Social Media Blogs by Aliza Sherman
Aliza Sherman is a web pioneer, author, and international speaker. Sherman is the author of 8 books about the Internet including The Everything Blogging Book, Streetwise Ecommerce, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Crowdsourcing and Social Media Engagement for Dummies.

5 Must Have Apps for Social Media Marketing Success

5 Must Have Apps for Social Media Marketing Success

If you aren’t using your smartphone to help manage your social media marketing, you’re missing a lot. Besides the convenience and mobility of being able to access, monitor, and manage your social media accounts from your phone, some of the most popular social networks function either mostly or exclusively on mobile such as Tiktok and Snapchat.

Smartphone apps can help with some key social media marketing tasks including:

  1. Monitoring and Responding
  2. Planning and Scheduling
  3. Designing and Crafting
  4. Collaborating and Storing

Which apps should you download to your smartphone? Start with the mobile app versions of the social networks you use the most to market your company. Here are some other smartphone apps that give you the tools you need to perform the most common tasks you need to do when marketing through social media.

Monitoring and Responding

Using a social media dashboard puts all - or most - of your social media accounts at your fingertips so you can keep up with relevant messages and respond in an organized and timely fashion. From Hootsuite to Sprout Social, these free and fee-based services provide analytics as well so you can measure how you’re doing. Access these dashboards with the mobile versions from your smartphone for portability.

Planning and Scheduling

Plan and schedule key messages to get a handle on the multiple messages in different formats required when marketing through social media. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer let you plan your messaging ahead of posting for multiple platforms including Twitter, LinkedIn Company Pages and personal profiles, and even Facebook Pages and Profiles, however, the better way to plan and schedule Facebook posts is to use their native planner and scheduler.

For Instagram, Planoly helps you visualize the look of your Instagram account page while allowing you to plan and schedule regular posts. You can use it to plan Stories and Reels but still need to manually post those as well as videos. Planoly also supports Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.

Designing and Crafting

In terms of design, one of the most popular apps for designing posts and Stories is Canva. Their vast library of templates can give you a head start with creating eye-catching visuals and you can customize them to be appropriate for your brand. Other useful tools include PicMonkey to manipulate images and Photo and Vont apps to easily add text over images and videos using your smartphone.

Collaborating and Storing

Part of creating assets to use in social media marketing involves handling large files and collaborating with others. Use a file storage and sharing platform like GDrive or Dropbox, especially if you are working with others and they need access to files. If you’re working with multiple people - such as a graphic designer, a scheduler, an ad manager, a writer and editor - you may want to use a tool to managing tasks. One popular task management tool is Asana. You can assign tasks, track progress, and attach instructions, messaging, and graphics, photographs, and video files to manage a smoother workflow.

As you can see, there are many tools you can use for social media marketing. Most tools have a web version, iOS and Android smartphone apps, and some even provide desktop versions. Think through your social media marketing process then find the apps best suited for your needs - and your budget.


Read other social media blogs by Aliza Sherman