When you’re trying to juggle all the aspects of your online marketing campaign, sometimes you can end up feeling downright swamped. Although we don’t yet live in a world where you can buy a person-sized robot to do all your work for you so you can take a well-deserved nap, there are applications and programs out there to help make your life a tiny bit easier.
HootSuite
HootSuite is most commonly associated with managing Twitter accounts, although the dashboard also supports posting to Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, and even MySpace. The application has both desktop and mobile versions. A noteworthy feature of this service is the ability to schedule future tweets. The basic version of the service is free, with limited functionality. Even the basic free version includes analytics to see your clicks and retweets. The paid version integrates with Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, as well as allowing you to add an unlimited number of social profiles. If you’ve seen a URL shortened to an “ow.ly” address, that person was using HootSuite.
Tweetdeck is similar to HootSuite, except it only manages Facebook and Twitter accounts. This service has been owned by Twitter since May 2011. Similar applications include CoTweet and Seesmic.
Dropbox
Dropbox isn’t strictly a social media app, but it’s an extremely useful tool if you’re working in a collaborative team or on the go pretty often. How it works: you can download Dropbox to your computer or smartphone, as well as access it from the Internet. Any file you upload to Dropbox online, on your phone, or on your desktop will automatically be uploaded to any device with Dropbox installed on it. If you invite your coworkers to share a Dropbox folder, all the files within it will be shared to both of your Dropbox accounts. The best part? You don’t need an Internet connection to access your downloaded Dropbox files.
Screenr
Screenr also isn’t strictly a social media app, but it can be a great tool to create shareable content. Screenr lets you record your desktop. If you’re holding a webinar or want to demonstrate how to do something, this can be a great way to record it and share it later. Screenr is free and web-based (no software to download), but has a maximum recording length of five minutes and limited editing capabilities.
For longer videos or better editing capabilities, there’s an upgraded version of Screenr. There are also other similar applications available for download on Mac and PC, like Camtasia and ScreenFlow, which both come with free trial periods.
Kred
Kred, much like other sites popping up across the Internet recently, attempts to measure your influence on a number scale. A higher number means you have more influence. For example, our CEO Shama has 769 out of 1000 possible influence points (for reference, 79 percent of people have somewhere between 201 and 600 influence points).
However, where Kred really stands apart is in transparency – they show you exactly how your Kred Influence is calculated, using a pretty in-depth system of scoring every single one of your interactions with a point level. This is then converted to your score. As your score gets higher, it becomes progressively more difficult to achieve a higher Kred influence score.
Just like other sites, you can search topics such as “social media” and “marketing” to see who the top influencers are in your industry. Since you can see the history of how their scores have been calculated, you can decide for yourself whether or not you think their ranking is accurate.
Do you have any specific tools you like to use to make your job a little bit easier? Help us out and tell us about them!
