There’s a flood of social media management tools and apps designed to automate posting from your website to your social accounts. That’s why I’m sharing my top 3 with you. It’s more important to get the job done than to know about the newest app that launches. And these 3 have been around long enough to earn their popularity.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite can almost go without explanation. It’s the largest social media integration tool on the web and provides a whole host of technologies and solutions completely free of charge.
Hootsuite allows you to manage feeds across multiple social media sites. They have analytics and reporting tools, albeit most of them are paid. You can integrate a team strategy, as well as analyze you contacts.
If you’re not sure where to start in social media integration, Hootsuite is a good bet.
Tweet Deck (by Twitter)
Tweet Deck is one of the largest social media integration tools on the web and the largest integration tool for the Twittersphere. In 2009, they had a 23% marketshare. The only other website that had a larger usage rate was Twitter.com itself.
The primary function of Tweet Deck is the social media dashboard. They feature an intuitive and easy to use dashboard that works with both Twitter and Facebook. In the past, they supported LinkedIn, MySpace and FourSquare, though they have since dropped support for those sites and chosen to focus exclusively on Twitter and Facebook.
Tweet Deck was purchased by twitter in May of 2011. It’s now run by the Twitter team.
You can run Tweet Deck on just about any operating system, including Mac OS, Windows, Linux, iOS (iPhone / iPad) and even Google’s tentative Chrome OS.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media integration tool that has some very interesting and unique features. For example, Sprout Social will log into your Twitter and Facebook analytics accounts for you and extract data about your demographics. This will give you a very good sense of who your audience is, all in one place.
Sprout Social can also make recommendations about new people to follow. If you don’t want to have to spend hours discovering new potential partners and sources of information, let Sprout Social do it for you.
Of course, Sprout Social also has all the standard features, like message scheduling and feed aggregation.