Too Busy For Social Media?
In a day and age in which it is deemed important to both personal and professional networking/marketing to be consistently plugged into social networks, those of you who have other things to do (and I would hope that's most) may want to sign up for SocialOomph or HootSuite, both social network mass-management tools. I mean, who has time to watch 7 different open tabs in a browser, trying to find out if a Twitter user is talking about their book, while someone else on Facebook is discussing a topic that's at the heart of their novel?
HootSuite is an entirely free and very user-friendly dashboard that allows you to navigate twitter; you can track conversations via specific keywords, find new people/businesses to follow based on interests and brands, organize your followers into groups, automatically feed new blog entries to your twitter account, and integrate link shortener services such as bit.ly to keep links you post SHORT.
We at Booknook.biz use SocialOomph, a similar dashboard which provides the option of a free or professional (but quite expensive) service. The free service (which we've got) provides all the services of HootSuite and allows you to set up scheduled and auto-updates, auto-replies, and auto-follows and -unfollows. If you are running the kind of enterprise which requires that you update a new announcement or product several times a day (such as clients' newly-converted ebooks), this service can be extremely helpful. Instead of updating a new announcement on real time, you can set aside a block of time to program several "bulk" messages in advance, to be automatically sent to your followers at a date and time you specify. You may also schedule a recurring update to repeat itself. It's no surprise that this service once sported the URL "Tweetlater.com."
On SocialOomph, you can opt to set up a "replies daily digest," a daily email that tracks all of your @Replies. You can also set up a platform to automatically follow or unfollow those who follow or follow you. The free package focuses only on Twitter, but the professional package allows all of these features to be applied to your Facebook and Ping accounts, as well as your blogfeed.
For more information on HOW to use these tools, check back here next week!
UPDATED:
Since originally posting this in February of 2012, we've changed to using HootSuite, over SocialOomph.