Social media has evolved as an increasingly important market force over the last few years and, surprisingly, the problem of how to manage your interactions with these services hasn’t got any easier – in fact, it’s become far harder because the services themselves keep improving ad expending their functionality and how and why we use them keeps getting more sophisticated.
Social media has evolved as an increasingly important market force over the last few years and, surprisingly, the problem of how to manage your interactions with these services hasn’t gotten any easier – in fact, it’s become far harder because the services themselves keep improving ad expending their functionality and how and why we use them keeps getting more sophisticated.
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So, when it comes to diving your social media agenda you can use the native Web interfaces of these services but if you want real flexibility and sophistication, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.
Consider Twitter: The service’s Web interface has improved vastly over the last year moving from a very simple, “vanilla” user interface to a rich Ajax-driven design that has added lots of new and useful features. Despite that Twitter still lacks a lot of facilities that serious social media users need.
One of the most basic enhancements advanced users want is the ability to schedule their tweets so they can be in sync with their target audience’s time zones and online hours; for example, there’s little point in posting a tweet at 3 p.m. in the Pacific time zone announcing a product upgrade for your British users who, being at 11 p.m. in their time zone, would probably not be paying a whole lot of attention at that time.
And that’s not all third-party solutions offer. Consider the ability to cross-post messages between multiple services such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn; that’s not something any of those services offer nor, I suspect, would feel a need to offer.
Thus it has been the case that third-party developers have seen an opportunity to provide products that add significant enhancements to how social media services can be used.
One of the most popular and slickest of these has been Seesmic.
Anyone who has used the free Windows or OS X applications will have been impressed with just how smooth and effective they are – terrific software engineering that is also available as mobile versions for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7. These apps are all really good but the Seesmic implementation I really like is Seesmic Web.
Like its application-based siblings, the free Seesmic Web service handles multiple and unlimited Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Ping.fm, Foursquare, and Google Buzz accounts and supports scheduled posting and cross-posting.
But wait, that’s not all! Seesmic Web integrates with Klout (a very powerful service that determines and tracks your influence” on social media); allows you to post images using “drag and drop”; provides a contact manager and handles auto-complete of user names; and, and, and … I’d encourage you to try both the desktop and Web versions and see which works better for you. While I tend to prefer the Web version because I can use it anywhere, they are both very powerful tools and, for serious business users, indispensable for handling your social media presence.
