Blog posted by Neil Patel.

Social media is one of the best ways to build a loyal brand following and establish yourself or your company as an industry leader.

But social media also takes tons of time from your daily schedule.

In fact, most marketers spend multiple hours each week on social media.

And on top of that, there’s tons of competition.

Everybody and their mother (and grandmother) can be found using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.

So standing out and besting the competition has become a laborious, time-consuming task that takes some finesse and dedication.

In fact, I used to find myself spending hours every single week on social media just to keep up with the competition.

Most people are using social media nearly two hours every day.

Yes, it can eat up your daily routine, but we need social media.

In fact, social media is one of the best ways to connect with fans, followers, and current customers.

It’s also an incredible tool that I’ve used to promote new content and drive sales through the roof.

So what do we do when we’re short on time and heavy on the competition?

How do we beat out our competitors without spinning our wheels?

Thankfully, there are tons of social media services and tools at our disposal.

There are ways to automate the process and best our competition.

I personally use them daily to get the jump on other brands and provide better content.

Here are five examples of social media services that you can use to beat your competition and save time.

1. Agora Pulse for scheduling

Agora Pulse is one of my favorite social media management services.

It helps me schedule content for platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all from the same place.

Plus, it has dynamic features like detailed analytics reports for all your social networks.

On top of that, you can market new content with ease and even run promotions directly from the application.

And the good news:

They offer a free trial so you can test it out before making any purchase decisions.

They also offer tons of free tools that I often use to monitor success:

For example, I’ve used the Twitter Report Card dozens of times to monitor my standing against my competitors.

Once you’ve navigated to your free report, you can easily add competitor accounts to view by clicking “+ Add An Account To Compare:”

I love this tool because it’s free and it gives me instant data on how I can improve or how my metrics are comparing to my competition!

But that’s not even scratching the surface of things you can do with Agora Pulse. That’s just one of their free tools.

Once you’ve created your free account and linked your social profiles, you can start to monitor alerts for your brand:

For example, I have a current keyword and listening alert set up for my own brand so that I can always respond to consumers on time:

Another one of my favorite features allows me to do deep inspections on my followers:

I can see how engaged they are and reward engaged followers based on their participation and interaction.

I can also use it to see which followers aren’t engaged and which followers are using my competitors more!

This allows me to run follow campaigns that I can use to steal my competition’s followers.

Genius, right?

But my all-time favorite tool within Agora Pulse is the content-scheduling system:

It’s a giant calendar that I can use to schedule all of my posts and works perfectly in line with my content marketing calendar!

Agora Pulse will help you stay on top of your game. It’s great for nailing down a strategy and is a pretty solid all-inclusive service.

2. Bitly for link tracking

When it comes to link-tracking software, Bitly is one of my favorites on the market.

And the ease of use is pretty much unparalleled in terms of any marketing tool.

You simply copy a current, live website link like your newest blog post, type it into the bar, and hit enter.

Then you get a shortened link that looks clean and tracks tons of useful data automatically.

Want to know who clicked your links in a Facebook post? A tweet?

Want to know what they did after that? You can do all that with Bitly.

To get started, click “Sign Up For Free” to create your free account:

Once you’ve created an account, you can start taking advantage of the platform instantly.

Click “Create Bitlink” in the top-right corner to turn a link into a trackable powerhouse of information:

Next, paste the link you want to track into the long URL section, and it will automatically create a new link for you:

Once it’s created, it will give you the new link to copy or share and will give it the same title that it pulled from your original link.

After you share your link on social media, you can get detailed insights on each click.

Bitly is an awesome way to easily keep track of how your links are doing.

And only seeing the number of people who clicked your link isn’t helpful for compiling data and understanding what drove the traffic.

The Bitly links will help you understand where and why people clicked.

You’ll see what countries they are from and how they found your social post.

3. Quintly for analytics

Quintly is probably my favorite social media analytics service on the web today.

That’s a bold statement, I know.

But it does so much! It helps me track, benchmark, and optimize my social performance with super-smooth analytics.

Google Analytics is great, but it’s not focused on social media.

Meaning I have to dig around and set up tons of detailed, custom reports just to get a little bit of data.

And the analytics you get on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter just aren’t enough.

It’s nowhere near the level of detail you find in services like Quintly.

Quintly works for comparing the competition, too. It allows you to benchmark your competitors’ social strategies to get ahead, and that’s exactly what I (and you) need.

Once you’ve connected all the profiles for your given social media platforms, you can head to the dashboard to get insights.

You can add tons of different widgets for fast previews on your most important metrics.

I can add things like fans, posts, interactions, and ad performance for my most important networks.

And I can add them all to the same dashboard so I don’t have to waste time browsing multiple tabs.

It combines all of your most important metrics and information in a single window.

