Boost Your Social Media Productivity With Awesome Apps

Ray Manley

Tweens sitting in their middle school history class may prefer to while away the hours on social media, but for freelancers and entrepreneurs, the time drain can be overwhelming.

Fortunately, there are a number of apps that can help you improve your social media productivity, freeing up time for other important tasks.

HootSuite

Confession: I’m a big HootSuite user. I have a Pro account and subscribe to Suggestions (highly recommended). With HootSuite, you can actually manage your entire social media presence – Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and more – using one dashboard. And you can use the dashboard from any device. Even better, if you’re using five or fewer social media platforms, HootSuite is free. And realistically, you probably don’t need any more than five platforms – if you’re using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (won’t post to Instagram), Google+ and LinkedIn, you’ve got it covered. Even if you’re using up to 100 social media platforms (and who in the world does that, realistically?), it’s only going to cost you $ 9 per month.

TweetJukeBox

This is relatively new and it solved a big problem for me that I experienced after TweetAdder got tossed off of Twitter and had to shut down. You can create loops of Twitter posts that continually post. I have a series of quote graphics and I like to post about one a day. TweetJukeBox does that for me…for free.

Juice

Juice comes from the people who bring us Paper.li. It analyzes your Twitter followers to recommend content. I usually get eight to 10 recommendations each day. I use the iOS version and I use Apple’s “share” feature to send the content to Hootsuite, where I schedule it and put it in the pipeline for the right social media account. I think it’s currently the best (only?) free content-recommending app.

SproutSocial

This is a management and social media productivity tool combined. You’ll never miss a post or a message, because SproutSocial brings in all the activity from every one of your profiles. You can see what’s going on with your various social media sites, schedule posts and measure your metrics, and you can even tell the app to follow up on vital posts. It tells you who you should follow, and who you should unfollow. Free trial.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster works with Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to monitor followers, see updates, schedule posts, and engage with your audience. It’s basically analytics on steroids with optimized scheduling of posts. If anyone is waiting to engage with you, this app will let you know. Free trial.

TweetDeck

This app focuses on Twitter exclusively, which isn’t a surprise since it’s now owned by Twitter. It’s free, and if Twitter is important to you, this app can deliver the goods. It offers filters that allow you to focus on followers, posts and responses that are relevant. With TweetDeck, you can customize your profile, schedule tweets, show or hide search results, and perform other marketing tasks, from one dashboard. The downside to TweetDeck is that it isn’t very mobile-friendly.

The Final Word

In today’s marketplace, social media productivity is vital to success, whether you’re operating a business or trying to make your way in the hyper-competitive world of blogging. There are various apps available that can help you to schedule your social media posts so that you can become more productive. Some are available at a low cost. Others are free. You’ll undoubtedly end up relying on two or three of these apps to boost your social media productivity.

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