In working with a range of clients across several industries, I’ve noticed a common major impediment to these organizations maximizing the value of their digital marketing performance.
With priorities ranging from business development to film production and screenwriting, marketing is often an afterthought. These companies understand the importance of posting on social media, writing blog posts and marketing campaigns through online ads, but they don’t often have time, energy and expertise to devote to the marketing process. And unfortunately, in the world of marketing, particularly social media, consistent content development is the key.
In order to build an engaged, responsive fan base, you need to interact with them, pull them into the conversation, and let them know what’s going on with your brand. If you don’t, audiences will shrink, and interest in your brand will subsequently drop.
But here’s the good news - although content will always take time to develop and promote, there are now various apps and platforms which you can use to make your life easier.
Without further ado, here are five great social media apps which can help you stay organized and keep your content flowing all through the year.
Planoly
Planoly is specifically designed to help you manage your Instagram presence. You can arrange how your feed will look with the exclusive 'drag & drop' feature, schedule content and captions days/weeks/months in advance (you’ll get reminders when it’s time to post) and it even provides you with analytics that'll show who has interacted with your posts.
The built-in scheduler enables you to schedule not just photos but videos and GIFs too, while you can use the hashtag manager tool to create different groups of hashtags for each post. It also makes it that much easier for you to search for UGC (user-generated content) which use your custom tags.
The free version gives you the option of uploading and scheduling 30 photos/month, with a month’s worth of analytics stored, but if you move to the duo option for $15/month, you’ll be able to manage two accounts, with unlimited photo, video and GIF uploads, and analytics history saved for up to a year. You also have the option of utilizing the ‘Shoppable’ package, which embeds a gallery onto your website, tags products on every post and tracks performance based on how many people purchase each item.
Echofon
In a nutshell, Echofon is the easiest way to manage your Twitter timeline.
The tool keeps unread tweets in synch between apps on different devices, helps eliminate duplicate notifications and enables you to stop notifications within a sleep period. No matter whether you choose the iPhone, Android, iPad or Mac version, you’ll be able to view timeline photos and videos in full screen, and see all the tweet details by tapping the tweet and opening links without the app.
Site streams deliver tweets in real time, with LiveLinks on your timeline, and you’ll be able to tweet over 140 characters as well. The Android version also has dashboard widgets which enable you to access the most used Twitter features without leaving the home screen.
SocialOomph
The free version of SocialOomph gives you a ton of flexibility, beyond simply scheduling tweets. You can set up alerts to track keywords in your public stream, so you can follow what everyone is talking about, while you can also shorten links, purge tweets and your inbox to start over. You can also link up to five Twitter accounts at once.
The professional version ups the ante by letting you vet new followers, apply spam protection, and filter spammy profiles (and sort them into Twitter lists if you need). You can also use the tool with unlimited Facebook profiles, schedule Facebook status updates, upload photos for Pinterest and schedule posts for LinkedIn.
You can even use it to publish and schedule blog posts.
SocialFlow
SocialFlow is a social media organizational tool which is focused on audience monitoring, analytics and statistics in real time.
SocialFlow provides a range of actionable data points in regards to what your target audiences are engaging with at any given moment. Enter your content into the queue and the software will utilize real-time data, along with business rules which you can customize, to determine when's the best time to publish content to your social media platforms. The platform supports organic publishing for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ (for now) and LinkedIn, and monitors aspects such as geo-tracking clicks, number of clicks, likes and comments.
On the social media advertising end, the app will provide recommendations on keywords, audiences and even ad spend, so that you have the right data to optimize your campaigns.
Everypost
Everypost makes it easy for you to pull together and sift through content from different sources, including YouTube, Instagram, Flickr and RSS feeds, in order to publish your chosen material across all the social media platforms you desire. You’re also able to customize each post to suit the style and audience of each platform.
The free option gives you the ability to connect one account on each platform, and enables you to integrate content from three feeds, such as Instagram, YouTube and RSS. As you move up to the other subscription options, you’ll be able to connect multiple accounts on the platforms, and integrate content from up to fifteen feeds.
As you can see, there's a wide range of tools out there, but hopefully these recommendations will give you something to think about, and to add to your digital content workflow to help maximize your performance in 2019.
