Many people enjoy the conversational aspect of social media and stay connected to their Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus all day long (or as close to that as possible). As the volume of my social connections grew, I found that I was nearly impossible to keep up with everything and stay engaged in my everyday life.
A great tip that I learned from Adam Pash and Gina Trapani’s book Lifehacker was to schedule time for email rather than dealing with it as it comes in (you can read that chapter of their book for free here.
As I built up my network and started to build networks for other businesses, I made a conscious effort to try to apply those same email principles to social media, but I quickly understood that Twitter itself was not going to be a useful tool to help me accomplish this.
I want to share 4 (actually 5) exceptional tools that offer you more of an email-like functionality for your social presence, so you can be most effective and efficient in your social media management.
1. The Archivist + AutoTweeterPro
These are my primary tools for managing Twitter. The Archivist is available for free online or for desktop download and AutoTweeterPro is available for free trial and $21 to purchase.
The Archivist uses the Twitter API (so this tool will only be able to present about 500 tweets for you) to show you your most recent tweets. It further allows you to download these into an Excel spreadsheet for management.
Not so coincidentally, AutoTweeterPro is an application that tweets directly from an Excel spreadsheet at an interval that you choose. This is very helpful if you want to send out more than 60 tweets an hour, it can space them out so that you don’t get locked out of Twitter.
2. Grab Inbox
Grab Inbox is a tool that you can use to review and schedule messages in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Much like AutoTweeterPro, GrabInbox will allow you to queue posts directly from a delimited text file. It has a very straightforward interface and is my favorite of the queuing products residing in the cloud (AutoTweeterPro is a desktop application). I will also use this in conjunction with the next tool.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the grand-daddy of the 3rd Party apps. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other secondary social networks and is free with premium (pay) options. The functionality is first-rate (better than GrabInbox in customization options), the only way that Hootsuite is inferior to GrabInbox being the ability to queue posts.
4. TweetDeck
Tweet Deck is a third party app that works similar to Hootsuite. It’s actually owned by Twitter, is free, and comes in a desktop or Chrome version. I don’t care for the Adobe Air platform (I find it a little slow to respond for my taste), but it is a slick analog to Hootsuite.
There are a ton of really fantastic tools for managing your social presence and keep your sanity, and I hope one of the mentioned ones helps makes your life a little easier!
Jim Dougherty (@leaderswest) writes about social media at http://leaderswest.com
Sincere thanks to Jim Dougherty for his contribution as my guest blogger. You may also like to check out my posts on other interesting social media topics here.
