7 less well known Social Media Management productivity tools

Check out these simple tools and apps for social media management to cut down time and increase effectiveness

As a social media marketing professional, there are certain questions that will constantly be on your mind. What are people saying about your product? Are they talking about it? Do they even know about it? Fortunately, these questions are no longer lost in the wind thanks to the wide variety of social media platforms online marketers have at their disposal.

To drive engagement on social media it is imperative that you consistently share interesting, relevant and fresh content with your audience. But sifting through crates of information on the web is frustrating and time-consuming for companies. Unfortunately, it’s not an exercise most startups can afford to forgo.

Amidst the ever increasing noise on social media, catching the customer’s eye is hardly easy. Your businesses must consistently maintain visibility. Understanding the behavior of your customers and generating interesting content could very well be the difference between the success and failure of your business.

Here are a few social media productivity tools that will help amplify your social media presence and increase your efficiency several fold. I have chosen seven less-well known productivity tools that I use regularly, see this post by Robert Allen to check against the best known essential social media productivity tools.

1. DrumUp:

This smart application uses advanced NLP and data mining algorithms to find stories of interest for your audience and queues it up for sharing through Facebook and Twitter pages. The free tool allows you to manage content across multiple Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and lets you edit and approve the stories you share. This saves you the trouble of having to navigate through an endless number of websites to find relevant content for your audience. By acting as your social media assistant, DrumUp helps you constantly stay at the top of everyone's newsfeeds and as a result, at the tip of their tongues

2. Canva

If you want to design like a pro but can’t tell the difference between a stroke and a paint bucket, this is the tool for you. Evading all the complications found on normal graphic designing softwares, Canva allows you to choose from 11 templates or start with a blank canvas. The app uses basic drag and drop movements, making image editing a cakewalk; Plus it comes with a huge database of images that you can choose from. Most of these, however, are paid features

3. Powtoon

This web-based tool is basically PowerPoint Presentation for advertisers. It allows you to create animated presentations for free that can be combined with background scores and narration. You can either work on an existing template or start from scratch. The tool then allows you to filter templates according to what you want to achieve with the presentation. The options range from ‘Marketing and sales’ to ‘Events and Greeting Cards’. Powtoon gives you the option of either uploading your own images or choosing from their inbuilt library. If you struggle with timing and animation on PowerPoint presentations, this tool simplifies the process for you. If simple marketing presentations are what you want, this tool is perfect.

4. Viralwoot

Previously Pinwoot, this neat tool lets you revamp your Pinterest account completely and use it to its maximum potential. It helps you increase your followers, repins, and likes on Pinterest and gives you the option of scheduling pins and repins. Once you sign up for a free account, you can follow various pinners in exchange for ‘seeds’ which serve as the virtual currency of the tool. You start with 30 free seeds with the option of purchasing additional seeds as well. You can also earn seeds by following new pinners, repining appropriate content, or inviting people to be a part of the Viralwoot The scheduling option available on the app makes sure you get your content in front of your audience effectively. Free users are allowed to schedule 100 pins and 100 repins in a month which is a good number if you are looking to stay active.

5. Pinpuff

This tool allows you to analyze your Pinterest account and generates your ‘Pinfluence’ score, which is basically a measure of your visibility and popularity on Pinterest. It also calculates your reach, your activity score and viral score. Pinpuff assesses the popularity of your boards with tabulated information regarding the boards’ followers, pins, repins and likes. The best part? Pinpuff is absolutely free to use.

6. IFTTT

If This Then That is another superb tool, which executes automated tasks for you once certain prerequisites are fulfilled. IFTTT involves three things: tasks, triggers and actions. Tasks are the predefined actions you want done while 'triggers' spark off the action you want IFTTT to perform and finally the 'actions' taken complete the task. What the tool does is perfectly explained in the name itself: if this happens, then do that. It supports 35 web apps. The edit panel shows you the variety of 'triggers' that are available for the web app you select. After choosing a 'trigger', you decide your action channel and the action itself. The final step is to complete the action. You can cook up a bunch of different combinations known as 'recipes' or choose from a variety of templates shared by other users.

7. Newsle

Newsle is great to keep track of the things that friends and influencers publish. It also lets you track mentions of you, your business and your competitors. Its different from other tracking tools in that it uses a disambiguation algorithm to verify whether a person mentioned in an article is really the one you're interested in tracking. The tool uses Email, LinkedIn and Facebook authentication, which helps it gather information about people in both your personal and professional networks.

Social media is an extremely useful marketing tool. It allows you to connect with our audience like never before. Tools like the ones discussed above allow you to make the most of social media and ensure that your campaigns don't fail. So what are you waiting for

Thanks to Jessica Davis for sharing her advice and opinions in this post. Jessica has a keen interest in social media and content marketing, and writes extensively about it. She represents Godot Media, a leading content marketing firm. You can follow her on Twitter.