Social Media Business Apps and Tools You Should Use

If you’re like most business owners, you have a lot on your plate at any given time. Some days you just can’t spend the amount of time that you need to on things like blogging and social media marketing.

Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there that can help make things more efficient and easier for you. Below are some useful social media business apps you should try.

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Try These Social Media Business Apps

Edgar

Edgar is a new tool and app that just launched this year and focuses on making sure your past social media content doesn’t go to waste. Whenever a tweet or post is sent, Edgar saves it to a library of posts, which can be sorted into categories. You can then set Edgar to republish items from the saved library and/or to publish from past posts when you’ve run out of new items in your queue that you’ve scheduled to be published for the first time. This way, you’ll never run out of content, and your great posts have a chance to be seen by more people, since you are publishing them on social media more than once.

Edgar currently is in invite-only beta and costs $49 per month for an individual subscription and up to $999 for an agency monthly subscription (businesses are in between at $449 per month).

Revive Old Post

This is a great free WordPress plugin that allows you to, like Edgar, reshare old posts, this time from your blog. After you connect your social networks, Revive Old Post allows you to set the frequency of shared posts, as well as other settings, like hashtags or custom URLs. After you set it, you can forget it, allowing your great content that you’ve published throughout the years not to fall by the wayside on social media. This allows your old content to not only be continuously found, but it also increases social media referral traffic and overall engagement.

Additionally, Revive Old Post allows you to select which specific categories to pull from, so you can exclude outdated or irrelevant categories, such as announcements or event recaps.

BuzzSumo

This is a social media and content marketing analytics platform that allows you to see how well your content is doing on social media, as well as see content from other sites you name specifically or search by keyword for. BuzzSumo’s platform is easy to use and it gives you a great idea of how your social media is doing at a glance, which is great when you don’t have much time to spend or you want to get the big picture in seconds.

In this example of HomeDepot.com, which is just a random domain, you can see at a glance which content of theirs is the most popular on social media. If this was a competitor of yours, you could use it as inspiration for your own content, as well as getting a quick overview of their saturation on a specific network. For instance, you may notice that tutorials do great on Pinterest and Facebook, but not on Twitter, where white papers seem to flourish.

BuzzSumo ranges from $99 to over $499 per month.

SumAll

This is a free tool that is basically an at-a-glance analytics dashboard for almost any data-driven service you could use in your marketing. SumAll allows you to link not only all social media networks (except for those that don’t have an API yet, like Pinterest), but also allows you to link Google Analytics, MailChimp, and more. This lets you view your data and analytics all in one place. You can then export custom, well-designed reports for $19 each (bulk pricing is also available).

SumAll also lets you get custom reports about specific data trends delivered to you by email each morning, so you can stay on top of your social media data better.

Pocket or RSS Readers

Are you having trouble coming up with content to share on your social media networks? Start keeping up with industry blogs and news by utilizing Pocket, which lets you save articles to read and share later (you can also save videos and photos). It’s a free app that lets you look for content on the go, then check it out when you get back to home or the office to make sure it’s a good fit for your social media profiles.

Additionally, you can stay on top of content with a free RSS reader like BlogLovin’ or Feedly, which are both good alternatives to the now-deceased Google Reader.  Once you subscribe to blogs’ RSS feeds, you can better stay on top of industry content and share it on social media as needed. BlogLovin’ also recommends other popular blogs users are following that are related to ones you follow, which is great for content discovery. Both of these apps and online platforms are free.

Monitoring Tools

Whether you are wanting to monitor what people are saying about your company and its products and services online, or you just want sharing and content ideas, try using a monitoring and alert tool like Social Mention or Google Alerts. Both are free and allow you to search for specific names or phrases both on social networks and websites.

As you can see from the example above, you can search for a keyword or phrase across social media, events, news, video, and more. This can allow you to not only scan for your own business, but to also find content ideas and where your target audience is congregating (and talking about your industry) online.

Google Alerts focuses mainly on sending results to your email at a frequency you set, which will bring up results from Google SERPs. This can also include some social networks, since Google does index Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and more.

These social media business apps and tools are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to available social media and online marketing resources for businesses. Try them all out (most paid tools offer free trials or tiers) and see what works best for your daily processes and workflow before combining a set of tools that will really make your social media strategy stand out.

Image: Edgar

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