Most of the work we do today as marketers or business owners is online. The typical day of any professional involves sitting before a computer and using various online tools and apps to create and test products, attract customers and market your products. It is safe to say that most of the time you have an internet browser open and you access various websites, from cloud storage to email clients.
Thus, it would be most helpful if the information and tools you need in your social media marketing work were integrated in the browser and would give you real time notifications when something significant happens. This is why browser extensions were invented. They are integrated in the toolbar of the browser, next to the navigation and bookmark buttons, and serve as standalone shortcuts to the social media and content marketing tools you use on a regular basis.
We browsed the most popular ones and, because we don’t want you to load and slow down your browser with too many extensions, selected the ones we find most useful.
- Grammarly
Grammarly is an online tool which checks the spelling and grammar of your texts, and even suggests synonyms and other ways in which you can improve your texts and make them more readable. Its dedicated browser extension corrects your texts as you type them in a browser. This is extremely helpful when you are writing social media posts or blog posts directly into your website CMS.
Grammarly is available for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
- Social Analytics
Whenever you want to know how many times your blog articles were shared on Facebook™ or LinkedIn, tweeted or pinned on Pinterest, all you have to do is click on the Social Analytics extension in your browser toolbar.
But this extension does not only let you see how your own content gets shared across the social media. You can get the same results for any blog and any article which contains social sharing buttons. That’s right, you can keep track of your competitors and see how their social media strategy fares compared to yours.
Social Analytics is available for Google Chrome.
- Buffer
You may have heard about Buffer from our previous articles, or you may even use it already. This useful social media automation and curation tool has an associated browser extension which helps you share content on the go to your social media pages. For example, if you are reading an article which you think your readers would like, you can simply click on the Buffer extension and share it on your Facebook™, LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+ account.
If you want to share only a photo from the article, right click on it and you will find the Buffer extension alongside the other options. The same happens when you select a portion of text and right click on the selection.
The Buffer extension is available for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera.
Did you just come across an extremely interesting article which you would like to share later to your followers? How do you do this? Do you bookmark it hoping you will find it among hundreds or thousands of other bookmarks? Do you copy the URL in a text file and then forget about it?
Pocket solves this problem for you: with a simple click on the browser extension, the respective URL is stored to your own “pocket”: a place where you can keep various bits of information you find online, organise it and use it at the precise moment when you need it. What is truly useful about this extension is that it effectively downloads the content you are interested in, so you can read it even in the offline mode.
Pocket is available for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera.
- Klout
What is your brand or personal impact on the social media? How popular are you? These are two key questions which Klout answers quickly and accurately by calculating your influence score between 1 and 100. The browser extension works for Twitter, and the other way round: it shows you in real time the influence score of people and accounts you follow.
Thus, you can expand your reach by following top influencers, starting a dialogue with them and sharing or commenting on their posts.
Klout is available for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari.