All that time that you spend traveling or waiting at the dry cleaners is such a waste. If you could use that time to get the little stuff done, it would amount to a lot at the end of a day. Especially if you’re a social media manager, your job runs around the clock, and has a substantial amount of real-time engagement.
Experienced social media managers know that social media never sleeps – it keeps evolving and changing every day. To keep up with this, you have to constantly be online and this is not always possible. So can use your down-time to take your online presence up a notch with a few cool apps. Mobile apps let you handle social media no matter where you are. Several of these apps are only available for certain platforms but a good deal of them are available for web, Android and iOS.
DrumUp is a content curation web and mobile app that gets you great social media content from all the latest happenings in your industry. It can greatly improve your social presence and all it takes is a few minutes of your time everyday. You can add multiple accounts and fully customize each of their content feeds effortlessly. Once you’ve set up your content streams, you can schedule content with a single click or customize the time and date for scheduling completely. Once scheduled, you can review your queue and remove posts that you don’t like or find irrelevant. You can also add your blog feeds to add your posts to your queue. The tool is available for both Android and iOS.
Mention works on a simple concept – it shows you mentions of your keywords from all over the web in real-time. Your keywords can include anything including your company’s name, niche, industry etc. You also get notifications in real-time for profile mentions. One of Mention’s most useful features is the anti-noise feature, which analyzes mentions for sentiments and priority and weeds out the unimportant ones. You can also respond and react to your mentions right from the app itself. Customized analytics are also a huge plus. The app is a paid one but it does have a 14 day free trial period so you can see its impact first hand.
Much like its web counterpart, the IFTTT app is great for automating mundane, daily processes and for simplifying complicated tasks. For social media managers, it has a ton of built-in ‘recipes’ to put their daily lives on fast-forward. These ‘recipes’ are simple IF statements that can be modified as you please. Once you’ve connected all your accounts, you can automate tasks like posting your Facebook status updates as tweets or updates on Tumblr or LinkedIn, post Instagram posts as Twitter photos, save your favorite tweets on Evernote and much more. Depending on the accounts and apps you’d like to connect you have endless possibilities with this app. The app is available for Android and iOS.
Flipboard gets you articles, videos and news from the best sources from around the web. Once you’ve downloaded the app, all you need to do is pick a handful of topics and start reading all the great content. You can start off with their Cover stories, which features content from the most reputed sources including the New York Times, CNN, Washington Post and more. You can keep track of hashtags or Twitter handles to stay up to date on the latest trends and events. You can also get hand-picked general news stories of the day by using The Daily Edition. Social media managers can create digital magazines with everything they like and share it on multiple social media accounts. The app is available for Android and iOS.
Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard that lets you track your social media efforts. You can monitor anything from websites and social media to departments in your business. The app comes with pre-built widgets that can be customized to give you the information you want right on your home-screen. You can also share your dashboards with peers and customers to improve integration and transparency. The data on your dashboard is archived forever and can be downloaded or shared through email in multiple formats. You can create multiple dashboards. For example, you can create a social media dashboard that has Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter Analytics combined with other demographic information. It also features a number of customization options to make organization and viewing more pleasant. This app is currently available on web and as a widget for iOS.
A key factor of social media management is organization and Trello is one of the best tools for it. The app takes note-taking to a whole new level and you can create boards for different topics with images and videos. You can add notes in the board and color code them according to your requirements. Boards can be shared with colleagues to encourage team involvement or used privately. You can add checklists under your board as well to help you keep track of your progress. People can add comments to boards to give pointers and feedback. Your social media presence will increase drastically by collaborating on boards as everyone on the team will be on the same page. Files can also be added from Google Drive and Dropbox as well. The app is available for Android and iOS.
- Facebook Pages Manager
This app is created by Facebook and lets admins manage multiple pages in a single place. You can add posts and photos on the go. Comments and private messages on your pages can be monitored and replied to. You can enable push notifications to get all the notified on all the updates as they happen. The app also provides analytics like new page likes per day, the number of people your page reaches and many other such stats. Social media presence can be increased greatly with timely responses and constant posting. The app is available for Android and iOS.
Getting It Right
You can use all the apps on this list and still fail at amplifying your social media presence. There are a few important things that you have to remember while using these apps:
- Choose the right time to schedule posts. If it is likely that your target audience will be offline, schedule content for the next day.
- Always engage with comments and replies to your posts. In the beginning phases, comments will be scarce but engagement is key to growth.
- Add a personalized touch to every post you share. Don’t be a robot that shares for the sake of it as this will turn readers away.
- Visual content is important and you must share both text and images as often as possible. Apps that can extract and use images from links are the best for this.
- Do not share 20-30 pieces of curated content in a single day. Sharing 5-10 pieces is recommended.
- Employee advocacy can be tricky and you must train your employees to understand different platforms and rules for sharing.
- Curated content must always be balanced out with original content.
Your social media presence is dependent on what and how you share. Keep the above points in mind before sharing anything. All the above apps have their own benefits and downfalls, try them out and understand each one before sticking with 2-3 permanently.
