In working with clients across several industries such as tourism and hospitality and film and television, I’ve noticed a major trend.

With their priorities ranging from business development to film production and screenwriting, marketing is often an afterthought. They understand the importance of posting on Social Media, writing a blog post and marketing campaigns through online ads, websites, social and even print, but don’t often have time, energy and expertise to devote to marketing. And unfortunately, in the world of marketing, particularly social media, consistent content development is the key.

In order to keep your fan base relevant, you have to interact with them, get them into conversation about what interests them and let them know what’s going on with your brand. If you don’t, audiences will shrink and interest in your brand drops.

Here’s the good news: although content will always have to have your stamp of approval on it, whether you work with a publicist or social media marketer, there ARE apps and platforms that can make your life easier.

Without further ado, here are the top 10 social media apps to help you stay organized & keep your productivity up!

• Planoly

 

The 411: This platform is specifically built to help you manage Instagram.  You can arrange how your feed will look with the exclusive Drag & Drop feature, schedule content & captions days/weeks/months in advance (you’ll get reminders when it’s time to post) and it even gives you analytics that will show who has interacted with your most popular posts. The built-in scheduler allows you to schedule not just photos but videos and gifs too and you can use the just-announced hashtag manager allows you 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) that use your custom hashtags.

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 USD, you’ll be able to manage 2 accounts with unlimited photo, video and gif uploads and analytics history saved for up to a year. You have the option of adding the ‘Shoppable’ package which embeds the gallery onto your website, tags products on every post and tracks performance based on how many people purchase the item.

• Echofon

 

The 411: Basically the easiest way to manage your Twitter timeline, in a nutshell. It keeps unread tweets in sync between apps on different devices, helps eliminate duplicate notifications and allows you to stop notifications on 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 open 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 that allow you to access the most used Twitter features without leaving the home screen.

• SocialOomph

The 411: The free version 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. You can shorten your links, purge tweets and your inbox to start over and use up to 5 Twitter accounts with it.

The professional version ups the ante by letting you vet new followers, apply SPAM protection, filter spammy profiles and sort them into Twitter lists. You can also use the tool with unlimited Facebook profiles, schedule Facebook status updates, upload photos for Pinterest, schedule shares for LinkedIn and have unlimited LinkedIn and Pinterest as well. You can even use it to publish and schedule blog posts.

• SocialFlow

The 411: This platform is a social media organization tool that focuses more on audience monitoring, analytics and statistics in real time. They replace arbitrary scheduling with actionable data on what your target audiences are engaging with at any given moment. You enter the content into the queue and the software uses real time data along with business rules that you can customize, to determine when is the best time to publish content to your social media platforms. They support organic publishing for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ & LinkedIn and monitor aspects such as geo-tracking clicks, number of clicks, likes and comments.

On the social media advertising end, the tech makes recommendations on keywords, audiences and even ad spend so that you have the right insights to optimize campaigns.

• Everypost

The 411: In a nutshell, this platform makes it easy to pull together and sift through content from different sources such as YouTube, Instagram, Flickr & RSS feeds to publish it across all the social media platforms. You’re also able to customize the content to suit the style and audience of each social media platforms and modify them, depending on the platform to add/remove hashtags and @mentions.

The free option gives you the ability to connect one account on each platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ & LinkedIn and allows you to integrate content from 3 feeds such as Instagram, YouTube and RSS feeds. As you move up to the other options, you’ll be able to connect multiple accounts on the platforms and integrate content from up to 15 feeds.

• Trello

The 411: A tool that makes team collaboration easy. You can use the customizable boards to plan out your social media content calendar, plan a campaign or organize ideas you’ve brainstormed. It’s completely up to you on how you want to customize it, as you can organize posts by a given week on a specific platform on a particular topic.

You can also add checklists to the boards which allows you to cross off items as they’re completed, making it easier to track campaign progress. Different team members can be assigned different tasks with customized labels and different publication statuses so team members can see what social media status update is on which platform and when they’re due.

• DrumUp

The 411: This platform has multiple functions that make content development easy such as the ability to schedule and repost your content as you see fit and content recommendations based on a list of keywords you’ve previously selected, straight to your dashboard. There are also feeds that you can add to select content from and the app allows you to add a certain number of hashtags and re-post your content over a period of time so the queue is never empty.

You can manage multiple social media accounts and link your blog updates to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and with the iPhone and Android apps, you can keep your productivity up even on the go. The new Chrome extension allows you to share the stories you’re reading without leaving the browser.  The starter package is $15/month allows you to have 3 social media accounts, 10 posts/day/account, 3 content streams and custom scheduling.

• Commun.it

The 411: It places the emphasis on who you should be following and who you shouldn’t follow by listing users in 3 different groups: Influencers, Supporters and Engaged Members, which allows you to target your audience more efficiently. It also provides free Twitter analytics, allowing team members to manage your accounts and recommends people you should respond to.

Influencers, Supporters and Engaged Members are determined by followers/following ratios, engagement history, retweets and brand mentions, identifying these valuable people for you to follow.  You’ll also be able to manage multiple Twitter accounts and focus on your top influencers and supporters.

• Canva

The 411: A visual tool that lets you easily turn ideas to visuals. You’ll be able to create images with quotes, conversation bubbles, custom icons and stickers. You have a wide variety of filters and effects to choose from and the ability to re-size images any way you see fit. It also has a ton of customizable layouts that can be changed.

No matter which package and version (Web, iPhone or iPad) you choose, you’ll have access to over 8,000 templates and access millions of photos for $1 each. The Canva website also has a ton of informative tutorials and ideas on how to use the app, along with actual design courses that you can take.

• Raven

The 411: This platform takes things one step further by extending the report monitoring to PPC, SEO and social media marketing campaigns. You can automate all the reporting for all the digital campaigns and include performance metrics from Adwords, Analytics, Facebook, Twitter ads and more.

You also have the option to use the site auditor to automatically crawl your website and gather data about key pages and fix any SEO problems your website may have.

Interested in more social media related tools to make running your business or promoting your film a little easier? Check out my posts on the top tools to create infographics and the top 10 unique ways to promote your film, TV or web project!

Tagged: Canva, Commun.it, DrumUp, Echofon, EveryPost, marketing, organization apps, Planoly, productitvity apps, Raven Tools, social media apps, social media marketing, social media organization, social media productivity, SocialFlow, SocialOomph, Trello