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For those without the right tools, social media management can be a daunting and time-consuming task. A little time pressure is not necessarily a bad thing, however, there comes a point when it can start to impact on the quality of your work, and consistency starts to drop.
Fortunately, there are some fantastic extensions for Google Chrome which not only help social media managers to use their time effectively but also maintain a high level of quality and consistency in their work. Here are our 5 favorites:
Instagram for Desktop
Instagram has always been a mobile-centric platform. Features on desktop are limited: there is no centralized section for viewing stories, and many of the features that are most useful for social media managers are only available in Beta via Facebook’s Creator Studio. This includes analytics and content scheduling. Even managing DMs can’t be done directly on the Instagram website.
This means that many social media managers spend their time using different devices for different social accounts and tasks. Transferring text or images between devices then becomes an obstacle and productivity drops. Workarounds include using Airdrop for Apple users, or Whatsapp for desktop, however, neither is as efficient as using your computer in the first place.
The Instagram for Desktop Chrome extension is a great solution that not only gives you a lot of the missing functionality directly on your computer but also allows you to easily manage more than 6 accounts (the Instagram mobile account only provides space for 6 different accounts at once).
Last Pass
So you’ve downloaded the Instagram for Desktop extension, and now want to efficiently manage the passwords for each Instagram account. You probably also have passwords for Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google, and Facebook, as well as for each of the online tools that you use.
Last Pass allows you to manage all of these in one location and even helps by letting you know when there are any security issues, such as weak passwords or identical passwords on multiple platforms.
It can be surprising just how much time you save by using a password management tool. Looking through notes to find passwords is completely unnecessary; once you use this you won’t look back!
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ColorZilla
Provided British-English users can forgive the lack of the letter ‘u’ in the name, this is a go-to when managing social media for more than one business. Each of your clients will have brand guidelines, and reading through these each time you want to create a quick graphic can be tedious and inefficient.
By adding ColorZilla to your browser, you can copy colours from existing materials, allowing you to ensure brand consistency without any of the hassle.
Grammarly
Even the best of us get caught out by typos and mistakes, and those few little mistakes start to become a major issue when you don’t catch them in proofreading. When you’re working under pressure, proofreading is one of the first things to suffer, and poor quality copy can end up published.
Grammarly will not only point out any mistakes like these but will also let you know when your language is unclear or hard to read. The free version provides all of the essentials, and will quickly become an integral part of your workflow.
Flaunt
Thanks to the previous four tools you’ve done some fantastic work that has achieved great results. Now it’s time to show off the fruits of your labour! Reporting can be incredibly time-consuming, and juggling screenshots from every social account for each of your clients can cause chaos.
Fortunately, Flaunt provides us with a tool to manage all of those screenshots, conveniently sorted by client, date and social platform. You can then use Flaunt to build a professional-looking report in a fraction of the time it would take without it. This allows social media managers to spend more of their time generating great results, rather than being bogged down in admin!
So there you have it; our top 5 Chrome extensions to help you speed up your workflow and consistently produce top quality work. Still hungry for more tips on how to be as productive as possible? Take a look at our list of 50 Social Media Productivity Hacks, which has plenty of advice to make sure you’re always at the top of your game!