Social media is an essential tool for both businesses and consumers. Everyone has their social media platform of choice, and brands need to be represented on as many as possible.

As a freelance blogger, I’m constantly using social media to promote published posts and start conversations with readers. It’s a great way to boost web traffic.

However, there are only so many hours in the day, and you can’t spend them all on social media. Automation makes things easier by letting you schedule posts out in advance.

If you’re looking to automate your social media presence, these are the apps to do it.

10. Scoop.It

Scoop.It is a great tool to find content to share on your social channels. If you want to be seen as a thought leader, you need to share great content in your vertical. Of course, not everyone has time every day to read through every trade publication and article. This tool lets you easily discover great content and share to your social media channels with your own commentary.

9. SocialPilot

SocialPilot offers social calendar management and scheduling. It integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram. It lets you bulk schedule posts across any of these channels and saves a lot of time by letting you get your monthly social media done within a day.

8. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social automation tools, but it’s definitely flawed, especially when using Instagram or a Facebook business page. The free suite has an impressive feature set, but you’ll need to pay for more advanced functionality.

7. Zapier

Zapier can not only connect to social media channels, but it also connects to other social media automation tools. When you have too many programs running to keep it all straight, Zapier is the all-in-one business platform you need.

6. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a powerful tool to provide analytics and automation for your Twitter and Instagram pages. Instagram is one of the more annoying channels to automate, so this is a big plus. It’s great for paying closer attention to your Twitter metrics and managing followers.

5. PowerPost

PowerPost was designed for enterprises and is a great all-around publishing platform. Not only can you schedule posts across social media, but you can schedule and manage your WordPress and blog posts too. If you want to run everything from one dashboard, PowerPost is the tool to use.

4. Agora Pulse

Agorapulse is a unified suite that lets you schedule and analyze posts across most social media platforms. You can set up alerts for mentions of your name (or anything really) and schedule out your entire campaign from one easy place.

3. IFTTT

IFTTT is a trigger-based automation program that acts as a break-fix for missing features in any of your social media tools. You can schedule anything to happen based on events, such as posting to Twitter whenever you post to Facebook, set social posts upon completing a blog post, and more. If there’s ever a feature you’re missing from your social automation suite, check IFTTT for a recipe. If it’s not there, you can create one (or hire someone to do it for you).

2. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is similar to Trello, allowing collaboration between virtual teams. It also has built-in social scheduling and lets you create an editorial calendar, check analytics, and more. With CoSchedule, you can see exactly where you’re at with your workflow at a glance.

1. Buffer

Buffer is a powerful social media automation tool that lets you easily share and schedule content across social platforms. The graphical interface is perfect for social media noobs, and it even recommends scheduling times to optimize post engagement on any channel. If you’re just getting started in social media automation, Buffer is the tool to use.