What’s more important than Google when it comes to driving traffic to your website and book sales pages? If you said social media, you’re absolutely right. With billions of loyal users, sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram are now responsible for more than 30% of all website traffic, according to a study by Shareaholic.

Clearly, social media is a marketing method we all need to pay attention to. But if you’ve ever tried to put the power of social media to work for your author business and then found that you were losing hours of time by disappearing in social media, you probably figured out pretty quickly that you need help.

Much of the work of a social media posting plan can be done by a trusted virtual assistant. Some of it though, can be easily automated as well. There are many, many tools available to you to pre-schedule posts across a variety of social platforms, including:

HootSuite – One of the first and still among the best options for managing Facebook, Twitter and Google+, HootSuite allows you to not only post updates, but also monitor your feeds from one single interface.

Buffer – With integrations for all of the most popular social platforms including Pinterest, Buffer is a popular choice, and offers both free and paid plans to suit any budget.

Post Planner – Great for scheduling, but Post Planner’s biggest draw is its suggestions for what to post. If you struggle with engagement, Post Planner will help by offering questions you can use to spark a conversation with your followers.

Meet Edgar – A newer offer in the social content scheduling field, Meet Edgar allows you to build a library of content you can then schedule whenever you like.

Nearly every app offers both free and paid options, or at the very least has a free trial. Sign up for several to test them out, and see which one meets your author business needs best.