Save time and improve your social media marketing productivity

Guest Author: Disha Dinesh

In 2015, the average US commuter spent 42 hours caught in traffic jams.

On any given day, how much time do you spend away from your computer screen?

What if you could complete a few tasks on your mobile phone while on the go?

For any social media manager, a few minutes of work while waiting at a restaurant or while stuck in traffic could mean time to schedule posts for a day, respond to queries or personally interact with followers on social media.

Fortunately, there are a host of apps that feature on-the-go functionality so you can save time and improve your social media marketing productivity.

1. Mention

Stellar brand reputation could mean the difference between remaining a small scale company and expanding to a large and well-known organization.

Maintaining a presence on social media isn’t easy because of its quick pace and unpredictability.

To ensure that your brand’s reputation remains untarnished, it is vital for you to monitor social media for conversations mentioning your brand.

Catching positive mentions is equally important. You could thank the person who mentioned you and share that comment for added credibility and trust on social media.

Mention has a mobile app (for android and iOS) that lets you set up notifications for keywords, one of which could be your brand name. Mention is also available as a desktop application.

2. DrumUp

As a brand it is crucial for you to provide your target audience with something that they can’t find elsewhere, or what is referred to as a ‘unique value proposition’ in business terms.

What is your unique value proposition on social media?

What content are you sharing with your audience that would make them want to follow you as opposed to other brands on social media?

If you could source fresh, useful content in your niche each day and share it with your social media audience, you could earn their favor and loyalty.

DrumUp is a content curation app (mobile: android and iOS) that discovers fresh content that fits the theme that you have choose. You could also schedule the articles you want right from the app or store it in a library to recycle at a later time.

3. Over

Succeeding on social media requires some juggling of themes and content formats to hold your audience’s attention.

After all, it has been widely discussed how the current internet user’s attention span is lesser than that of a goldfish’s.

You could touch on different sup-topics in your niche and move between blogs, infographics and videos from time to time.

Over is a visual content editing app (mobile: android and iOS) that assists you in converting flat images into something interesting and intriguing that could speak to your target market.

The app lets you choose from a list of unique fonts (for custom text) and clip art that you could pass over an image to make it more engaging.

Additionally, the app has the whole set of editing options – cropping, fading, resizing, stretching and a lot more that you could experiment with.

4. Nuzzel

I attended a digital marketing conference conducted by a multinational IT services company last month.

They asked the people who read newspapers to raise their hands. Out of the 100 participants in the room, 3 people lifted their hands.

We were then asked where we read our news. While 40% of that remaining lot said news aggregators or apps, 60% said social media.

Do you use the news tab on Twitter?

Nuzzel was originally designed to deal with the issues of social media information overload.

Nuzzel (mobile: android and iOS) helps you discover the best of the news stories posted on social media by your friends without having too much at hand, or missing out on anything.

The app also lets you analyze stories shared by your connections so you can assess your audience.

5. Plume
   

If Twitter brings you a large number of referrals, and you spend a considerable amount of time on it, Plume could be an interesting app to use.

A Twitter client, it allows you to customize the way you view Twitter, and recently Facebook.

On the app, you could integrate your Twitter timeline to your home page and control several functions from there.

A lot of functions exist in widgets that you could experiment with and keep the ones you prefer on your home screen.

Additionally, Plume (mobile: android and iOS) allows Twitter Geo-tagging and replies with autocomplete for hash tags and Twitter handles that you might want to type.

If you want to focus on specific users, or turn some off for some interval in time, you could selectively mute those Twitter handles via Plume.

The live streaming is by far the best feature, especially if you participate in a lot of Twitter chats.

6. Facebook Pages Manager

If you’re a Facebook page manager (mobile: android and iOS), and a multiple one at that, this app if for you.

Managing multiple pages on Facebook itself is time consuming. If you work with an agency that manages multiple Facebook pages for clients, this app will make the activity easier.

The home screen itself lets you view all the pages you manage as a list and choose between them.

Along with the list, the home page also displays your page insights and page administrators so you can quickly assess how to delegate work and pick up the slack when your stats are low.

From the app you can comment, like and share content and view the number of views for each post, making it easy to monitor and plan while on the go.

7. Canva

Visuals are the best way to catch your social media audience’s attention. With every piece of text you publish, you should add a visual to let it escape from being a flat read.

A large group of people are visually inclined and prefer to view their content rather than read it.

In fact the human brain, communicates in a largely visual manner.

There is the fact that creating visuals isn’t easy, until you’ve tried Canva that is.

Canva (mobile: iOS) has a wide variety of templates you can choose from for every imaginable purpose.

Once you’ve picked a pre-designed template it is only a matter of experimenting with the drag-drop feature and putting together a simple but elegant looking graphics.

Amping-up your presence on social media is simply about maximizing your time, increasing your visual appeal and sourcing fresh and useful content regularly. Managing this well will leave you room to create the thought leadership pieces that you need in order to establish a name in the industry.

Author bio:

Disha Dinesh is a Content Writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media trends and inspiration.

For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.