Scenario: You’ve planned a fun-filled spring break. But while you’re there, you find yourself with lots of little tasks to catch up on. And after you’ve posted a tweet, updated your Facebook status, written a blog entry, proofed an email campaign and followed up on a few customer emails, you realize you’ve spent more time in the business center than at the pool. Next time, set it and forget it. Take advantage of today’s scheduling and auto-responding tools to make your holiday a breeze.

SOCIAL MEDIA

A wide variety of tools let you manage your social networking from Twitter to Facebook to LinkedIn.

Social Oomph lets you send out twitter messages on schedule, and also includes the ability to automate reciprocal follows.

Twittertise has scheduled twitter capability, plus it incorporates a tracking mechanism on links included in the message.

Easytweets lets you send time delayed tweets, and manage multiple twitter accounts at once.

Sendible lets you schedule Facebook messages ahead of time so you can send messages to your friends, customers or colleagues in the future.

Social Tomorrow Create messages to post at some later time to your favorite social service such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also schedule your sms text messages and groups and fanpage wallposts.

HootSuite If you manage multiple Twtitter accounts or share your Twittering duties with friends or co-workers, HootSuite is designed for you.  If you want to pre-schedule your messages or feed your blog to Twitter, they’ve got you covered.

BLOGS
With blogs, it’s easy to schedule a blog post in advance. Both WordPress and Blogger allow you to write a post and indicate the date and time you want it published.  Better yet, create a blog series in advance, and you won’t have to think about blogging for a month!

EMAIL
Most email platforms let you design, schedule and test your campaign – and then decide a future date and time it should go out. You can even split your list by time zone so all recipients get it at the same time of day.

Don’t forget the power of the autoresponder.  Of course, you’ll set your “out of office” response to let customers and coworkers know you’re out of town. But you can also use autoresponders to send friendly notes to new subscribers, reminders to those who abandoned their shopping cart, or a series of messages to keep your brand top of mind. Stop manually replying to emails when an autoresponder can do the heavy lifting.

These tools enable you to enjoy your vacation without babysitting your marketing campaigns. Just make sure you allow time in your pre-trip schedule to do all the planning AND testing so you don’t get any surprise calls while sunbathing.  Yes, it takes extra time and effort before you go away to set these tools in place. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather put in the extra hours the week before vacation and relax on the trip than have to hustle the whole week I get back and then feel like I need a vacation all over again.