Organizing Your Social Media Life
We’ve had a few folks ask us about various tools that we use to deal with organizing social media, and decided we may as well blog our personal preferences because… well, because everyone else does. Despite social media not really being a part of “web hosting”, it’s become obvious that businesses and sites with personal connections tend to fair better.
We are by no means experts. In fact, we may be the only people on social media that don’t have “Social Media Expert” in our description – but these are some tools we found that work for us and we’ve been asked about them often enough that we thought we’d go over them here.
Remember, this is just what we use, and how we use it – people’s preferences for their social media “stuff” are varied and many. Feel free to outline your favorites in the comments. These are just ours.
FireFox Addons
Currently, our latest It Girl is Yoono. One of the reasons is that its a Firefox Add On, and Firefox is my particular browser of choice. Frankly, as monitors get bigger I find that I have way more real estate than I really need, and I’m just used to maximizing my browser. Yoono fits nicely into the side (though I moved it to the right side using another add on), and allows me to keep up with most social media streams.
One of the benefits with Yoono for me is that the DrakNet tab for the “corporate Twitter account” can be kept clean by not updating its live stream – its not that we’re not interested in you. Really, it’s not. The corporate account follows almost everyone back which opens it up to a vast amount of noise, spam, ridiculousness and it can be very difficult to separate the noise ratio from people actually talking to us. It’s also an incredible waste of time to click to check it every time someone utters a move in a Twitter game. The Yoono tab lets us silence everyone, and only be alerted when someone DM’s us or sends an @ reply, making our response much faster.
Since you can have two Twitter accounts with Yoono, I can use my personal Twitter account for the normal, narcissistic random stream of consciousness, as well as following those accounts that I need to see everything on “just in case”, like our Data Center’s and software companies we work with. On this end, Yoono’s “hide updates” comes in handy – some people (myself included) occasionally just tweet too damn much, and you wanna turn them off. This allows you to do that individually without un-following them. That comes in handy during high-stream times, or when someone is going on and on and on about an issue you just don’t care about.
Yoono also really integrates with your browser, allowing you to switch accounts with a drop down click. Love that feature.
To us, Yoono has a good balance of control, great features, and again, we love that its a browser sidebar client. (They also have a desktop version as well). Yoono currently supports Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, FriendFeed, Linked In, MSN, AIM, GoogleTalk, and YahooChat, though we currently use it for Twitter and Facebook only, and called it a day.
Puny URL 1.6 by suskind is a barely used (7,518 Downloads) FF plugin, but personally, we find it to be the simplest URL shortening plugin out there and despite Yoono having the “Share” feature, we still use it due to its ease of use. Right click, hit the “Create Puny URL” in the menu, and its done and copied to the clipboard. Simple, fast, and dependable.
Services
Want to program Tweets for later? We use Twaitter. Their interface is clean and simple and, most importantly, its so far been far more reliable than other services that we tried.
Want to manage your followers? Tweepular is an awesome service – when its up. It’s normally all happy, with a dancing bird, with cheery, vivid gem colors – however, its been down now for over a month and since it claims its coming back, we’re going to include it here because we do think it was the best. When it was up. If it gets back up again, it would be useful.
So, there’s a snippet of what we use – what do you like?
(Or, you know, if you hate Twitter, Facebook, and all that other stuff, let us know that, too!)
