5 Free Tools to Help Businesses Combat the "Social Media Time Sucking Monster"
Mar 7, 2010 at 6:33PM
The number one thing we hear at each and every presentation we give is: We don’t have the time!! To that we say,
You have to make the time...... because your competition is already there
Time saved is $$ saved!!So, to help you save money, we are going to share a couple of the time saving tools we currently use daily in our business...
Posting to Multiple Social Media Sites
- TweetDeck: Can view and post to Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn and MySpace…all at the same time or choose which one/ones you would like to send it to. Bonus: Wonderful organizational tool!
- Ping.fm: Post from anywhere >>> to anywhere. Post to all of your favorite services (currently 44 different choices)
Social Media Organizational tool
- Facebook Lists: Organize lists so you can easily access certain people. For instance: Family, Friends, Prospects, Home Town etc… Once you have created your lists, you will be able to view a feed with updates from only people in that list. Enter link
Social Network Scheduler
- Hootsuite: Manage Social Networks, iPhone App, Track Statistics, Twitter Lists, Brand Monitoring, Personalized View, Schedule Tweets
URL & Headline Shortener
- Bit.ly Sidebar Shorten, share and track your links! Once you install the bit.ly sidebar (located under tools) you will be able to shorten a URL to any page you are on with one click of the bit.ly sidebar. The shortened URL will appear once by itself and then once with the title of the page you were on and the shortened URL . We use this every day when we find an article we want to share. Bonus: All of the links you shortened will be tracked here so you can monitor the quality of your posts.
Five great places to begin at becoming more efficient with the time you spend in social media. You can and will dial this in to a very reasonable daily time allotment. With the Social Media Toolbox that we have built for ATI, we manage our Social Media visibility/presence in 30 minutes a day.
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Reader Comments (18)
This article is great! I didnt know about most of these tools available. Thanks!
For any company that is using social media sites for marketing, it is crucial that you be organized and productive if you are going to succeed and keep at least one step ahead of the competition. The five tools discussed in this article are terrific - you can post to multiple social media sites at the same time, you can organize your lists, you can schedule, you can easily post links. These tools will certainly increase your productivity when marketing in social networks, and I plan to try them in my marketing campaigns. Thank you, ATI, for making these tools available.
Well I certainly think this article could be better written. The grammar, for one, can be tweeked since its a bit everywhere. Add periods, don't start sentences with digits (i.e FIVE not 5), do not capitalize after a comma, etc etc.
Also I wish there were more of a summary of what each tool is as opposed to only what it does. For instance, I have NO idea what Ping.FM is from that one line of information, so why would I want to have the tool?
Last but not least, I thought the article was about not wasting time on social media sites because of time theft. Maybe the title should be tweeked to express that you still want to use social media sites in your workplace, just more efficiently.
I really liked this site. very essential these days.
You are absolutely right. Time saved is money saved. These free tools are invaluable to any business.
I personally feel that social network has become a very unfortunate alternative to personal interactions, but communication has changed so drastically in such a short period that it has become difficult to reach consumers, especially with so many competing means of communication. I think any tool that would help companies reach a wider consumer base without sacrificing service is a step forward, and it is great to see that some people are focusing on the important stuff.
In today's fast-paced marketing field, time is one thing that is very hard to get. Everyone wants too much stuff in too less time. In this context, I feel these five time saving tools can be a big help to achieve the marketing objectives. With many new social media sites coming up, managing social media visibility / presence in 30 minutes a day is a challenging task, which is not at all possible without these highly useful tools. Thanks for this informative post.
this is great article about being systematic and organized . with growing competition,marketing tools have to be updated. people should follow various methods to increase their market value. social networks sited are definitely the great way to get more market. tools mentioned in the article is sure going to provide help to starters. keep posting such informative articles. bye.
The article is excellent to know the best 5 free tools to promote business.
I am satisfied and rated 5/5.
Time management in social media is an area where many people lack ideas. the ideas you have provided in this website are really useful.especially about the url and headline shortener seems to be a very good idea.i will also try this bt.ly sidebar
I am fortunate to have come across this article. I agree that time saved is $$$ saved. I have bookmarked the links in this article and am going to try these applications and recommend it to my friends as well. Keep up the good work!
Yes. You are right. The time saving is an important thing in this competitive world. If we save the time then our money is also saved. The above time saving tools organizes our valuable time in an efficient manner. The Posting to Multiple Social Media Sites is an good idea to save our time with the help of any one of the following : Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan Page, LinkedIn, MySpace. Yes this is an wonderful organizational tool! The another tool is Social Media Organizational tool, which organizes lists so we can easily access certain people.The next tools are Social Network Scheduler URL and Headline Shortener, which also saves our time. This is an excellent one.
Good article.The five tools discussed in this article are good.Try to include the articles like this to encourage people.I really like it.
I had no idea about TweetDeck. Good to know!
The article is very very useful .
Though I used to use some, Facebook lists,etc.., of these tools already , I wasn't aware of the rest such as Tweet Deck,ping.fm.
Thank you very much.
i agree, now a days, time management takes the major role in all kinds of business. For this ur information is very much useful and needful. thanks dear.
A lot more businesses need to be using these social media tools to get to different types of people. It is a good way to showcase your business and to get more info out about your business to differenty types of people and different areas. It is very helpful to know about all the different types of social medias out there and I hope more businesses will start using them.
Time saving tools are definitely out there and that doesn't change the fact that you certainly need to set aside time each day to do your social networking tasks. At the same time it is almost "not social". Yes, it is networking but because it is now a business necessity it is no longer a social activity but a work activity. Interesting!
Another really good scheduling tool is http://www.twaitter.com/ It manages multiple accounts and does the same plus some as Hootsuite. Thanks for keeping us up to speed Jodi and Michelle!