Blog
Managing your social media from one place
Written by Andy Patterson
Of all of the buzz words of our time, ‘social media’ is one of those oft used phrases, that can cover a wealth of sins. From what I have read, companies are now employing social managers to look after their Facebook pages and their Twitter feeds, and if they spot un-happy customers to resolve issues immediately. Lets just say I’m pleased I’m not the social manager at the Royal Bank of Scotland this week…
It is all still a very new thing in the grand scheme of things – nobody knows how long Facebook is going to last, but at the minute, it is doing very well in taking a lot of the attention of its users – and as a result, we are trying to use it to our advantage – as are so many others in the world..
What’s the problem?
So, through Abubilla, we have 2 Twitter accounts, and 2 Facebook pages – one of each, for both Abubilla Music, and Singing Wells. Each has a different audience, of which we are trying to build upon, and tell the people about our content and projects (and hopefully get retweets and likes etc – a subject for another day/post).
So, a while back, I looked into different ways of posting to all of your social media outlets at once. There are a number of ways to do this, and I even signed up to one or two of them (you can find out which ones people are using by seeing what it says under their statuses on Facebook – sent via ping.fm for example)
Ping.fm
So ping.fm was one that I tried for a while. Free service, and it works quite well, but didn’t give me the full experience of seeing my full Twitter account in its true glory (ie different panels for connections and mentions), but it did give me the chance to update Facebook and Twitter at once, so success on that front.
Twitteriffic
I downloaded and began to use Twitteriffic, but this seems to be limited to Twitter and only one account at a time (although I didn’t delve deeply into it…). Also I found that, as with many programs and such, I stopped using it after a few days – ie it wasn’t enough to keep me interested, which is a shame, as I paid for it….
Tweetdeck
Next was Tweetdeck which has both a downloadable application, and as I have just found out – an online service. You can view all of your Twitter accounts in one place, and update them all at once. Again – did the trick for a while – and the software was, I believe a free download from the Apple App Store. So, again – successful for a while, but again I stopped using it after a while.
Hootsuite
Now I’m onto Hootsuite, which is another service that allows you to add your different social media accounts – Twitter and Facebook, and others that I haven’t delved into yet (Foursquare, LinkedIn, Mixi (??) and even the mighty WordPress!). the online window is very clean and clear and your accounts are arranged into tabs along the top window of your browser – much as the tabs of your browser are arranged under the address bar etc.
So far, so good. I’m going to experiment with scheduled tweets – maybe for a ‘Song of the Day’ on the Abubilla Music Twitter feed and a ‘performance of the day’ on the Singing Wells site – showcasing the best of our material so far.
These may not be the only Social media tools for this out there on the web – please let us know via the comments, if you know of any more, or can recommend anything else for us to try!
By the way, those account addresses in full for you to be able to check them out:
http://www.facebook.com/singingwells
http://www.facebook.com/abubillamusic