Building and maintaining your presence in social media, across multiple platforms, can take a lot of time and energy. You’re likely struggling to stay on top of your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and YouTube profiles (and perhaps a host of other niche communities), not to mention staying active on blogs and social sharing sites like Digg, Diigo, and StumbleUpon. The good thing is that these efforts can be immensely beneficial to your business if you have a sound strategy in place, and can manage your efforts efficiently and consistently. To save time, you need to use one or more tools to manage all of your social media activity, so you’re not jumping between 10+ websites all day every time you want to post an update.
Here are a few of the best management tools available at the moment:
Tweetie (Mac desktop and iPhone)
If you’re a Mac user and only need to use Twitter for the basics, Tweetie offers a solid desktop and iPhone app. Here’s a summary of its main features:
Seesmic (Mac & PC desktop and web-based)
Seesmic’s desktop client was built with Adobe AIR, so as long as you’re comfortable with first installing AIR, this is a great tool for updating your Twitter and Facebook accounts (there’s also a web-based version, but the desktop version is recommended). Here’s what Seesmic has to offer:
Tweetdeck (Mac & PC desktop and web-based)
Very solid desktop client which allows you to update multiple Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace accounts. The feature set is mainly centered around Twitter’s capabilities, so if you mainly use Twitter but also need to stay on top of your presence on Facebook and/or Myspace, this is a good solution. I didn’t think the Tweetdeck explainer videos were that great, but here’s a screenshot of the interface (click for info. on the feature set):
Click image above for more info.
Digsby (PC desktop)
My main beef with Digsby is that it’s not available for Mac or Linux yet (coming soon), but if you’re a PC user this is definitely a solid, very comprehensive solution. In addition to managing your social media accounts, you can also manage chat and email using Digsby. Check out more info. on Digsby here:
Hootsuite (web-based)
This is definitely one of the best Twitter clients for business use, which also allows you to update Facebook and multiple other accounts via integration with Ping.fm (a great social media management tool unto itself, by the way). With a very feature-rich interface, it’s more ideal for advanced Twitter users – there are a lot of simpler tools available for more casual users who only need to perform the basic functionality (sending and reading tweets). Here are some of the coolest features:
Do you use a different service not listed above? Let me know and tell why you think it rocks!
