first but is actually quite simple and intuitive to use, and it’s not as easy to post messages to the wrong account as it is with some systems (I’m looking at you, Tweetdeck). Hootsuite also offer a discount on their paid plans for non-profits.