There are several different options available to help you manage multiple social media accounts at once. Among the most popular are Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Hootsuite. Depending on your needs and desire for access, then you might consider  each one of these for different reasons. All of them have a web version and apps for iPhone. Tweetdeck and Seesmic also have downloadable desktop versions.

For everyday non-mobile use, I have found Hootsuite to be my preferred social media management tool. Hootsuite provides you with a comprehensive social media dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts and platforms all in once place.

First built as a Twitter management tool, Hootsuite has grown to include the ability to post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook pages, Ping.fm, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare and importing RSS feeds.  With Hootsuite, you can pull in multiple Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook profiles, multiple LinkedIn accounts, etc.

For Twitter accounts, you can quickly and easily view your Home Feed, your @ mentions, your sent tweets, your direct messages, plus add columns for any of your Twitter lists, columns to monitor keywords or key phrases, and a pending tweets column for any scheduled tweets. You can have up to 10 columns for each twitter account showing at one time. I typically add a few columns for monitoring keywords and a few more columns for lists of specific twitterers for different purposes. For example, I might like to keep up on the tweets of my colleagues, social media people and local friends.

Hootsuite makes it easy to reply, re-tweet, send a direct message, add a tweet as a favorite, reply all (for tweets with multiple twitterers listed) or send a specific tweet to email. Another nice feature is the amount of information available about each twitterer including their Twitter bio, a link to their twitter account, their website, how many they are following, number of followers and the ability to report them as a spammer. What I really like about this feature as well is that it includes easy access to their timeline, their mentions, their favorites and links to their other social network accounts. You can easily follow, unfollow, direct message or add someone to one of your lists from this window as well.

For LinkedIn or Facebook, you can monitor the news feeds of your connections in Hootsuite and schedule status updates to go out to each of them. For Facebook pages, you can see all of your posts to the pages and schedule updates.

Hootsuite offers a handy link shortner that makes it easy to shorten a URL and include in it a tweet. There are analytics available for each link shortened using ow.ly so you can track how many times a link has been clicked or you can select a specific tweet and see that stats for that tweet. This is a great way to gauge what types of content your followers are interested in and respond to. Hootsuite recently added the ability to bring in your Google Analytics making it easy to monitor yet another piece of your online activity from one place.

You can also bring in the RSS feed for your blog so that when you post on your blog, it will automatically post to any of your social networking accounts. Other RSS feeds can also be pulled in and set to automatically post to your accounts. For example, each Delicious account has it’s own RSS feed. I set mine so that when I bookmark something in Delicious, it will automatically post that article or website with a link to Twitter. I preface these tweets with “Bookmarked:” This lets my Twitter followers know that I’ve just bookmarked something that I found interesting and that I thought they might like too.

Hootsuite allows for multiple users to manage different social network accounts from their own respective Hootsuite accounts. Hootsuite confirms who is the “owner” of an account and then you can give access to someone else to that account as a team member. This is very helpful when multiple people need to manage an account and especially in the work that I do. This means when I reply to something in another account or if I schedule a tweet to go out, then the other person with access to that account will see that I’ve already replied or can see what I have scheduled to go out.

Update: Hootsuite recently announced they will start charging for different plans with different levels of features. They will have one plan that remains free with limited features. You can find more information here about the new Hootsuite plans.

Image via CrunchBase

Related articles by Zemanta

• Everything You Need To Know About Managing Social Media With Hootsuite (socialtimes.com)
• HootSuite adds Foursquare integration, iOS 4 support (macworld.com)
• 12 Social Media Monitoring Tools Reviewed (sixrevisions.com)

Last week, Twitter launched Blackbird Pie where you can post the link to a specific tweet and it will automatically generate code to embed that tweet into your blog post. Previously, most folks were mostly using screenshots to show a tweet or a series of tweets. While the code generate does seem rather long just for one tweet, it does become a pretty handy tool as it includes that Twitter account’s avatar and part of their background.

To get the code you need to grab the link for that particular tweet which can be found by clicking on the time stamp listed below in small font underneath a tweet. Usually it says something like “about 2 hours ago.” If you click on that it will take you to a page for that specific tweet and you just need to copy the URL for the page. It usually looks something like this:

“http://twitter.com/jkvirtualoffice/status/13878799371″

And when you enter it into Blackbird Pie, click “Bake” and it will generate the code for that tweet which you can then paste into your blog post.

