Christine Gallagher’s latest article is titled “4 Useful Productivity Tools For Social Media”. [Article]


Christine Gallagher’s latest article:

4 Useful Productivity Tools For Social Media

We all want to do more in less time with social media. The good news is that there are lots of tools to help automate your social networking activities.

Although I don’t suggest automating your entire experience (that’s kind of missing the point), there are some great productivity-boosters worth checking out.

1) Ping.fm: Have you ever wanted to update your Twitter status as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites all at the same time from one place? Ping is great for this. Tools like Ping are one of the top “secret weapons” of the most savvy social media users.

So, if you have something to say to your Twitter followers but that you would also like to share with your Facebook friends and fans and your connections on LinkedIn, you can-without going to each site and logging in separately. Ping has the ability to update over 40 different social sites. Talk about a major time saver!

In addition, you can even create groups, so that if you only want to update Facebook and Twitter but not LinkedIn, for example, you can do that. It’s definitely worth exploring.

Ping also has a browser toolbar you can install, making it simple to update your social networks with a link to any web page you are on.

2) Hootsuite: I consider this to be the ultimate Twitter tool-and its ability to automate so much of your Twitter experience is pretty impressive. Hootsuite is web-based and free and here are just some of its most useful features:

– Manage multiple Twitter profiles

– Pre-schedule tweets to go out ahead of time

– Monitor keywords of your choice

– View multiple columns to see @ replies, direct messages, keyword tracking and more

– Have multiple administrators for your Hootsuite account

– Create groups of friends by simply dragging and dropping them into columns

– Integrate with Ping.fm to update many social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn

– Track statistics of how many people have clicked on the links in your tweets

– Automatically feed RSS to your Twitter stream

3) Selective Twitter Status: If you use both Facebook and Twitter, you’ll want to take advantage of integrating the two in order to reach even more people–without more effort.

Selective Twitter Status is an application you can add to your Facebook profile or Fan Page in order to update your status with your tweets. Once you have this application installed, you simply add #fb to the specific tweets you want to make your Facebook status as well.

4) Facebook Fan Page to Twitter tool: If you want to do the reverse and send your Fan Page status updates to Twitter, you can do that with Facebook’s Twitter tool. This is nice because you are allowed to use over 140 characters for status updates on Facebook, so when you update Twitter (which has a 140 character limit) with a longer message, it inserts “…” along with a link back to your Fan Page so people can finish reading your update. This means more people are driven to your Fan Page from Twitter.

So, if you’ve always wanted shortcuts to help manage your social media activity, check out these four tools and start streamlining your experience like the pros.

Christine Gallagher, MLS, MSIS, founder of CommunicateValue.com, teaches small business owners and professionals how to conquer the overwhelming aspects of online and social media marketing to increase business and maximize profits. For FREE tips on how to build profitable relationships, leverage technology and create your own successful online business, visit http://CommunicateValue.com

*This news post was submitted by Christine Gallagher.

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