9 Free Digital Marketing Apps You Absolutely Cannot Live Without
By: Digital Marketing Singapore
Tags: Featured, Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing Apps

As a digital marketing professional in Singapore, I tend to bring my work wherever I go, but not necessarily my laptop.

When I’m on the move, my best companion is my mobile phone. So naturally, I rely quite heavily on mobile apps to check in on my work, and I use a few important ones for my content and social media marketing, SEO and analytics-related work.

If you’re a digital marketer like me, or you’re just one to be hands-on with digital marketing for your business, here are some mobile apps that I absolutely swear by.

For managing Facebook

1. Pages Manager

I’m going to start off with the obvious. This Facebook-created app is the go-to for digital marketing professionals who manage their company’s social media account.

Pages Manager lets you manage all your Facebook pages in one single application. You can respond to chats, and schedule and edit posts. These are mostly the features that you can find in the desktop version of Facebook business manager.

With this app, you can track the insights promotions, statistics, and activity on your page.

Do note though, that there have been quite many glitches in the recent updates to the app and receiving notification of new messages may take some time.

However, if you have relatively few messages and you manually check messages at certain times of the day), then Pages Manager is a decent app to have if you want to put your digital marketing hat on-the-go.

Download Pages Manager: iOS and Android

Alternative: Hootsuite

For scheduling social media posts

2. Buffer

Buffer is an awesome, user-friendly scheduling app.

I emphasize ‘scheduling’ because it isn’t an all-encompassing app that allows you to manage your social media accounts comprehensively like Pages Manager or Hootsuite.

It does, however, benefit digital marketing folks with analytics for each post. This includes engagement metrics like clicks, retweets, repins, likes, shares, and mentions.

With Buffer, you can easily schedule stuff like links, text, images or videos to your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn accounts. And at any time and anywhere, at that.

My favorite parts of Buffer are the customizable link previews and its automatic integration with link shortening tools (for tracking aggregated clicks). You can choose between the default Buff.ly or Bitly.

By illustration, say you were to share rachelrooi.com because it’s such an awesome site, and you do this with good ole’ Facebook Manager. The post will look something like this:

You’ll have to use the Facebook preview image as per the website’s Open Graph protocol. Or worse, if they didn’t have one, your post will look something like this:

That looks lousy indeed!

With Buffer, the URL is removed, you can change both the title and descriptions, and upload your own image.

[Update]: It’s now no longer possible to edit the link previews on Facebook. Read Facebook’s blog post here for more info.

Also, the free version allows you to connect up to four social media accounts and schedule up to ten posts per profile. So this applies to other social media accounts like LinkedIn or Google+ too!

Download Buffer: iOS and Android

For highly-used Hashtags

3. HashTags for Instagram

If hashtags elude you, or if you’re feeling uninspired, HashTags for Instagram can generate popular hashtags that are relevant to your category.

I’ve personally been using it to get engagement on my new Instagram account.

Despite not marketing my posts in any other way, including popular hashtags in the caption garnered likes, some comments, and even followers!

Those who liked my posts seemed to be relevant in my field too.

Word of caution: Although there are many ways to improve your Instagram engagement, using this digital marketing app will let you know the top tags. Just make sure you don’t abuse it and that you understand the Do’s and Don’ts of using hashtags.

Download ‘Best HashTags for Instagram’: iOS and Android

Alternative: HashTags for Instagram

Read also: Top 10 Reasons to Pursue a Digital Marketing Career in Singapore (Pt. 1)

For reposting on Instagram

4. Regrann

Reposting on Instagram is a great way to share content done by someone else through your own account. Whether it’s a single image, gallery or video, you can repost Instagram posts without any watermark.

What I like about this particular app is you can repost content without ever leaving Instagram!

All you have to do is click on the three dots on the top right, and hit “copy link”.

This will save the photo(s) and videos onto your gallery, allowing you to share the content at your convenience. You can even use the stuff you’ve saved for other photo or video sharing platforms!