What’s also nice about this feature is that it will generate links to Twitter account of the person who tweeted it as well as to the Twitter accounts of any Twitter folks who might be mentioned in the tweet.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What is Twitter really up to with ‘Blackbird Pie’? (socialmediatoday.com)
• Twitter Cooks Up The Blackbird Pie Tool To Bake Tweets Into Your Website (techcrunch.com)
• Twitter Launches Blackbird Pie Tool To Embed Tweets (socialtimes.com)

Google’s YouTube has recently launched their SearchStories feature which allow you to create video search stories using search terms, and then adding music and easily uploading to your YouTube Channel.

You simple enter search terms, which can be either keywords or phrases and then you have the option of showing what comes up for these terms in either a web search, images, blog search, product search, map and a few others. Once you enter a keyword term or phrase, then there will be a preview image listed below your search terms. You then choose a music clip to add.

Here is the actual search story video I created for my social media virtual assistant business.

You can go here to create your own Search Story.

So Facebook is making some pretty big (and complicated) changes that will impact significantly how users use, navigate and perceive the platform.

Among the biggest change is that users no longer “Become a Fan” of a fan page. Instead they will now “Like” a page and people will no longer be listed as fans, but will be “People who Like This.” Facebook explains the change here:

Why did “Become a Fan” change to “Like”?

To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we’ve changed the language for Pages from “Fan” to “Like.” We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested.

They also explain here what it means to “Like” a page:

What does it mean to “Like” a Page?

When you click “Like” on a Page, you are making a connection to that Page. The Page will be displayed in your profile, and in turn, you will be displayed on the Page as a person who likes that Page. The Page will also be able to post content into your News Feed.

So far I’ve found this page in Facebook’s Help Center to be the most comprehensive explanation of how all the changes work and tie together. Along with the “Like” for fan pages, they are launching Community Pages which will link to your profile info so that your interests become links to community pages that reflect these interests. You also have the option of linking your interests to specific fan pages.

This, of course, means increased public visibility for your profile an the information in your personal profile. Along with these new features come new privacy settings that everyone should know and be aware of. Listed below are some of the posts and articles that have come out about these changes and how they affect users.

Connecting to Everything You Care About. Source: Facebook Blog

Facebook to Link Profiles and Pages. Source: Mashable

If You Link Your Profile Data to Pages, then You Make that Information Public by Default. Source: Inside Facebook

Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt. Source: TechCrunch

Google announced today via their Twitter account that Facebook Fan Page status updates will now become part of the real time search. This is huge for people who seriously consider Facebook as marketing avenue and want to use it as a tool to further get found by search engines.

Google Twitter Announcement

This means that updates from Facebook Fan Pages are currently being indexed and included in Google’s real time search feature. This includes links, photos, videos and status updates but not comments by fans. While updates from personal profiles can also be posted publicly by users, it doesn’t appear that those updates are being indexed as part of the real time search.

What is Real Time Search?

If you’re not familiar with real time search, here’s an example. Currently trending on Twitter is “Canadian Joannie Rochette” from Olympic events. If you go to Google and type in “Canadian Joannie Rochette,” you will get quite  few results, but if you scroll down about mid-page, this is what you will see.

As you can see, there is a scrolling box which shows real time results as they are happening.

The addition of Facebook page updates to real time search joins Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and others. Mostly what I’ve seen so far in real time search are updates from these networks about trending topics. This probably means that big brands on Facebook with large fan bases will likely get the most of amount of love from real time search right now. However, it does become yet another reason why businesses, organizations, non-profits and others need to seriously considering creating a solid presence on Facebook because now it means that just one more way to get yourself found on Google.

Need help with setting up your business Facebook page? Shoot me a message and let’s talk about it or come find me on my Facebook page!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Takes First Shot at Facebook Search Results (readwriteweb.com)
• Google Adds Facebook’s Fan Page Updates to Real-Time Search (insidefacebook.com)
• Google Adds Facebook Pages to Real-time Search (mashable.com)
• Facebook Pages Now Part Of Google’s Real-Time Results (allfacebook.com)

Social media and the internet make it easier than ever to reach other people, other markets and other businesses anywhere in the world. So sometimes, it seems as though what is most often overlooked is how easy it is to use social media to connect with local people and businesses.

As a Virtual Assistant, my business model is built around being able to work with virtually anyone, anywhere. When I first started using social media for marketing, I did not focus too much on networking locally either online or in person.  However, when my husband and I started an e-commerce business, OTC Sports, part of our business model for was centrally built around reaching the local market.

