WorkSmart: Control Social Media Mayhem

You’ve been gaining followers on Twitter, have a ton of friends and fans on Facebook, are blogging regularly, following others, and realized that you have no time to get your actual work done.

If this is your reality, or your fear, there is a way to minimize the resources required to effectively manage your social media. With the growing popularity and business necessity of social media, third-party applications wearing superhero capes have been coming to the attention of business owners.

There are hundreds of applications for everyone and everything, including your desktop, iPhone, or Blackberry, and finding the app that can best help you manage your social networking needs can be a challenge. Before making a decision, take a look at the bottom of the posts of the people you follow. You’ll find a little message that reveals where the post came from. For example, on Twitter, you may see “3 minutes ago via twitterfeed” or “1 hour ago via HootSuite.” If you like the format, or trust the poster, check out the application that they are using.

In the meantime, there are several popular, third-party applications worth looking into. Each application has its strengths and weaknesses, but like buying a car, some have all the bells-and-whistles, and some like to keep it simple.

You’ll have to decide what works best for you, your life, and work style. The good news is that almost all of them are free, and so, unlike purchasing a car, you won’t need a loan officer to get on the social media road.

Tweetdeck is a desktop application that combines Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr into one manageable view. One of the most useful features is the ability to organize people you are following into lists of interest and importance, which allows you to control the noise level of streams, and not miss tweets or posts from most valued people. It also allows users to post simultaneously to Twitter and Facebook pages, respond to posts, and gives you the capability to shorten a URL using your own bit.ly account, so that you can later track click-through rates, providing valuable feedback about the interest level of the content you are posting.

Ping.fm and HelloTxt are applications that provide users a simplified way to update their status across all social applications, including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more than 50 other networks. Posts can be made online, or via instant message, email, or mobile SMS text messaging.

Seesmic is a good desktop application similar to TweetDeck, but has the added advantage of allowing you to manage multiple profile accounts (i.e., personal, company, multiple clients). They recently purchased Ping.fm, so their solutions should get even more interesting. Definitely keep an eye on Seesmic as a social media management tool. CoTweet is another application that has a lot of the same features as Seesmic.

SocialOomph, formerly TweetLater, allows you to schedule future posts on both Twitter and Facebook Fan pages. There are other features that make this a worthwhile site to use. You can set up parameters of who you would like to follow on Twitter, and even create an auto-responder to new followers. There is an “opt-out auto direct message” feature, which works like a Do Not Call List for Twitter spam. Other key features are keyword tracking and a feature that will clean out your direct message inbox on Twitter. All of this is included in the robust, free service, and, of course, professional upgrades are available for a fee.

8hands is a consolidation application, also referred to as an aggregator, that non-bleed enables you to receive a stream of activity from fans and followers from either your desktop or your mobile phone. 8hands streams notifications to a single interface

in real time, including comments, direct messages, fan or friend requests, feeds, events, and media that customers, fans, and members post online. You can also request summaries and statistics on your social networking activities. 8hands covers realtime

content and notifications from multiple accounts including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, and blogs.

Chi.mp centralizes content and contacts. With Chi.mp, you get a personalized domain and website where you feed in all of the information, such as contacts, usually stored within your various social media applications and networks. The site offers you a unique domain name that aggregates all of your online activity into one interface. This type of application works best for someone without a website, or for companies looking to stay on top of the content coming in and going out to the web from one big-picture dashboard. To make the most of your experiences and interactions with customers, members, and fans online, selecting a social media management tool is a smart step. These third-party applications will take the tedium out of the process and keep you current with your friends, fans, and followers. It will also allow you to stay consistent across all of your platforms without spending all day doing so