My Top 13 Chrome Extensions for Social Media Managers (and addicts)

Here’s one for the social media professionals, potentially social media addicts and the Google Geeks.

I now cannot work anywhere without my favourite browser Chrome.

Extensions are the little and mostly free add-ons that help streamline repetitive tasks spectacularly as I work daily across social media and web content. For mem they have replaced shortcuts, bookmarks and bookmarklets.

1. Send from Gmail
Awesomeness incorporated. You can select text and mail it. Or just mail the link and a pop-up window does the rest. I use this twenty times a day.

2. Awesome Screenshot
Annotate screenshots, select area, visible or full page, add text, circles, lines, arrows in an instant. then save. Shame you can’t email.

3. Session Manager.

Save all current tabs and reopen them later. SImple. Classy. Perfect if you are like ame and regularly open twelve tabs then need to swap computers or just save some RAM.

4. Evernote.
This is essential for any notetaker. Clips pages,pics, selected text,full pages. And keeps them forever, and they are searchable. Handiest for keeping a record of online transactions.


5. One Password

Inserts your password on any given page, saves all of them securely and generates fancy ones you wil never remember – but hackers can’t guess them. Win-Win! (You won’t find this in the store. Must buy the One Password program first. )

6. Google News

Expandable headlines should be the future. It’s the best thing HTML5 ever brought us. You want to read more, just click the headline & there’s the story! Sure, lists are ugly but have you seen most news sites lately? This works great with customisable news searches, syncs with your google account and updates download constantly.

7. Facebook
This needs work. The quick look at messages and updates is not a good enough replacement for the website because it pretty much is the website but with side navigation be fewer features. It’s also buggy and wasn’t activating when I went to get a screenshot. Keep at it Zuck.

8. Chrome It Later

Clips any page or selection to your Read it Later account, which syncs with my iPhone app to give me lunchtime or railtime reading. (Perfect for reading offline on trains when you lose connectivity.) I used to change the settings pane so I could add tags but now I don’t bother as I read most on the same day.

9. AdBlock

The most popular of all Chrome extensions, they claim. I never need to click this unless I notice this effective ad-blocker has removed some other valuable element by accident. Which is rare because ad-blocking works! I own three!

10. Bit.ly link shortener

Every social media manager needs this. I am regularly involved in five twitter accounts – only one of which is personal, so tweaks for quick tweeting are essential. This is like THE swiss army knife extension for twitter. It allows text clipping, multiple accounts, copies the link to your clipboard, and has a genius right-click menu feature that takes any link, shortens it & copies it to your clipboard. Sharing, tweeting & tracking of links was never supposed to be this easy!! Get it. No questions.

11. Mashable

Could be improved but gives you the latest tech and social media stories at a glance. The real estate is used poorly which makes the whole thing a bit of a let down. Alas, there are two mashable extensions – get the one with expandable lists of headlines.

12. Picasa

Don’t use this, why is it there? How often do you want to browse your own galleries on this underpowered version of flickr? It shows up comments. Has anyone ever commented on your Picasa albums. Did you even know they could?

13. Huffington Post

HuffPo is an unstoppable news source and aggregator specialising in viral content and political sex scandals. This extension gives handy, quick navigation of top stories in each category – which sure beats using their convoluted website (although NewsGlide makes it feel like you’re on an iPad. Much cooler).

——-
So there they are. I haven’t spent hours searching out the best but of those I have come across and used, these have stayed undeleted longer than most!
Oh, nearly forgot.
Those indictors in the address bar include two last good extensions.
The first one is an instant Google Reader RSS Subscriber that grabs any RSS and with one click adds it to your Google Reader list. You can even select the folder it should enter.
The light bulb is called Turn Off The LightsClick it while watching video or  slideshow and it cleverly dims the rest of the screen for a sexier viewing experience. Like many of these extensions, it’s great but you need to remember it’s there and to use it.
I am still yet to see a great extension for flickr or Tumblr, but I’m sure one is coming.
Next up…  I must learn how to sync my extensions across multiple computers.
Which extensions do you rely on? Which obvious ones am I missing? Please share, by using your Send from Gmail extension, of course.

One response to “My Top 13 Chrome Extensions for Social Media Managers (and addicts)

  1. Pingback: Best 8 Twitter Tools I Use « Buckleup's Blog

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