9 Free Google Chrome extensions every marketer needs
Productivity: the business blog topic that just won’t quit.
Every week, new articles promise cures for the 3 p.m. crash (or an entire seasonal slump). We’ve shared our personal tips for staying on track, including the best locations to work, how to run productive meetings and ways to multitask without losing your mind. At the end of the day, though, it’s still hard to conceptually or habitually hack your way into productivity.
However, we savvy marketers know that tools and systems can be the best tricks to getting stuff done. Since college, I’ve amassed dozens of Chrome browser extensions to hack my way into productivity. Below are nine favorites I can’t live without. (Note: Most of these are available on both Firefox and Safari, as well.)
1. The Great Suspender and OneTab
“Your computer is running slowly because you have 25 tabs open,” our IT team recently told me. Guilty as charged. OneTab collapses all of your open tabs into a list that you can restore piecemeal or collectively. The Great Suspender, on the other hand, automatically suspends any open tab after a user-selected duration has elapsed.
If you use Buffer or Hootsuite for social media management, these extensions are a must. Both allow you to instantly share articles, quotes, images and videos. Or you can schedule them for later — which is particularly helpful if you’re following an editorial calendar.
3. Grammarly
The faster I work, the sloppier my grammar gets. Grammarly is truly a lifesaver. In any web-based text input box, Grammarly will automatically check for spelling and grammar errors. Yes, friends, that includes Tweetdeck and Gmail.
4. Pocket
Social media pros are always on the hunt for relevant articles, be they for clients, internal teams, or personal sharing. Pocket is my favorite way to save and categorize articles to read and share later.
Email can be tricky. Sometimes you don’t want people to know your insomnia drives you to send midnight emails; sometimes you wish you knew if an email didn’t get opened. Boomerang helps with both. You can schedule emails and have them “boomeranged” back to you if they go unopened — or you can go dark for a couple hours, only to have incoming emails come soaring back when you’re ready.
6. Emoji Input
Social media has gotten increasingly visual, but management tools like Hootsuite and HubSpot Social Inbox don’t have emojis built in. Enter Emoji Input. Never again will you be denied the ability to schedule tweets with burrito emojis. It’s a wonderful world we live in.
7. Giphy
Twitter recently added Giphy integration on mobile, but again, some social media management platforms don’t natively include GIFs. Sometimes, you just want to send Takeout Thursday emails featuring the cast of New Girl and Parks and Rec. This browser extension can make that happen.
8. Ritetag
These days, it’s almost impossible to know which hashtags are popular, outside of the mainstream trends that Twitter announces. If you want to find industry-relevant hashtags, Ritetag is the way to go. It lets you quickly search how “hot” a hashtag is and automatically rates the quality of your hashtags as you type.
9. Todoist
I was never a to-do list guy before I became a social media professional, but now I can’t image going without. The Todoist extension lets you quickly check unfinished tasks and complete them as you go. It also serves as a nice reminder of your tasks when you lose track of time searching for the perfect gif in Giphy.
Did I miss any that you use? Let me know in the comments.
This article originally appeared on the Metis Communications blog.
