What would any of us do without our precious iPhone? Smartphones just keep getting smarter, making it easier for us to manage social media on the go.
Check out the following apps for yourself. Most are free; others might cost you a couple of bucks. All are worth downloading and giving them a try if you don’t have time to languish at the office or your home while running your business.
AllSync
This app is definitely worth a mention. You can sync all your social media contact’s info to your iPhone contacts so you never forget any important details about them (e.g., names, photos, phone numbers, emails, birthdays, addresses, companies, job titles, notes, IMs, website links, nicknames, anniversaries.) The app is still a work in progress, as each social media site continually updates their privacy policies. For instance, Facebook only allows the app to import names and photos after their recent Restricted Policy updates. Works with the following social accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Xing, Yahoo, Orkut, Netlog, Linkedin, Plaxo, MySpace. This app will only get more powerful as time goes on.
Hootsuite
This is a powerful app when your business doesn’t let you sit at your desk all day managing your social accounts. You can schedule tweets and Facebook page posts, connect to your Foursquare account, translate foreign posts to your language for viewing, and more. It comes with url shortener integration (Ow.ly), works with GPS to share your location, and allows you to “Bump” the people you cross paths so you can follow them on their social media accounts.
Circle
This app could be dead in a year, but the current popularity on the iTunes store indicates otherwise. Yet another new social network that’s gaining traction for users. It gives you access to information that’s happening around you according to your geo-location info. From a business perspective, this can be helpful if you’re in the business of sharing news and other breaking information with followers and clients. Great if you’re running a news site, or work as a reporter.
Unfollow
Unfollow is an essential cleaning app for your Twitter accounts. The tool automatically unfollows dormant and suspended accounts, unfollows people who don’t follow you back, and gives you a readout of people who’ve unfollowed you. Hey you don’t want to do people a service by adding to their follower count when they can’t be bothered doing the same for you, right? Simple yet essential iPhone app for your business.
If you use Instagram for more than just posting your “selfies”, this iPhone app lets you capture and share photos with Instagram followers easily. It has a few built-in editing tools that allow you to tweak your photos and vids, while also sharing them with your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare accounts.
Of course you need a Facebook app for your iPhone! The free app lets you do pretty much everything you could do from your Mac or PC without the drawbacks of using certain mobile browsers. The video album feature is non-existant currently, which can be bothersome for some of you. Expect a few other limitations over using your laptop or desktop at this time. Still, this is great for Facebook viewing on the move.
Vine
The totally free (for now) Vine app lets you film little teaser vid posts on the fly with your iPhone. You’ll have to check it out for yourself if you haven’t yet. Similar to the short-and-sweet tweeting platform, but for video clips instead, the Vine social platform for mobile users allows you to post 6-second vids. Be forwarned about “revines”, which as you can imagine are the same as “retweets”. (The biggest trouble I found with the whole revine issue is that it’s harder to scroll through 25 revines than it is to do the same task with 25 retweets, making it easy to get sucked in to watching hours of 6-second clips, then wondering where the time went! Your customers and competitors are using it, so should you.)
Hangouts
It’s hard to keep up with all the changes that Google’s making. The new Hangout app is a mobile chat platform for Google+ users to talk with their contacts. It’s a pretty cool app. You can chat with 10 people at once, on the fly. New features include SMS, MMS, photo/animation sharing, status and geographical location-sharing.
BBM
Will Blackberry survive in the end? Nobody really knows, but businesses big and small are still using them. Just because you choose to stay off the Blackberry-bandwagon doesn’t mean your contacts and clients will follow suit. You can stay in touch via your iPhone by chatting and sending video, photos, voice memos, text files and more. Pick it up for free right now.
Skype
Where would any of us be without Skype? Heck, we’d probably use G+ Hangouts more, or (gasp) maybe MSN Messenger would still be popular! You can expect a few bugs if you’re using an older iPhone with the current ios7 updates (why do these updates make things worse all the time?) Still, most users love using Skype on their iPhone – the resolution is amazing and most of the features are perfectly intact.
Photo credit: Jason A. Howie
