3 Tools For Social Networking Productivity

Social networking can help you generate buzz and communicate with your target market, but it can be a major time sink the more involved you get. Fortunately, new applications are being developed to manage activity across sites and monitor information more quickly. Here are three free tools to help save time and widen distribution of your social-media content.

Ping.fm (Ping.fm)
Ping.fm allows you to update your status on numerous social networking sites simultaneously. Post from the web, your mobile phone, or via email to over 30 sites including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Ping.fm will even convert long URLs into shorter ones automatically.

Twitterfeed (Twitterfeed.com)
Gaining additional distribution for your blog content is easy and automatic with Twitterfeed.com. Just register and provide the URL for your blog's RSS feed, and Twitterfeed will create Twitter posts with the title and a shortened link to the full blog entry. You can set up feeds from multiple blogs, as well as feeds to multiple Twitter accounts, or a Ping.fm account to post automatically to other social networking sites.

Tweetdeck (TweetDeck.com)
If you follow more than a few dozen people on Twitter, it's hard to stay on top of relevant conversations. Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application that allows you to filter and organize your Twitter stream. See incoming tweets, @replies, and direct messages (DM) all on one screen. Segregate your favorite tweeters into one group. Set up a keyword search and have all conversations across Twitter with that keyword automatically routed to you, including those from tweeters that you aren't following, helping you prospect for new clients or potential partners. You can post, reply, and DM from within Tweetdeck as well.