Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Pinterest. How do you manage it all?
Amazingly, there are several applications, both mobile and desktop, that actually make it quite easy to manage your social media accounts.
Two of the most popular are
Hootsuite and
Tweetdeck because you can manage multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, Foursquare, and even LinkedIn all in one location. You can cross post to multiple accounts at the same time and you can search and create saved search columns based on key words or hashtags. You can also schedule posts through multiple accounts as well.
I've used both apps at different times to manage the Richmond Police Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as my personal accounts because it's a great way to share information quickly without doing twice the work.
One of the downsides, however, is that these apps don't always capture every tweet, even when you're specifically mentioned by name. For some reason, there's a discrepancy between the app itself and your Twitter account. That's why I periodically click on the RPD account through the Hootsuite desktop app and click on the mentions to see what tweets I'm missing. These apps also periodically update, which is usually a good thing, but not always, making something that used to be easy to use no longer as simple.
Though I use Hootsuite on my desktop at work, I am trying out several other apps on my iPhone to manage the RPD accounts, such as
TweetCaster,
TweetBot, and
Ubersocial because I find they offer more options.
The options include different color themes and fonts, which may seem silly, but can actually be quite helpful when trying to remember which account you're in. For example, I may see a Richmond Police-related tweet while reading tweets in my personal account, but I want to make sure I respond to them via the RPD account. The color is an easy reminder. Another important options it the ability to automatically shorten web links, which is key when you want to share important safety information or Web sites, but only have 140 characters.
One new update for the iPhone that has been a huge help is the new
Facebook for Pages app. With one app, I can now easily manage all three pages for which I'm an administrator. Additionally, I can now post updates and photos directly to the page via my iPhone and see every other post on the page far more easily than I could before. Just as importantly, I can also respond to comments, delete inappropriate posts, and ban users if the need arises.
In the end, it doesn't matter what app you use, but it's important to know that there are many apps out there to help you manage your social networking needs. Given that a crisis can pop up whether or not you're at your desk, it's good to be mobile and in the know.