A huge amount of time in a content marketer’s day is spent perusing the web. Having your browser perfectly armored with great plug-ins and extensions helps you save time, be more productive, and generally make your work much, much easier. It also is crucial to know how to make the most of available tools in optimizing each step of your efforts.
Here are my favorite choices of the best available browser extensions and how their features can make a content marketer’s life much easier. Each browser link listed connects directly to the extension for easy add-on.
1. Feedly
Simply speaking, Feedly is a news aggregator. What makes Feedly stand out is its availability as a cloud service so you can have access to your RSS streams across your devices.
Available for Chrome, the Feedly extension is customizable. It looks simple and minimalist, and believe me, it is.
The extension allows you to:
Instantly add a website to your feed
Save it for later
Send it by email
Tweet it
Share on Facebook
Save to Evernote
Tag page
The benefits inherent in using the Feedly extension are obvious. You’re always one click away from saving your favorite feeds to one place and making them extra tidy. Thanks to customized categories, even huge amounts of content can stay well-organized and easy to digest.
Available: Chrome
2. Save to Pocket
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Use Pocket to help you keep the huge amounts of content you discover organized. It lets you save to your “pocket” anything you find online with a single button click. You also can create a personal tagging system.
While Feedly allows you to read feeds to which you subscribe, Pocket allows you to save blog posts with an easy download. Therefore, you can read them even if the posts have been removed or if you are offline.
3. OneTab
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OneTab is a brilliant extension based on a simple observation that most of us keep a few dozen tabs open when browsing the web. The volume can be distracting and it consumes significant computer memory to process all that content.
This extension organizes your recently opened tabs. With one click of the button, it turns all of the tabs into a single list-like tab. You can restore the tabs all at once or handpick the tabs you need at the moment. You also can send individually picked tabs to the OneTab list and right-click on links to add them (without opening the URL).
It is really helpful, especially when you are researching something extensive and suddenly find yourself with 20 or more open tabs.
4. Buffer
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Buffer is a great extension for social media management: Line up your social media updates at one time and it publishes the posts according to your schedule.
It supports Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google-Plus pages. You can choose to schedule the same update on multiple platforms or on just one.
The extension also adds a button to your browser bar that allows you to share the page. If you right-click on an image or selected text, Buffer lets you post that specific piece of content, along with the source link. With this extension, you also will add some buttons on your social media feeds to schedule the resharing of posts of someone you follow (like this one on Twitter below:)
An interesting feature of Buffer called “Pablo” helps you quickly create visuals for social media. You can place any selected text on one of the provided backgrounds by right-clicking “Create Image With Pablo” and adjust it to your preference. Naturally, the next thing you can do from here is to add your new “visual quote” to Buffer’s schedule.
5. Grammarly
Grammarly is an automated spelling and grammar checker. Its proofreading isn’t as accurate as a human editor, but it is still impressive. The extension integrates with your browser, so whenever you write something while browsing online, Grammarly underlines errors and suggest ways to correct your typos.
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Additionally, it suggests synonyms to improve your vocabulary. You also can access statistics regarding your grammatical errors, and have a report, “Your Weekly Progress Report & Tips,” delivered to your inbox – an absolutely brilliant way to learn from your own mistakes and track your progress.
Microsoft Office also has a Grammarly plug-in, however, versions for browsers other than Chrome have been discontinued.
Available on: Chrome
6. Check My Links
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Check My Links is a simple, yet useful tool. Designed for webmasters, it also is helpful for content marketers. It really has only one feature – to check for broken links on a webpage you are viewing. Click on the checkmark extension icon and the tool quickly evaluates links to see if they work.
Why should you care? Delivering the best content experience to users requires you to make sure your cited resources provide valuable and contextual additions. Once a link is broken (for whatever reason), it provides nothing but a terrible user experience. Therefore, it should be fixed or replaced with the appropriate substitute resource.
Moreover, if one of your goals is to build links, then it gives you the opportunity to execute some strategies. In simple terms, if you have a relevant replacement, you can reach out to the author, letting him know about the broken hyperlinks along with your proper substitute suggestion.
