If you’re in marketing, you know how time consuming posting and monitoring social media can be. It can easily swallow hours of your work day. Yes, hours.

As I mentioned before, I’m all about the productivity hacks this year, and am diving deep into the world of Chrome extensions to try to streamline my work and personal life. My current favorite extension for efficiency in the social media department is the the Hootlet extension for Chrome and Firefox. If you use Hootsuite to manage your social media accounts like we do, you need this, plain and simple!

Why is it so great? It allows you to share articles or web pages that you are reading/visiting, without ever having to switch tabs or copy/paste a single URL or string of text. While it may not seem like either of those things are that much of a nuisance, you’d be shocked at how much time the back-and-forth swallows, and how easy it is to get lost and distracted when you’re juggling 15-20 tabs at once (that’s not just me, right?).

With the Hootlet extension, all you have to do is click the Hootlet icon in the browser toolbar, and the familiar Hootsuite draft box will pop up on the webpage, pre-populated with the page title and URL. From there, you can customize your message, add a photo or attachment, and choose to either share the social media post immediately or schedule it for later, without ever leaving the webpage. Life changing!

Another cool feature? If you see a quote in an article that you’d like to share, you can quickly do so by highlighting the text, right-clicking, and clicking on “share via Hootlet.” The draft box will then pop up with the highlighted text, and a shortened link to the article.

Sharing made easy! Can’t beat that.

What are some of your favorite social media productivity tools?