Social media thrives on real-time interactions and current content making management of multiple social media outlets a real challenge. Luckily, the digital world has a variety of applications to handle all of your social media streams in a unified way. Here is a look at some of the tools you might want to explore:
- AtomKeep focuses on keeping your social media profiles synced. Rather than updating your profile information in every single social media outlet, AtomKeep does it for you making it simple to implement an address change, include a new service, add a website, etc. Note that AtomKeep is designed to be used by individuals, but can be leveraged by companies and organizations as well.
- Hootsuite is a social media aggregator which allows you to create a social media dashboard to look at a variety of media all at once. It supports Twitter, Facebook (and Facebook Pages) LinkedIn, WordPress, Ping.fm, MySpace, and Foursquare. The beauty of Hootsuite is that you can customize how you view all of the streams, and it keeps track of your responses. It also allows you to schedule posts for delayed posting so that you can enter content all at once and allow it to roll out. Links are transformed into short links to help you easily stay within 140 characters or less. Hootsuite is free, but you will need a premium subscription to be able to set up multiple users with different logins--helpful in corporate tweeting to keep credentials safe.
- TweetDeck is a personal real-time browser that connects you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and more. It has similar features to Hootsuite and works across iPhone, iPad, Android and Chrome.
- Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. Their slogan is "post from anywhere to anywhere. " Ping.fm is primarily about content distribution. Post once, and it goes to all of your supported accounts.
- Hellotxt is an aggregator designed to be used via web or mobile--so it is especially sleek and easy to use. Just like HootSuite, Hellotxt allows you to schedule status updates (aka “future post”) and have them delivered to your blogs and social networks. It also allows you to individually select the social networks and blog platforms you want to update--which can help you cater messages to specific audiences. Another feature is "doodrama" which allows you to upload and doodle on an image before sending to the masses. This could be particularly useful in our industry to highlight certain architectural features on an image or highlight "what is going to be" on a site plan.
- SocialOomph (previously tweetlater) is one of the few platforms designed for professional rather than personal use. While there is a monthly fee to unlock all of the features, it has items attractive to marketers that some of the other applications do not such as allowing you to manage many accounts with an integrated console, delegate account management, send DM's to new followers, set up recurring updates and find your "power followers".
The good thing is that most of these applications have a basic service for free charging only to add premium features. That makes taking one for a test drive an easy thing to do.