OTC Sports Fleece

Around this same time, I made the acquaintance of Gary Powell with ImageWear Solutions on Twitter (@imagewear).  Gary and I exchanged a few emails as I helped him figure out some of the inner workings of using Twitter and Facebook for business.  He also reached out to my husband, Jeff, on Twitter (@OTCsports), communicating back and forth about different sports related topics. Gary is a great example of what a local business can do with social media. He reached out to other locals on Twitter and Facebook, offered a helping hand, and was always willing to help spread the word about other local businesses.  Gary doesn’t use social media to be self-promoting, he uses it for connecting with people.

When the time came for us to order promotional apparel for OTC Sports, Gary was the first person we called upon.

OTC Sports Beanie

Completely knowledgeable about promotional products and apparel, Gary made the process easy and seamless. He was even kind enough to help push the order through to meet a deadline for us. We were thrilled with the items ImageWear had made for us. The quality and workmanship was outstanding.  And what’s more, is that we have gone back for more as I ordered some beanie caps as a Christmas gift for my husband with the OTC Sports logo on them.

This is just one example of how businesses can use social media to networking locally and get seen, get heard.

I became  a fan of the US Army fan page on Facebook after the shootings at Fort Hood last year.  Today I noticed an interesting status up from their page. (See below). I think this is a fascinating use of a government agency connecting with every day people  but it was also an interesting commentary on just how far social media has come and is now ingrained in our every day lives.

After seeing this update, I went over the Army’s Facebook page to see just what was going on and it seems as though the Army’s fans were posting their opinions on the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. Obviously, this is a highly charged and highly emotional issue for many people on both sides of the issue.  The parts that particularly caught my interest was:

1. The response from the Army’s admins for page who were actively engaging with their fans and letting them know they were being heard. It also appears Admins are actively watching the page to delete any completely derogatory and profane messages. But the ones that are on there seem to be posted by people on there who are willing to post their opinions without resorting to name calling or hurtful words.

2. That this issue was being so openly discussed at all on their fan page.

While fan opinions on Facebook may not change whether the policy continues, it does seem entirely feasible that at the very least, these comments will be forwarded to those in the higher ranks and quite possibly to congressmen and women and other policy/decision makers.

I believe this speaks to power of social media today. Not only is the US Army using Facebook to connect with people but those people are using the platform as a way to make themselves heard and they’re doing it without a second thought. Just a few short years ago, (heck, even just a year ago), the ability of the public to get their opinions directly to an agency like the Army would have been limited to poll or survey agencies or to sending a letter directly to your congress person…something that only small percentage of people would actually do. Additionally, it also shows how much more comfortable people have gotten with discussing such highly charged issues in a very public forms.

Is it a good thing? I think so. You need to remain objective though about whether the majority of opinions on the Army’s Facebook page are in support of the policy or if they oppose it. They currently have over 148,000 fans and one would venture to guess that a significant portion of those fans support the Army and it’s principles so opinions may be skewed in one direction or another. You also have to consider that the Admins may be removing the most inflammatory posts.  However, a good portion of the comments that I read seemed to mostly support not discriminating against any of our service men or women based on race, gender or sexual orientation.

I think its an example of a good use of social media.

Often people ask how to go about finding other people to follow on Twitter. There really isn’t an exact science to it but for Twitter to be an effective social media marketing tool, it just makes sense to follow (and to be followed by) people who are or might be interested in what you tweet about or in connecting with you. I think those who are new to Twitter will sometime become frustrated in the beginning because they are only following a few people then the Twitter stream can be a fairly quiet place. And then, if you are only being followed by a few folks, the interactions can be few and far between.  Here are some ideas for finding other people to follow on Twitter.

Check the different Twitter directories. Use these directories to find people who have listed themselves by industry, subject, interest or location. Here are the top three that I often use:

1. WeFollow.com- Users self-identify themselves in this directory using different “tags.” You can easily do a search by tag and find other people who you might be interested in. I also recommend listing yourself in this directory so others can also find you. WeFollow will list users within a certain tag according to how many followers they have with the higher follower counts first.
2. Twellow.com- The Twitter Yellow pages. Every account on Twitter is automatically listed in Twellow. However, users can also go in and “claim” their profile on Twellow and list themselves in 10 different categories. Twellow also gives you the option to input additional profile information about yourself or what you do or your business. I also recommend taking advantage of the options for adding in links to any other social networking sites you are on such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Profiles in Twellow that can been claimed, will have a small “claimed” icon so you know that person has come in and officially set up their Twellow profile. Twellow is also connected to Twellowhood which helps you find other users according to their location. This can be especially helpful if you are looking for other users in your area.
3. Twibs.com- This is a Twitter Business directory where people have gone in and added their accounts and listed their business. While this directory is lesser known and probably lesser used, it can still be useful for finding other businesses or business people who you might be interested in following. It is also another directory where you can list yourself for free and gain additional exposure for your account and for your business. You find an abundance of small business owners and other entrepreneurs on this site as opposed to just big business.