Reposting on Instagram is a great way to encourage user-generated content and feature posts by your brand advocates. Just search for the hashtags related to your product or brand, or any image that’s been tagged to your Instagram account by users, and repost away.

Download Regrann: iOS and Android

Alternative: Repost for Instagram

For writing your blog posts/ creating notes

5. Evernote

As digital marketing practitioners, we need to be ahead of the curve when it comes to not just our work but also how we conduct ourselves to be effective individuals.

Evernote (on desktop and mobile) allows you to take, organize and archive notes, photos, videos and audio files while syncing all of them on various platforms.

This allows you to work wherever you are, whenever you want, whether it’s on your desktop, mobile or tablet devices.

And of course, you can use Evernote for your personal use; you just have to save the notes in a different ‘notebook’. You can easily create lists for errands and check them off as you go along! But I digress.

Evernote is great for quick note-taking when you’re suddenly inspired, and sharing them with your teammates.

However, it isn’t as top notch when it comes to its rich text editor, which is why I would recommend the Google Docs app, which Google recently announced has tons of third party add-on support, or even the Wordpress app if you’re doing serious work on your mobile phones or tablets.

Download Evernote: iOS and Andriod

Alternatives: Google Docs and Wordpress

For checking your stats

6. Google Analytics

The Google Analytics app is one of my favorite daily apps.

If you want web analytics on the fly, the Google analytics app is your best bet. It has most of the features available the desktop version, and using it is pretty seamless on its easy-to-navigate interface.

What’s more, you can view metrics that are important to you with built-in or your very own customised reports, compare date ranges and apply segments and get real-time data. What’s there not to love?

Download Google Analytics: iOS and Andriod

Read also: Top 10 Reasons to Choose Digital Marketing as a Career in Singapore (Pt. 2)

For separating work and personal accounts

7. Parallel Space

If you’re an in-house digital marketer or running campaigns/ social media for your clients, you’re bound to run into a situation where you need to separate your personal accounts from your work-related ones.

Thankfully, there’s Parallel Space which allows you to run accounts simultaneously on your phone.

Parallel Space allows you to connect messaging accounts and social networks such as WhatsApp, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter and even Facebook Messenger, just to name a few.

Do note that using the free account subjects you to ads every now and then, so if you’re particular about that, the $9.90 may be a hefty but good investment. Alternatively, you may use your Google Opinion Rewards to purchase this app (or any other app on for that matter).

Download Parallel Space: Only available for Andriod users

For editing your videos

8. FilmoraGo

FilmoraGo was introduced to me by a multimedia video producer colleague from SPH.

To be honest, at first, I’d assumed that this video editor app might be daunting but as turns out, it was pretty foolproof.

What I like about FilmoraGo is, unlike other video editing apps, it is free of watermark or time limits. To add, you can create video clips with effects like music, titles and text, overlays, transitions, filters, and icons.

Download FilmoraGo: iOS and Andriod

9. Sinium SEO

Last but definitely not least, Sinium SEO is the must-have free SEO app you should have on your mobile phone if you’re an SEO pro.

Geek out on more than 50 free SEO tools available for your ranking, research, performance, and on-page/ off-page optimisation needs.

Some of the most common ones I use include MozRank Checker, Google SERP Lookup, Pagespeed Insights, Backlinks Lookup, Domain Authority and Pagerank Checker.

There’s more to it, but I’d recommend you try it out for yourself and knock yourself out!

The only thing that I don’t like about it isn’t all that user-friendly (yet, it seems), and they are still polishing up some functionalities such as the export PDF option for the SEO Report Card tool. Nonetheless, Sinium SEO is one of the best free apps by far for its purpose.

Download Sinium: Only available for Andriod users

Alternative: iOS users, check out SEO tools

Has this post been useful to you? Are there apps that you cannot live without as a digital marketing professional?

Feel free to let me know in the comments below!