11 Top Productivity Tools to Use in Social Media Agencies

You know that managing social media platforms is a complex task.

What apps and tools are available to make you more productive?

This post will show you 11 great social media productivity tools. These tools can be used to help a social media agency become more productive.

Agency Productivity Tools

Let’s get started.

1. Toggl allows you to track your time

You must first understand your time and how it is being spent before you can be more productive.

Toggl Track is a timer-based program that tracks your time spent on projects.

I am using the browser-based version. However, there is also a mobile and desktop app.

Sign up now for a free account and open it in a web browser. Then click the play button to get started. The timer will start immediately. When you finish your task, stop it.

Click on the tab ‘Clients” in the sidebar to get a better experience.

Here, add your client names.

Click the “Projects” tab to add any projects that you are working on.

You can add a client to each project and a code of color.

Scroll down to the “Tags” menu. You can now specify tasks such as creating ads, scheduling calls and scheduling content.

You can return to the Timer tab to select a project or tags to add to your timeline before you click play, or after you’ve finished.

You can click the hamburger menu at top to add time later if you forget to record your time live.

The reports tab displays how your time has been spent. It can be very informative.

Agency staff will love the ability to add up to five colleagues to your free plan.

You can upgrade for $9 per month to add additional team members or add billing rates to your reports. This is a great option for agencies that charge per hour.

This tool’s biggest flaw is the fact that it can be difficult to remember to turn it on and off. This tool becomes indispensable once you get into the habit.

2. Buzzsumo – Brainstorming content

It can be time-consuming to brainstorm topics that will be shared, liked and read on social media. Buzzsumo analyzes which content is most successful for each topic and competitor. It is a great tool to help you start brainstorming.

This is an enormous benefit for agencies who want to be efficient with their time and the content they provide to their clients via social media.

It can be used to help you search for topics and popular content, as well as to identify influencers.

Explore

You can use the discover tab to search for content that is trending and categorized by topic.

You can see content that is being widely shared in relation to keywords you have added by going to the content tab.

The results can be broken down by Reddit engagement, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook shares. It also tracks how many links were received for each content.

These are the results of my search for ‘Cats.

Influencers

It can be a time-consuming task to research influencers. BuzzSumo has a tool to help you do this and save time searching manually.

As part of the free plan, you can search for influencers on Twitter. You can also expand this to YouTube or Authors if your upgrade.

Buzzsumo’s unique feature is the ability to search by keywords in profiles as well as articles shared by users.

They are not only categorized with statistics but also tagged. The search results below show that the first result has been tagged as an influencer and blogger.

If you find the results, click on the link to go to an Instagram account.

3. Agorapulse allows you to quickly report on any topic.

It is not everyone’s favorite job to compile client reports. Agorapulse can save you time and create social media reports that are easy to create that will be loved by your clients.

Reports can be downloaded as a PDF, CSV or PowerPoint if you use Power Reports.

gency Playbook: Your Step by-Step Guide for Power Reports

This makes it so much easier for social media agencies to work and takes less time.

No doubling up

Agorapulse doesn’t just offer reports as a time-saving tool. You can also ensure that team members don’t double up on tasks by scheduling.

Agorapulse’s team feature makes it easy for team members to manage multiple accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It also lets them know what comments were answered by whom.

4. Evernote makes it easier to take notes.

Agency work requires you to take notes. You will need to take notes at meetings, ideas that grab you when you see them, websites and content that interests you, and checklists for recurring tasks.

You can do all of these things within Evernote.

It’s possible to take notes on any device, and then pick them up on another. This is especially useful when I need to make notes on my computer, and then pick them up later on my iPad for review.

You can use the browser extension to cut a portion of a website or the entire thing from top to bottom.

It can be used to scan documents. I don’t have to search around for instruction manuals and can save time by using Evernote to find them.

You can use checklist notes to organize recurring tasks. This ensures that each task is completed without your having to think about it. You can also share this information with your team members when you upgrade to one their premium plans.

Here is my checklist to promote my Facebook Live Show.

5. Text Expander saves you time

You use words and phrases such as your email address, website address, and home address for delivery to send emails over and over, sometimes multiple times per day. You send emails that look almost identical to each other, but you end up typing them from scratch each time.

What time would you be able to save if you didn’t have all that typing?

Text Expander is a mobile and desktop app that does the typing for you.

It populates the shortcode with your keywords, phrases, and form email content.

