Making Your Life Easier... One Application at a Time

At this point, the benefits of social media for businesses have been established. Social networking websites—like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn—allow businesses to advertise their products/services and update clients, or potential clients, on any developments within the company. It is not uncommon for a large organization to have a social-media-marketing department within their offices to maintain a presence on these popular platforms; however, that usually isn’t the case for smaller businesses. So that begs the question, how much time should a company spend status updating and tweeting? After all, effective social-media-marketing requires a substantial amount of time. Through my RSS feed, I came across an article by Matt Ferner (2011) from Practical Ecommerce regarding new applications that allow a company to consolidate their various social networking profiles into one interface.

Ferner recommends smaller companies consider purchasing applications like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and Yoono. These programs allow a company [or individual] to status update simultaneously—effectively cutting the time spent on social networking websites. For example, with the free application Ping.fm, I would be able to update my Facebook status, tweet, and schedule in advance my next update all at the same time (¶11-¶15). Many of these applications are available both on your computer and mobile device. There are more advanced programs—like CoTweet Enterprise and SpredFast—that are available at a charge; however these applications support an unlimited number of profiles and have features that allow you to search Twitter and Facebook for discussion about your brand (¶5-¶7).

In ending, if your company is building a presence via social networking platforms, you may want to consider one of the above-mentioned applications to save time and minimize frustration. My personal recommendation is TweetDeck—it is free, user friendly, and has basically the same features as the expensive programs. That said, I encourage you to read Ferner’s article in full to determine what features you would require in  “social-media-management software” for it to be beneficial to you or you company (¶2).

To read Ferner’s article “15 services to manage your social media activity” please click here.

Source

Ferner, M (2011). “15 services to manage you social media activity.” Practical Ecommerce. Retrieved on April 1, 2011, from http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2688-15-Services-to-Manage-Your-Social-Media-Activity