Available on: Chrome
RECOMMENDED FOR YOU: 6 Linking Techniques That Will Help Your Content Get Ranked, Found, and Read
7. Klout
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Klout calculates your influence on major social media platforms to give a score between 1 and 100. You also can add topics and areas to your profile, as well as discover content and top-scoring experts within these particular niches and industries.
The Klout extension brings each person’s scoring metric in your Twitter feed and displays it real-time. It is helpful if you are interested in discovering the influence scores of people you follow.
8. MozBar
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The MozBar is a “veteran” extension that packs quite a few features. Its main and dominant function is to measure the domain and page authority (Moz’s authorial metrics), along with basic social-sharing statistics of recently viewed websites. It even has a special mode that hides the main toolbar and shows only the domain authority score as a tiny button. Personally, I prefer using it in this “DA-only mode” as the MozBar is quite large and heavy in its standard-mode size.
Another MozBar feature adds an extra “Get Keyword Difficulty” button next to the standard Google search bar, which provides an interesting insight on niche competitiveness in search results.
It also displays the domain and page authority stats, as well as backlinks data below each search result in Google. This is helpful for a quick overview and comparison of results.
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9. Impactana Content Marketing Toolbar
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Impactana is a handy toolbar and provides a lot of useful features, especially for content research. You can discover the popularity of the viewed page with its Buzz score and its Impact score. The Buzz score relies on social media statistics (which are displayed as well) such as shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Linkedin, and Xing. The Impact score is based on signals of content resonance, including the numbers of views, comments, downloads, and incoming backlinks.
Other features packed in this extension include the presentation of information about the author of viewed content, along with direct links to his social profiles and date of the page’s last update. Additionally, the Impactana toolbar not only provides an option to share the page on social media; it also has built-in buttons for sharing with Buffer and HubSpot, adding to Pocket, and finally sending the page by email.
10. Riffle by CrowdRiff
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Riffle is a Twitter analytics plug-in. The simple, yet comprehensive browser extension dashboard allows you to measure several advanced metrics about Twitter users: number of tweets, followers, descriptions, and links to other detected social profiles. You also can find interesting insights on performance, including:
Retweets/tweet ratio
Favorites/tweet ratio
Top hashtags
Top mentions
Top URLs
Average tweets/day
Activity breakdown (new tweets vs. retweets vs. replies)
By clicking on the Riffle button in your toolbar, a sidebar slides out to the right and you can search for data by any user name. You also can access the dashboard metrics by right-clicking on a Twitter user name and selecting “Riffle this account,” or simply by clicking on the Riffle icon that appears next to every account name in your newsfeed as noted in this screenshot:
Riffle also supports easy integration with most of the available Twitter tools such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck, Mention, Zendesk, etc.
Available on: Chrome
11. ShareMetric by Content Harmony
ShareMetric is another great extension that helps measure a handful of valuable content-performance metrics and social shares from the following platforms:
Facebook
Google+
LinkedIn
Twitter
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Pinterest
Some of the more SEO-related features incorporate built-in links for checking domain WHOIS data, schema and rich snippets markup analysis, as well as viewing a page in Google cache if available.
Moreover, thanks to connecting the extension with your Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMRush accounts, you can get an overview of:
Page and domain link metrics from Moz’s Open Site Explorer
Page and domain link metrics from Ahrefs
Organic search visibility by SEMRush
The dashboard is easily accessible and it simply pops up after you click on the extension icon, showing the metrics of a recently viewed page.
Available on: Chrome
Conclusion
It is imperative that the toolbox of a successful content marketer is armed with a diversified selection of the best available tools. By looking at these selected browser plug-ins, Chrome users seem to be better positioned because of all the extensions available. Users of Firefox and Safari also can benefit from at least a few of these.
I hope this list proves valuable to aid your content marketing efforts. I honestly recommend trying all of them, especially because they are so easy to access — and usually within a click from your browser. If you already use any of these plug-ins, it would be great to hear your opinion and the features you like the most. Also feel free to share your other top choices of browser extensions in the comments below.
Want to learn more about how your fellow content marketers are finding success? Check out CMI’s e-book: Building the Perfect Content Marketing Mix.
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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