Once you’re following more than a couple of dozen people online or are using more than two social media sites, it’s worth considering investing the time to learn one of the social media aggregators. This lets you monitor what your connections are saying, track keywords, even make comments or publish content from a single place, rather than having to be logged into and flipping between multiple sites.
I’ve previously written about using TweetDeck. I love that tool but lately it’s been a bit buggy. I suspect it’s a Twitter problem, but it’s motivated me to try some other tools. I’m currently test driving Hoot Suite and you can expect a blog post about my experiences next week. In the mean time, I thought I’d post some videos from some other users of these tools so you can get a variety of opinions.
First is a video by personal branding expert Lethia Owens. She uses a service called Netvibes. I’ve never used Netvibes myself so I can’t comment on what Lethia has to say. Her video is a bit long, but really goes into detail about how she uses the service. You can watch the video here or on YouTube.
The second video is by Laura Roeder and she talks about how to set up Hootsuite. I’ve been using it for about a week and like it so far, although I don’t think it’s as visually appealing as Tweetdeck. You can watch her video here or on YouTube.
Finally, there’s Socialoomph. Formerly called Tweetlater, Socialoomph has changed a lot from it’s early days. There’s a free and paid version which I suspect I will like better than Hootsuite but I’ll need to decide if I like it enough better to pay for it. I’ll be test driving it after Hootsuite and you can expect a blog post about my opinions in the coming weeks. In the meantime, here’s a video by Debbie Wood or you can watch it on YouTube.
Andrea J. Stenberg
If you have an aggregator or portal you use, please leave a comment and share your thoughts about why you use it.
