Organizing Social Media Tools

Social marketing and networking is no longer hype, major news, or some unexplained phenomena.  It is definitely becoming a standard practice of communicating with your prospects and customers. It is a new way of marketing that is accepted, tested and practiced by many large corporations, small business, entrepreneurs, and professionals.

Most of us are recognizing these new tools and platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube to be easy-to-use tools that allow for comfortable and relaxed way of communication, as we build our online communities and create value by sharing good content.

It sounds so great! It looks so easy! It’s free! And then…  We find ourselves spending so much time on our computers, struggling with keeping up with updates and replies.

Relax. There is a way around the time sucking social networking abyss!  The key is to get organized.

Let’s review a couple of most popular applications you can use to organize your social media tools: Hootsuite and TweetDeck.

These two amazing Twitter clients will help you organize your feeds, pull-in your lists, connect to your other networks like Facebook profile and pages, Linkedin, MySpace, manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts, schedule your tweets and posts, and check your stats.  

HootSuite: This is a feature-packed social media organization tool. Originally designed as a Twitter client in 2008, the fully loaded version was just updated in July of 2009. Hootsuite is a free web-based application available to any internet user without downloading any software to run it. Create your account at Hootsuite.com.

Here is the list of the main Hootsuite features that will help you organize your social media networks:

• Update Twitter (multiple account update capability), Facebook (both your profile and your pages), Linkedin, WordPress accounts .
• Assign other people to manage your account by adding them to your user admin list.
• Easy monitoring and managing of all conversations by organizing them in separate columns.
  • Monitor @replies/mentions
  • Monitor direct messages (separate columns for outgoing, or incoming)
  • Monitor Lists (add, manage, create)
  • Save Searches
  • Use url shortening service ow.ly created by Hootsuite developers and track statistics
• Easy sync with Hootsuite iPhone application.
• Feed your blog RSS directly into your Twitter account.
• Schedule your tweets and posts (this is a BIG TIME SAVING feature).
• Share documents, photos, and MP3s.
• Tweet directly from the blog site you are visiting by importing Hootlet into your browser.

• Hootsuite has multiple short video tutorials demonstrating all their features.

TweetDeck: Just like Hootsuite, this application was originally designed to organize followers and conversations on Twitter, but since it’s conception and release in 2008, it has added features. Now you can pull in your Facebook profile, pages, MySpace  and Linkedin account and manage them all from TweetDeck. TweetDeck is the most popular Twitter application and it is compatible with both Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX. This application runs on the Adobe AIR Platform and it can slow down the performance of your computer.  Download it at TweetDeck.com.

TweetDeck’s main features as a tool that can help you organize your social media networks:

• Update Twitter (multiple account update capability), Facebook (both your profile and your pages), Linkedin, MySpace accounts
• Easy monitoring and managing of all conversations by organizing them in separate columns
  • @replies/mentions
  • Direct messages
  • Lists (add, manage, create)
  • Saved Searches
  • Monitor new followers
  • Use url shortening service like bit.ly and monitor the clicks by linking to your bit.ly account API
• Easy sync with TweetDeck iPhone application

It is a good idea to check out both of these tools. Start organizing your tweets, posts , followers, friends, and business contacts. Monitor and organize conversations about you, your business and your  industry on the social networks. You may find out that you like both for different reasons and end up using them interchangeably. Or you may choose one over the other because it fits your needs better. Whatever you decide, it will help you be more organized with your social media networks.