ARK Squared Productions

With the big buzz about Social Media now a days everyone is trying to get on board, whether they want to or not!  Well there are some great tools out there that can make things easier for you whether the thought of Social Media makes your head spin or if you consider yourself a well seasoned expert. We’ve talked before about linking social media, and in there we briefly talked about social media managing tools, but I wanted to expand on that thought a bit more.

When we wrote about linking Social Media accounts I had said that we had ours partially linked, but that has since been un-linked.  The only link that I’d had was that posting on Twitter would put a post on both Facebook and LinkedIn, but I realized that I was starting to use much more “Twitter Speak” so decided that was probably not the best idea anymore.  What I’ve opted for instead is to take advantage of a great service called HootSuite.  There are other great services out there as well, such as TweetDeck which is actually made by the creators of Twitter, but HootSuite is great and I love that I’m supporting a great local Vancouver based company!

What HootSuite does is it allows you to manage multiple social media platforms from one interface.  So you can link to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace, and the list goes on, all from one point – and you can also connect to RSS feeds too.  This allows you to manage your messaging and your reading/monitoring.

So for messaging, you have a place where you can write and publish your post and you select any of the places that you want it to post and it will also let you know if you’ve gone over your character limit.  One thing that I also find handy is to write it once for twitter, then copy it to my clipboard, post it, then paste it and edit the “twitter speak” out of it and use it again for LinkedIn and/or Facebook.  It also lets you choose thumbnails for links for facebook too.  So I can write it all in one spot and I’m not having to go to a bunch of different websites, try and remember what I wrote, etc.  Nice and simple!

Then there’s the reading, monitoring and general “staying on top of things” – again, all in one simple place!  By default it makes tabs for the different social media platforms.  Twitter one for example is the Home Feed, Mentions and Direct Messages.  Then you also have the option of making custom tabs and choose what things you want on them.  So you could make one with the main feed from three (or more of course) different Social Media platforms.  One example that is also very nice is you could have a custom stream of a particular topic/keyword – so I might have “web design” or one of my competitors twitter handles so I can see how they’re using it or being mentioned.  Think about it, if you see a tweet from one of your competitors complaining about them, why not swoop in and see if you can make them happy?  I’ve heard countless stories about situations like that happening!

There are really great ways that a tool like this one can be used, and the features that I’ve mentioned are all available free!  Now, you are limited to the amount of accounts that you link with just the free account, but for a basic small business that can be more than enough.  And then if you pay a bit you can have access to more features and the ability to link more accounts.  So the next time you think about Social Media and shudder check out HootSuite or other social media management tools – it may be the de-stressor you’ve been looking for!

Tags: Facebook, Foursquare, HootSuite, LinkedIn, Linking Social Media, Social Media, Social Media Management Tools, TweetDeck, Twitter