Have PR Tools, Will Work Efficiently
What PR tools and apps do you use on a daily basis? Are you wondering if there are other tools out there that you should add to your toolkit? There are many low-cost and free tools for PR, social media and content marketing pros. We’ve compiled a list of the tools that we use in our business and we want to share those with you!
PR Campaign Tools
Iris PR For tracking the results of your pitches and capturing articles about your clients.
When we first started using Iris a year ago, we were so thrilled with its capabilities, we wrote a review of it. Since then, they continued to add features—such as a Gmail connection, media contacts, etc.—that are helpful to us on a day-to-day basis.
Anewstip is a source for identifying influencers via Twitter. You can also sort people according to the beats they’re covering. Free version available.
HARO, owned by Cision, sends queries via email three times per weekday from journalists and bloggers seeking sources for stories. The free version allows you to choose only the categories that you need (for example, technology queries), and the low-cost monthly subscriptions offer additional benefits.
TechNews PR Deadlines is a free email newsletter for PR pros from TechNews (formerly IT Database) that lists upcoming speaking and award deadlines for your technology clients. Sign up for a subscription here.
PR Content Planning
Anders Pink is a tool that monitors important topics you need to know about and sends articles to you as a personalized daily briefing, filtered the way you want. Free version for one user, or low-cost monthly subscriptions if you want more bells and whistles.
Answer the Public helps marketers identify the best topics for content that is useful, engaging and likely to be shared and cited, and attract more traffic. Free.
Moz SEO toolbar. The free, Chrome-compatible “MozBar” (available for download here gives you instant metrics while viewing any website or webpage). Of particular interest to PR is the MozBar’s ranking of a site’s “Domain Authority,” which helps you decide where to seek out media coverage and placements for contributed content. The site offers other free marketing and SEO tools here.
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Media Monitoring
Talkwalker media monitoring and social media tracking. Absolutely THE best free-free-free clip search tool is Talkwalker Alerts found here. No need to sign up to use it, but if you do subscribe, you get the latest relevant mentions on the Web directly to your email box or RSS feed reader. More comprehensive than Google News or Bing News search. Not stingy like Mention’s free version.
Mention media monitoring
Google News News alerts
Social Media Tools
Meet Edgar posting of your evergreen social media content. This little gem of an app takes all the older social media posts and shuffles them and begins posting them for you. It’s an excellent way to get extra mileage out of your posts that are evergreen. We’ve introduced this app to several clients and they love it. Try it out here and get $10 back!
Hootsuite Social media platform
Buffer Social media scheduler
Bit.ly URL shortener
Images and Photos
Canva and Stencil for creating images for your blog posts
Pixlr Online photo editor. If you don’t have Photoshop but need those capabilities, you can easily use Pixlr. In working with our graphic designer and web developer, I have use Pixlr to change photo sizes and settings with ease.
Scannable scans documents and photos via your smart phone. I use this app on my smartphone about 2 times a week. Invariably, there is a paper document that I need to send to someone or a contract that needs my signature. With Scannable, I just take a picture of the document and it turns the document into a PDF file or a JPEG file and I can email or text or share the document right away. Snap! Done in a minute! Since this app is part of Evernote, it also saves the scans into Evernote.
Infogram Create infographics, maps, charts and interactive images from more than 20 templates, or you can create your own. Import your data and download your completed work. Free version available.
Project Management
Teamwork project management and time tracking software. Our agency has been using Teamwork since 2014, initially just as a time tracking tool. It has many other features, such as project management and invoicing. I really like how I can send an email directly to a task for a project with a custom email address. And, the budgeting and forecasting abilities are real time savers. I know that we only scratch the surface of Teamwork’s capabilities but we like what we use it for.
Wunderlist To Do list and reminders. This is a handy app that I use for both my business and personal life. I love how I can use it across all my platforms—computer, iPad and smartphone. It captures your To Do list in an inbox or in files that you set up. You can also set it up to connect to your calendar so you have additional reminders of your tasks. I especially like how I can add to my grocery list on my phone so I don’t have to take little slips of paper with me to the store! I’ve divided my lists into these categories: Today, This Week, Grocery List, Phone Calls, Errands, To Discuss, Computer Work, Home, etc. I’ve trained myself to input notes about picking up dry cleaning in the Errands list and a note on preparing monthly invoices in the Computer Work list.
Zapier Automating workflows. Zapier creates processes and systems that let computers do what they are best at doing and let you do what you are best at doing. I’ve created “zaps” that take my WordPress blog posts and populate them to my Meet Edgar account. My QuickBooks Online invoices go to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. It takes my tasks from Google Calendar and Wunderlist and adds them to a Google Sheets spreadsheet. Their blog is awesome as well! It talks about productivity, workflow automation, company building and how to get things done with less work.
IFTTT If This Then That. The IFTTT software platform connects your devices and applets together to help you automate workflows. Set up an app to add new Twitter followers to an Excel spreadsheet. Back up photos when they are posted on Facebook. Sync all your phone (iOS) contacts to a Google spreadsheet. The list goes on…
Business
BizGym Lots of great tools for entrepreneurs and startups, including a friendly tree-shaped mind map that intelligently guides you to write your business story. The cool thing is that whatever you write on one tool auto-completes other BizGym templates, such as the elevator pitch, the investor presentation and the marketing brochure. Try free for 30 days before choosing a low-cost monthly subscription.
Conferencing/Telecommunications
Freeconference.com Free conference calls with audio recording. In PR, you often have to interview experts and it’s important to record your interviews so you can go back and listen to their comments again. We use FreeConference’s audio recording a lot! We also like how FreeConference offers international phone numbers for other callers.
Join.Me Free screen sharing and online meetings. Sometimes you have to see the screen of the person you are talking with, whether it is to go over the graphics of a piece of content you are creating or to show how to use a piece of software. I love the ease of use of Join.Me and and how it makes screen sharing so easy. ‘Nuff said!
Let us know what tools you use and the apps that you can’t live without!