Social Enterprise

Five tools for staying on top of your social media presence

By · June 13, 2012, 6:43 AM PST · jlwallen

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  • Introduction

    Social networking has become an inevitability for businesses of all sizes. No matter what your product or service, you're hurting yourself if you don't have a social media presence. And as you grow, so do your social media needs. At some point, your social presence is going to become hard to manage using the standard interfaces. You will need newer and more powerful tools that are better suited for the task.

    Here are five low-cost (or free) tools that can help manage your social media presence. With these tools, you can handle various tasks and keep track of your social accounts as well as your followers.

    Note: If you'd prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.

    Photo: iStockphoto.com/adventtr

  • SocialBro

    SocialBro is available as a Google Chrome extension and as a desktop app. It allows you to get fairly fine-grained with the viewing of your Twitter accounts. It's one of my favorite tools, simply because it offers so much information and so many capabilities with Twitter.

  • SocialBro

    SocialBro lets you search users and keywords, create specific filters, find your best time to tweet, monitor hashtags, analyze competitors, and much more.

    You will have to create a SocialBro account (free) and then give the extension permission to access your Twitter data.

  • TweetDeck

    TweetDeck is offered as a Google Chrome extension, a desktop client, and mobile clients (IOS and Android). All versions of the tool offer the same features.

  • TweetDeck

    With TweetDeck, you can customize what you see, schedule tweets, monitor unlimited accounts, get notification alerts for new tweets, see media previews, handle list management, and much more.

  • GroupTweet

    GroupTweet is a unique tool that allows multiple users to post on a single Twitter account. This can quickly ease the burden of managing a social presence on Twitter. Each user who is given permission to post is displayed in the group account -- individual names can be enabled or disabled. You can have unlimited contributors to an account and any Twitter client can be used with GroupTweet.

  • GroupTweet

    For $4.99 per month (the Premium account), you gain extra features like Tweet moderation, scheduled tweets, prioritized tweets, and multiple hashtag designation.

  • HootSuite

    HootSuite is an outstanding tool for monitoring your brand. From a single dashboard, you can manage teams, get custom analytics, manage messages, manage multiple accounts (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more), and get Facebook insights.

  • HootSuite

    HootSuite offers two main plans: Free and Pro ($9.99 per month). Check out the feature matrix to see which plan offers which feature. If you need more, there is also an Enterprise plan. (Contact HootSuite for more information.)

  • Seesmic

    Seesmic is a handy tool that allows you to manage your Twitter and Facebook feeds. You can connect not only your main Facebook page but any fan page you manage.

  • Seesmic

    Suppose you have a main company page with fan pages for different services or departments. You can easily post to only those pages you want from a simple-to-use mobile or desktop client. Seesmic also allows for the scheduling of tweets and updates.

Introduction

Social networking has become an inevitability for businesses of all sizes. No matter what your product or service, you're hurting yourself if you don't have a social media presence. And as you grow, so do your social media needs. At some point, your social presence is going to become hard to manage using the standard interfaces. You will need newer and more powerful tools that are better suited for the task.

Here are five low-cost (or free) tools that can help manage your social media presence. With these tools, you can handle various tasks and keep track of your social accounts as well as your followers.

Note: If you'd prefer to view this information as a blog post, check out this entry in our Five Apps blog.

Photo: iStockphoto.com/adventtr

Related Topics:

Social Enterprise Collaboration Software CXO Innovation

By Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic and Linux.com. He’s an avid promoter of open source and the voice of The Android Expert. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website jackwallen.com.

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