Most companies have a presence on several social media sites these days, and managing all of those accounts can be difficult, especially if you follow a lot of people, or have busy fan pages and groups to look after. The following tools will make looking after your social media profiles a lot easier.
Tweetdeck is one of the most well-known Twitter management tools. It supports multiple accounts, and is available for almost every platform, including mobile devices. Tweetdeck started life as an independent software project, but it was bought by Twitter in 2011, making it, in a way, the “industry standard” Twitter client.
Seesmic is perhaps Tweetdeck’s closes rival for the Desktop client crown. What makes Seesmic so popular with social media agency workers is the wealth of plugins that it supports. If you want flexibility and the power to search and aggregate a huge amount of information (including points such as Klout score, followers, and retweet count available at a glance), Seesmic is a good option. You can save your Seesmic profile and use it on any device, without needing to go through the hassle of re-setting up your accounts on each device.
Hootsuite is a web-based application that makes it easy for you to manage your social media profiles as part of a team. Hootsuite serves as a social media dashboard that makes it easy to track brand mentions, schedule messages, and manage multiple social media profiles all in one place. You can give your social media agency access to your Hootsuite account, and easily see what they’re doing without having to log in and out of lots of different profiles. Some of Hootsuite’s more advanced features cost money, but they’re worth the investment if you’re serious about social media.
Ifttt, pronounced “Ift”, stands for If This, then That. This social media tool is designed to automate various tasks – for example, IF you take a photo and post it with Instagram, THEN this tool will download that photo and save it to your Dropbox folder, ensuring that you always have backups of important pictures. You can set up Ifttt to link and automate all of the major social networks, saving you a lot of time and stress.
Dlvr.it is a free service that makes it easy for you to automate the posting of messages to social media services. You can use it to link RSS feeds to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other services. You can set up Dlvr.it to use any URL shortening service as long as it has a published API, and you can add hashtags, control the frequency of posting, and set a range of other options. Dlvr.it will send you regular reports about the activity of the feeds you have set up.
Hootsuite has its own service for scheduling posts, but if you’re hitting the limit of the number of services that you can add to Hootsuite, then using Dlvr.it is a good option – it’s free, and has proven reliable so far.