No more wasting time scouring Twitter and Facebook for analytics.

Simply head to your dashboard and spend five minutes focusing on the most important things.

Quintly is also amazing if you want to focus on outgrowing and out-shining your competitors.

You can easily set up a dashboard to compare you against your competition.

You can monitor important information like YouTube subscriber growth, Facebook fan fluctuations, and more.

It’s one of my favorite tools to constantly stay ahead of the competition on my social media strategy.

4. MeetEdgar for automated posting

MeetEdgar is a diverse content delivery system for social media.

It’s like having a dedicated content marketer without actually going through the trouble of hiring one (or paying a full-time salary for one).

Edgar is a powerful automation tool that shares your best content over and over, saving you tons of time every week.

Ever want to simply keep sharing a post that’s been killing it on social media? Don’t feel like digging through years of content?

That’s no problem at all for Edgar.

It keeps automatically sharing your evergreen content to drive more engagement and exposure.

On top of that, it has category-based scheduling.

For example, if you want to schedule posts about content marketing on a specific account, you can.

And if you want to schedule SEO posts on a different account, you can do that too.

The tool is super diverse and lets me keep resharing the best content without any effort on my end.

To get started, head to the homepage and click “Sign up for free!”

Next, you can easily connect your different social accounts:

Currently, Edgar only works for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

The content scheduling system is also incredibly easy to use:

You can add a new post with photos and videos and upload them at a specific time and date.

To create the best photos to post, head over to Canva and start playing around with their endless design options. For video editing, head over to InVideo and be blown away at how fast and easy it will be for you to create professional videos.

You can even set them to expire.

And one of the best features of all is the RSS feeds integration:

This RSS integration will pull the best content from your favorite sites and add it to your queue.

Meaning that your laborious content curation strategy can now be cut to just a few minutes.

So, if you follow a website religiously like HubSpot and you tweet some of their content often, you can now do that automatically.

Your time now will just be spent approving posts and automating your curation process.

And let’s not forget about the account scheduling tool:

This helps you stay on top of the game, making sure posts are heading out on time every single day.

MeetEdgar is one of my favorite ways to stay ahead of the competition. It puts my content curation and posting on autopilot.

5. Socedo for generating leads

Socedo is an automated social media service that helps you collect more B2B leads.

It works with Twitter and LinkedIn to find the best, most qualified leads. Then, it automatically delivers them to your sales funnel.

That’s automation at its finest!

And, it works with tons of different CRMs like Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

Once you start a base template, you can refine or expand the lead audience by entering keywords or tags.

Then, you’ll see tons of prospects pop up automatically on the left-hand side:

Socedo is my favorite tools to generate high-quality leads. And once you start refining your search, you can select the engagement steps.

For example, it’s useful to be able to follow approved leads and unfollow those who don’t follow back or show interest.

This way, the tool automatically weeds out leads that aren’t engaging with you, saving you tons of time and money.

And, you can send automated direct messages, like targeted links or offers, to those who do follow you back.

One of the coolest features with Socedo is being able to A/B-test your messaging and offers.

Socedo helps you convert leads and capture them with almost no work on your end.

I've used it for many years to drive tons of new leads and sales.

And the features that you get are almost incomparable to any other social media service.

Being able to A/B test within the application itself is huge. On top of that, the leads that I’ve produced using Socedo have been excellent.

The targeting is specific and refined, so you aren’t just going after random accounts, but people who actually want your products and services.

If you are currently struggling to make the best out of lead capture on social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, try using Socedo to automate the process for you.

Instead of researching and grinding all day to find a few leads, the service will gather lists based on your company and industry-related keywords for you.

Conclusion

79% of U.S. internet users are on Facebook. 32% are on Instagram. 24% are on Twitter.

Your customers are on social media, and so obviously, you need to be, too.

This captive audience makes social one of the easiest, best ways to build a brand or establish a loyal following.

It’s also great for creating personal brands and becoming an industry expert.

But social media takes tons of time from our daily schedules.

Believe it or not, most marketers are spending multiple hours every week on social media.

And to top it all off, you have to consider your competition.

Every competitor you have is likely grinding on social media to get ahead of you.

So you can’t just sit back and watch your followers go elsewhere.

But you can’t afford to spend three hours a day on it, either.

So it’s time to start making things easier on yourself by using some of the best social media services out there.

I recommend using Agora Pulse for scheduling content across social media platforms. It saves you time and helps you optimize content with analytics to soar past your competitors.

Use Bit.ly for link tracking to see what’s working and what’s not. Use it to see what actions users are taking on your content.

Use Quintly for prime analytics to help you make better marketing decisions.

Then, use MeetEdgar to automate your social posting so that you’re not wasting hours on content production.

Lastly, use Socedo to generate valuable leads.