Free online tool and tricks to help increase your productivity
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Posted under: Advertising & Marketing, Blog, Community Management
Because I work in social media, I basically spend most of my time online and sometimes it’s hard not to get distracted by everything that I come across on the internet. So for the past few months, I’ve been playing around with a few online apps and tools and they’ve significantly increased my productivity. Here are a few of my favourites:
Boomerang
Ever sent an important email to someone and they never got back to you? Boomerang for Gmail can help you with that. Whenever you email somebody about something, and they don’t reply within a certain time frame, the email is sent back (ie. Boomeranged) to your inbox as a remainder that you should follow up.
Boomerang also has a send later option, which let’s you schedule your emails. So if you’re ever working on an email late at night and you want it sent out first thing in the morning, you can schedule it to do just that!
Evernote I’m an avid note taker and I take notes relentlessly. I also have a tendency to frequently lose my notes or forget them at home or at work especially when I need them the most. Thankfully, Evernote solves that problem for me. Evernote is a free easy to use app that lets you take notes, sync files across your devices, save webpages and much much more.
One of the coolest things about Evernote, is that it automatically backs up and saves your data while you work, so don’t sweat if you forget to save your work. The best thing about Evernote however, is its synchronization feature. Documents and notes from your computer are instantly synced to your smartphone, ipad, work computer etc., which means that you can always access your notes and documents wherever you are.
Read Later Fast
Because I spend a lot of time online, I come across a lot of great articles which I don’t always have time to read. A great tool for dealing with that problem is Read Later Fast which allows you to save an article to an archive and then ‘read it later’. All you have to do is download the Chrome extension and then when you find an online article you like, you just Right-Click on the web page you want to save and select ‘Read Later’.
Read Later Fast also syncs your stored archive so you can access all your saved web pages on your phone or on all your different computers.
Another great thing about Read Later Fast, is that the web pages you save can be read even without an internet connection. So you can read all your saved web pages on your phone without worrying about going over your data limit.
Social Bro This one is for the Community or Social Media managers!
Social Bro is a free tool that let’s you manage and analyze your Twitter community. Although Twitter management tools are a dime a dozen, SocialBro has a number of unique features which seperates it from the rest.
For example, it has the Best Time to Tweet report. It basically ananlyzes 100 of your Twitter followers (which you can customize) and then it tells you the times they are most online and the best time to tweet to them. Another cool thing you can do with SocialBro, is analyze the followers and friends of any Twitter account. This is particularly useful if you want to keep track of your competitors’ community so that you can follow them and interact with them.
On top of this, SocialBro has a real time analysis feature which gives you up to the second real time reports on which of your followers are currently online. How cool is that?
SocialBro is still in Beta though, so not everththing about this app runs smoothly and I’ve had a few technical issues with it from time to time. The SocialBro team does however, respond to you quickly on Twitter whenever you have an issue.
Yoast SEO plugin for wordpress:
Another one for Community or Social Media managers. I’m not a big fan of plugins since downloading too many of them can slow down the performance of your blog. But if there’s one plugin you must use on your our blog then it’s Yoast! It will change the way you blog.
Yoast gives you control over WordPress’ SEO architecture by allowing you to easily enter your blog post’s meta title and description, change permalinks, and much more. You can read more about Yoast and why it’s a must for your blog here.
Other tools you should check out:
Pinerly: An awesome analytics tool for Pinterest. It’s still in beta though and you need an invite yo use it.
Delicious: Another bookmarking tool. Particularly useful for keeping your bookmarks organized using tags and stacks.
TweetDeck: A great tool for staying on top of tweets from your favourite people and brands on Twitter.
Screen Capture by Google: An easy to use Google Chrome extension for taking screen captures.
What are some of your favourite tools and apps? Feel free to share them with me.
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