I get excited about new apps on my iPhone, or I used to until I started my own business. I still make an effort to check out the new apps available on iTunes, but I’m now interested in what apps can help my business grow and I’ve come across a few recently that are excellent. I thought I would share some of them with you, and if you want to have a go at installing them and letting me know what you think, even better!
I’ve been using Buffer for a few weeks now, there are three different plans, I have the free plan at the moment. This offers 10 posts in your Buffer, 1 Twitter account, 1 Facebook account, free browser extensions, free mobile apps and you can use your Bit.ly details. The other plans offer more posts and other extras, in fact the best plan offers unlimited posts.
Buffer works by scheduling Tweets (or Facebook updates) at optimum times of the day. So when you install it (either as an add-on for your browser, on your iPhone or a widget on your blog/website) you can click the Buffer icon and the tweet/update will automatically be scheduled to post at the next slot.
I tend to use this more for the weekends, it is set-up to post 4 tweets/posts per day, I go through my updates I’d like posted over the weekend and very quickly schedule them. It’s so easy I actually prefer it to Tweetdeck which I use on a daily basis. You don’t have to mess about with the dates and the times, it’s all done for you.
I have only been using SocialBro for a couple of days but I love it!! It’s all about stats, and I am a self confessed stat-aholic. I have installed it as a Chrome add-on and when I open it up it synchronises with my Twitter account. It tells me everything I could ever want to know about my followers and who I follow.
Just on the front dashboard it shows me New Followers, Recent Unfollows, Influence Stats, Not Following You Back, You Aren’t Following Back, “Low Follow Ratio” Users You Follow, “Low Follow Ratio” Followers, Inactive Friends, Inactive Followers, Famous Friends, Famous Follower’s, Influential Friends, Influential Follower’s, New Friends, Newbie Follower’s, Newbies Friends, Follower’s Bio Tagcloud, Very Active Friends and Friends Bio Tagcloud.
But that’s not all, within the application you can customise what you want to see such as ‘Best Time to Tweet’ or ‘Analyse Your Competitors’ and sooooo much more! Can you tell I love this app? You can also link it to Buffer and it will automatically customise the best times to tweet, it suggests you do it once a week so your tweets go out at optimum times.
While writing this blog I also added the Twitter accounts of my clients to SocialBro, being a virtual assistant / social media manager for others it’s going to be a great when I can provide my clients with all these stats and manage their social media more productively.
It would be impossible to try and tell you everything about this wonderful app, so take a look at the SocialBro User Guide.
This app is for the iPad and iPhone, and I’ve had it on my iPhone for some weeks. When you are overwhelmed with social media this is a great app which consolidates everything into a magazine style format. You literally flip through page after page of updates, it’s nothing like your Twitter feed, it includes the images so it makes it so much easier to pick out items of interest. I find that during the evenings when my eyes are getting tired after a day on my laptop, flipping through Flipboard is really easy on the eyes. As well as the feeds you choose, you also have other content which you might not have come across before, such as cover stories, news and Flipboard picks, it’s fully customisable.
So there you are, my top 3 apps for social media. I hope you try some of these out and love them as much as I do and don’t forget to leave a comment and let me know what you think.
