How many of you have only one Social Media profile, and think it is the greatest one to have?…anyone?…..Bueller…..Bueller…. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Quora, StumbleUpon, and of course there are more, dozens more! When you Google my actual name, you get well over a dozen pages of results. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Quora, my personal blog, comments on other blogs, and other channels – yet I spend less than 30 minutes a day on average to get my results….and this system is what I want to share with you today.
If you have multiple Social Media profiles, updating all of them (and more importantly LISTENING to all of them) can be an arduous and time-consuming task. With only a few minutes to spend managing your Social Media profile, it is more important than ever to find a control system – or dashboard system – to interact with your network in a timely manner. As you can see, I prefer to use the web-based tools instead of software downloaded into my computer – this makes it a remote system that only demands an Internet connection, making it even more efficient.
Here are (in my thoughts) the 5 Best Websites to help you update all of your social media channels the EASY way:
1.
HootSuite.com – Hootsuite lets you not only update all of your social media websites and profiles, but it lets you batch-schedule your updates and messages in advance, gather custom analytics on your social media activity and provide team collaboration that lets multiple users to your social sites. There is both a paid option you can choose, or the free option. If you are just beginning, and have a handful of profiles, the free version will let you manage up to 5 different social media channels. The other options are also manually set, however it saves a great deal of time in listening to what your network is saying to you – this is usually my first stop along the way to social media management.
2.
Ping.fm is a very user-friendly platform for someone who has numerous channels or just a few social networking profiles. It lets you select which websites to update and put them in groups. Ping.fm is an intuitive time-saving service, and can be used with other services as well. Ping.fm is a way to broadcast your updates easily, but does not help with listening to what others are saying – I do use it however to pop onto and broadcast my updates to several sites all at once.
3.
Yoono.com is another great tool for updating all of your social media at once. Staying connected, status synching and easy sharing is what makes Yoono a popular site. In just a few clicks, you identify your social networking profiles and start updating all of them via a single dashboard. You can filter updates, there is a desktop application, there is a browser plug-in, and it has an app for Iphone and Ipad. Nothing for Android users yet, however this is a plug-in that I let run in my
Firefox browser so I can listen and surf, interact while I am on the computer, all at the same time no matter what site I am on.
4.
Shareaholic.com is one of the most intuitive resources to help you streamline the use of Social Media updating and provide easy access to share your content via multiple sources. It is an extension for your website, your browser, or a blog where you can gather all of your social networking accounts in a single place and use it to update them all from a single place. There are several ways to share, and you can simply insert a plug in to your browser so you can share and show you care. It will then catalogue all your updates so you can see them later.
5.
BufferApp is my new favorite tool. You link the application to your Twitter account, and then you can set the buffer to fill with pending tweets. Simple, easy, and free to use for up to ten buffered tweets – you can of course update to the free account to save even more time. You set the times, and Bufferapp tweets them out when you want. It also has a mobile application, which I use on a very regular basis as well - just add one more to your buffer, and you are done.
I wanted to give you all a complete round-up of the most effective tools that I have found to use, however there are new tools each and every day. Are these your favourite, or do you have a different one you like to use? There are several free tools out there, but I feel these 5 are the best 5 free tools for social media updates that are current. Leave your comments, and we can all share best practices and make our profiles better, more interactive, and more relevant, in a timely and efficient way.
