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

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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