A social media presence is becoming more and more important for all productions nowadays. It doesn’t matter if the production is the size of the new James Bond movie, or if the production has the budget of a Kit Kat chunky, social media is a valuable tool that you should not overlook. However, and I’m totally speaking from experience here, social media can also be overwhelming and complicated.
I mean take Twitter for example, you have to post relevant, worthwhile tweets multiple times a day, you have to make sure you’re retweeting your fans, followers, competitors and partners as well, you have to monitor the amount of traction, shares, likes and retweets that any single one of your posts receives, you have to reply and retweet any tweets you’re mentioned in, answer all and any questions thrown at you by follower and fans, you have to monitor trolls and negative tweets as quickly as possible, you have to make sure you’re expanding your followers whilst at the same time making sure to keep your follow list down, you have to join, create and be actively apart of groups and lists and at the same time, you have to figure out what exactly your audience wants and given it to them, constantly!
No wonder companies have whole departments dedicated just to social media.
Yes, social media can appear to be a difficult world to navigate, but thanks to some digital geniuses, there are a whole slew of apps out there to simplify the process. Below are just a few of oh so many!
Crowdfire
A personal favourite of mine and a total lifesaver. Aimed at Twitter, although they have small Instagram extension, Crowdfire claims to help you organically grow your twitter followers by up to 400% per month. With multiple subscription plans, including a free service (whoop whoop), this apps helps you manage mentions, retweets, analyses your competitors, your followers, your unfollowers and helps you find new accounts tweeting about your “keywords”. A must in my opinion as this bad boy taught me how to love and utilise twitter.
Hootsuite
Perfect for you busy bodies who would rather schedule your daily or even weekly posts in one go. This app is great for planning ahead as all you have to do later on is click a button at the right time, which by the way Hootsuite will notify you about. Able to bounce between multiple accounts and initially free to download (unless you want a higher service), this is a must for organising your social media campaigns.
Spark Post
Developed by Adobe, this app is perfect for helping you enhance your images, or even create them, for multiple social media platforms. Want to add text, shapes, cartoon pictures or colouring to your images; Adobe’s got you covered. And no worries if you don’t have an exact image yet, Adobe lets you browse through their stock images for free. This app has been a personal lifesaver on multiple occasions! And hey, if you love it so much, grab their Spark video app for, yup you guessed it, your videos!
Mention
This wonderful app allows you to monitor how your brand (or production in this case) is doing in real time. It allows you to analyse, monitor and engage with audiences as well as compiling reports. What I love most about this app? It allows you to find your brand influencers. Meaning you can see who’s mentioning your keywords and who is receiving the most traction from them. Pretty awesome, right?!
Facebook Page Manager
Want to know how your Facebook page is doing? How many engagements you received per post? What’s the best time to publish? This app developed by the Facebook team allows you to do all that. It’s perfect for gathering insights, keeping you responding to mentions and comments and allows you to see not only how many page likes you’ve received, but also how many views. A must for any production with a Facebook page to manage!