There are other directories, of course, and please feel free to list your favorites below so others can use and enjoy them.

Another way to find interesting people to follow is to see which people your favorite Twitterers are tweeting with. I find this method to be sort of a roulette of finding followers because you never know who you’re going to find. All you know is that someone else found them interesting enough to tweet with them so they might also be of interest to you as well. This is a great way to find people to follow who might fall outside of search by industry or category and it can help expand your process for finding people you might not otherwise have found.

Check the following of someone you like to follow. If they are in a similar industry or have similar interests, then most likely are following people you might also finding interesting. Keep in mind, however, that you don’t really know what that person’s follow policy is so they may be someone who follows back everybody and has not been very diligent about checking who they are follow. This means you should really review each and every profile for relevance rather than just blindly clicking on the follow button.

Keyword Search- Twitter’s search feature can also be an incredibly good tool to find other people who are tweeting about topics, ideas or keywords that you might also be interested in. The Twitter search feature is easily found on the right of the web application as well in many of the various Twitter applications available. The advantage to using a Twitter application like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck is that you can set it up to track those keywords in real time all the time. I also recommend checking out the Advanced Twitter search to filter your query even more specifically. These advanced search features will let you narrow your search query by exact phrase, excluding some words, hashtage, by person, by location and by sentiment.

Are you on LinkedIn? Twitter and LinkedIn recently joined forces so you can now sync your LinkedIn account with your Twitter account (how to do that is another post…) This gives you the ability to update LinkedIn from Twitter and vice versa. It also means that you can post your Twitter ID on your LinkedIn profile. While this is a fairly new feature that not everyone is taking advantage of, it may be worth going through your LinkedIn connections and finding out which ones are on also on Twitter.  If you wanted to take social networking a step further, you might even send them a message on LinkedIn that you are now also following them on Twitter. I don’t recommend sending someone a request on LinkedIn who you are NOT already connected with just because you are following them on Twitter. The more acceptable etiquette would to connect with them on Twitter through conversational tweets and then seek out connecting with them on LinkedIn.

Hopefully, you’ve found some ideas to get you started on finding people to follow on Twitter. Would love for you to post other ideas to find Twitter folks to follow in the comments below.

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook recently changed not only how news and updates are delivered to users, but they’ve also implemented a formula for deciding which news is delivered. When you log into Facebook, you will most likely first see “News Feed.” (Unless you’ve moved Status Updates to the top of your left side menu, in which case, you will see just the Status Updates from your friends.) What shows up in your News Feed is determined by Facebook based on their own formula.  The News Feed typically will include content from your Friends and from the Fan Pages that you belong to. However, unless you click on view “Live Feed,” you are only going to see the content that Facebook has decided you might be interested in.

This means Facebook now takes into account what Fan Pages your friends like, or what Fan Page stories they are commenting on, which fan pages you interact with frequently and which fan pages you visit most often.

What does this mean for Facebook Fan Page Administrators?

It means that engagement and interaction on your Fan Page just became much more important if you expect to get your Fan Page to show up in your fans’ News Feeds. No longer can you just post on your Facebook and expect that it will get seen by your fans by showing up in their News Feed. It will still show up in their Live Feed, but the Live Feed is not the default and we have no idea how many users are actually moving from their News Feed to the Live Feed.

Fan Page Administrators will now have to work to earn a spot in their Fan’s News Feeds. While this might seem like this approach works against small businesses and works more for big brands with a huge fan base and tons of interaction, it really just means that Facebook is working towards keeping content in user’s news feeds that is relevant and interesting to the user. Fan Page should be places where fans come to interact with a brand or business. It’s never been the intention that Fan Pages should just be advertising billboards who can blast out marketing messages to anyone who becomes a fan. As a social networking platform, Facebook is a place where people go to network and socialize either with people, brands or business which they have *chosen* to interact with.

Next up…How to Keep Your Fans Engaged.

Image by J.Rio via Flickr