Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

For efficient marketing, we need instruments. With hundreds of them available, we try dozens and opt for the best. But how to choose the best without money to burn, especially when it appears that most instruments digital marketers need for work are free?

Here’s our list of over 40 useful, multifunctional, and free mobile apps for marketers. Chances are you’ve heard of them, but you probably haven’t tried all of them. It’s a high time to name leaders and choose those best suited for your marketing goals.

Hearing the term “ad tech” makes most people think of data science and complicated formulas. While there’s a kernel of truth to this, ad tech is so much more. Over the last few years, it’s attracted a lot of outsiders, and the result is a much friendlier set of tools with an agency-esque ease of use.

Because of this, we’re now seeing companies and people move closer together in advertising transactions, eliminating barriers and unnecessary middlemen.

Ad tech opens you up to many opportunities. You now have a greater, more valuable ability to optimize, analyze, and offer companies behavioral data on the people who matter most to them. It’s still about targeting an audience — just across multiple touchpoints and platforms, with far richer data.

As long as you understand where you fit in this new digital landscape, you should be fine. But it takes a shift in focus, and you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the advancements and trends in this emerging industry. Here are four essentials you must keep in mind...

Twitter has become much more than 140-character blurbs, and now Tweetbot is using that additional content to turn our media-rich feeds into a stream of photos and videos for users to quickly scroll through. An update released today for Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad introduces a new timeline view that displays images and videos — including content from Instagram, Vine, and YouTube — inside of the Twitter feed.

The display uses tweets as captions for the content, and it omits any tweets that don't include something to look at. Twitter has been working to enrich its feeds with news stories, images, and interactive content by letting developers create multimedia cards — but so far that effort hasn't exactly livened up the text-based medium on mobile devices. Tweetbot's media stream may do just that; it doesn't require users to actively open content to engage with it, and instead works by surfacing those images and videos.

While it may repeat tweets that have already gone by, it's an easy way to catch up on things you may have missed. The new timeline appears to display all image and video content supported on Twitter itself, as well as select outside sources, such as Instagram, that require custom support.

However, the view doesn't include all of the frills and shortcuts that Tweetbot's traditional feed has, though it can be quickly toggled on and off at the top of a timeline beside the app's search box. No announcement has been made about when or if the new view will be coming to the desktop, but if it's anything like the mobile-centric apps that it resembles, it could be a while....