As a news junkie and fanatic web-startup-watcher (is that a word?), I’m always reading up on crazy new tools to measure this and monitor that. I’ve tried a lot of them but so many are just shiny toys; they do something neat that’s really fun for a few days until I forget about it and curse its icon for taking up valuable iPhone/iPad space. But there are some tools that have genuinely made my life easier. 

I read a lot of blogs, so many that I can’t possibly remember to check them all every day, so I rely on Zite and Flipboard to feed me articles of interest. Both apps are similar in that they learn from what I like and, over time, produce personalized content, but incredibly, they rarely send me duplicate content. Flipboard also lets you create your own, shareable magazine, which is a cool new feature they added recently.

So, now that I’ve found all this great content, how do I share it?

Buffer is a simple social media scheduling app. It’s genius. Seriously. There are more complicated apps, sure, but nothing beats the sheer simplicity of reading an article, enjoying it and emailing it to your Buffer account to automatically schedule a tweet or Facebook post. It also integreates with a lot of other useful tools like IFTTT, Pocket and more. I also really admire Buffer as a company. Leo (pictured left) and Joel are kind of my internet heroes. They’ve been incredibly transparent since day 1, which is super refreshing and they also publish a fantastic blog on productivity and user experience.

Another tool I use a lot is Sprout Social. It’s a paid social media monitoring app that offers quite a lot more than scheduling. The most useful thing Sprout Social does for me is curate my ‘smart inbox’ so that I can find conversations and keep up with everything that’s going on for my client. I can monitor conversations, track keywords and export engagement reports.

I’ve also got to give an honourable mention to Paymo, which is way high in my list of favourites because it helps me to track my time and get paid for it! There are plenty of online time tracking applications, but I especially like this one as it has a free iPhone app that syncs to the web version so I can accurately track my time wherever I am. Now THAT’s a useful tool!

I do use other tools, but these are a few of my . These tools save me time and help me produce better content for my client and audience. I hope you will find them useful as well.

Those are my secret weapons. What other tools are in your social media arsenal?