Making Social Media just a little bit easier with Management Tools

In today’s day and age all businesses need social media presence but how they can manage their social media while running their own business?  

To have an effective social media strategy it requires time and the more time you put in the more return you will get.   Your business can’t afford to not to have a social media plan in place.  If you are not going to outsource to a social media marketing company, then you should know that there are many social media management tools that can help make it a little easier.  For instance, you may have a facebook business page, a twitter account, and a linkedin account and you need to post on all the sites several times a day or week but don’t have the time to keep going in and out of each account so what do you do?   Below is a list of a few of the more poplular  social media management sites that allows you to post on one site while providing you the ability to send to several sites.

• Hootsuite:  Hootsuite allows you to monitor and post to multiple social networks, including Facebook , Twitter & now Linkedin using the HootSuite dashboard. You can schedule when you want your posts to be sent (day and time) and to which site you wish to send it to.  They offer a basic plan which is free but limited and the pro plan which is 5.99/mo.  It is easy to set up and only takes a few minutes.
• Ping.fm:  Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap! It pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social media individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately. 
• Sproutsocial:  Sproutsocial integrates with Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla and other networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. In addition to communication tools, Sprout Social offers contact management, competitive insight, lead generation, reporting, analytics and more – all in a package that’s intuitive and easy to use. Their pricing goes from 9.00/mo. to 900.00/mo.
• Tweetdeck: Tweetdeck is a desktop application for Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Buzz, Foursquare , and MySpace (for the few of you left that still use it).  As of May 25, 2011, TweetDeck was bought by Twitter.

Each Management Tool has a different feel.  You may want to play around with a couple to see which one or two works better for you.

If none of these feel right – Keep Searching.  There are many more out there to choose from.

Sources:

• Hootsuite
• Ping.fm
• Sproutsocial
• Tweetdeck