You won’t only save time typing repetitive phrases and filling out forms, but you can also access client ad account, social pages, and analytics quickly with them as an agency. It can also be used to insert shortcut links into email or social media conversations.

It takes only seconds to set up a shortcut within Text Expander.

I am using Text Expander desktop for Mac.

Create a “Group”, which is a folder that you can use for shortcuts.

Click on the ‘New Snippet” icon.

In the main section, add the text that you wish to expand.

The shortcut should be added to the “Abbreviation” field. To avoid accidental expanding, I prefix all my snippets by a +

When I type my shortcut anywhere on my PC, it expands to show the complete link.

Text Expander offers an extra benefit: a monthly email report that shows how much time you’ve saved using snippets.

6. Brain FM helps you stay focused

It can be difficult to stay focused when you have many clients or projects to manage. This is before you consider distractions at work. Your mind wandering can cost you valuable time.

Brain FM is a radio station that plays music specifically designed to aid.

It’s not music you would want to sing or dance to, and certainly not music you’d enjoy listening to in your spare moments. It does help you to focus on the task at-hand.

The app is browser-based and also available as a mobile version. You just need to plug in your headphones (recommended for Brain FM), set the duration and get to work.

It turns on when I have a lengthy task to complete (like this blog post). Although it is supposed to work in 10 minutes, I find that switching it on helps me stay focused.

Brain FM is available for free. For $6.99 per month, you get five sessions free before you have to upgrade.

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7. Trello allows you to manage your projects

Client projects can include many components. You can keep track of the simple things like contact information links, as well as more complicated tasks such reporting, creatives, and processes.

Trello can be used to help you organize all of these parts and make it easy to access them all from one place.

It is based on the Kanaban system and acts as a series or index cards. Each card can contain information, resources, or a subproject such as a research project, content, or an ad campaign.

You can assign cards to team members. Attach attachments can be created, checklists can be created, and tasks can then been assigned from these checklists.

Here is the Trello board template I offer to my clients for managing holiday campaigns.

It is possible to assign due dates for cards and checklist items. This makes it the most useful feature.

Your board will be transformed into a calendar with a power-up. This will transform your board into a calendar.

8. Bit.ly allows you to quickly report with a click

It can be time-consuming to dig into your analytics. If you want to quickly check which social networks drive the most website visits, this is something you should do often. Bitly can help.

Bitly is a tool to shorten links. It converts long links into short, easily rememberable ones. This makes it much easier to share the link verbally.

It’s the tracking that makes it so powerful.

After you have created a link with Bitly and shared it on social media you can see statistics about which websites and social media referred traffic to your link, as well as the location of each click.

This is not a replacement for Google Analytics, but it can provide a quick overview of what’s working.

9. Pixabay

Pixabay has more than 590,000.000 photos and counting. This makes it a great resource to any social media agency. Pixabay images and videos are free from copyrights, under Creative Commons CC0.

This means you can use the files for any purpose, including commercial ones.

The images are organized into different categories which make it easy to find vibrant photos that will bring your social media feed to life.

10. Create graphics quickly using Canva templates & resizing

Non-designers may find graphic design tools difficult and time-consuming. It is often worthwhile to hire a professional graphic designer to create your graphics, but sometimes you need to make something quick for immediate use.

This is especially true for social media.

Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design tool that allows non-designers to quickly create content.

They program in the correct image sizes for social media and offer a variety of templates.

These templates can be customized with the colors and text of your clients or you can create your own templates.

The pro plan allows you to resize graphics for various social media platforms, which can save you a lot of time.

You can create folders to manage your visual content. This makes it easier to locate and reproduce designs for future projects or clients.

This tool is great for social media agencies that have multiple people working on a project or client.

11. Slack

Email becomes cumbersome when you work with many people. It can be difficult to find what you are looking for or to talk to the person you need.

This is where Slack comes in.

Slack, a messaging platform that allows teams to communicate easily, is called “Slack”. Slack breaks down project conversations into channels that are related to specific tasks. Each team member can only join the channels that are relevant to them. One-on-one conversations are also possible.

Each Slack Workspace can be used for one project, unlike other messaging apps. You won’t be distracted by unrelated notifications while you are signed in to a project.

It is a way to easily communicate with many people on a project, before a huge conference of attendees, or as deadlines approach within a social media agency.

These are just a few of the productivity tools that I use frequently.

You can take control of your social media. Get a free trial of Agorapulse, which will help you plan, track, measure, and measure your social media efforts.