The Best Social Media Aggregator Apps in the World
By Branko Miletic
It would be an understatement to say that social media is big right now – if you added all the users of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Google+ and Foursquare together, you would have a combined population of almost 1.3 Billion people and be only second in size to China.
Moreover, many people like me have multiple social media accounts – in my case Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google+ and LinkedIn – and keeping these in check, updated and relevant can be a fiddly task. Bearing that in mind wouldn't it be nice if you could update all these channels at once, without needing to go in and separately updating each one?
Thankfully, for all those multiple social app users out there help is at hand – or rather keyboard, as there are literally many dozens of programs that will allow you to view, sort, check and update all your social media sites – all at once, without ever needing to worry if you have missed one.
So over here at Cybershack, we have decided to preview the 7 best social media site aggregators for the job.
HootSuite- www.hootsuite.com– Using an owl as a logo, Hootsuite is free and will allow you to manage multiple social profiles, schedule messages and tweets, track brand mentions and analyse social media traffic. But one thing it doesn't do is Geotagging, which is too bad as it’s a great program.
TweetDeck – www.tweetdeck.com– Very much like HootSuite, but with sleeker looks and also free, TweetDeck was designed as a personal browser for connecting across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. It became so popular that it was bought out by Twitter and is now officially part of the company.
Ping.fm – www.pinfm.com– another freebie that allows users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. It-s easy to use, but seems to cater better for those that want to push out their thoughts, rather than looking at the whole conversation thread.
NutShellMail – http://nutshellmail.com/– this does pretty much the same job as TweetDeck and HootSuite, however with one slight difference- it sends you only one email per day with all of your activity on it, making it perfect for those who don't like to be bothered or suffer from ADHD.
Sprout Social- http://sproutsocial.com/ – Another social media organiser, however unlike the previous examples, Sprout Social is not free- prices start at $9 per month. The $9/month sure goes a long way. Not only will it do what the above programs do, it will also provide you with a full set of metrics; if you are mentioned somewhere on the web, it will tell you; it will measure how influential you are; provide you with monthly reports; and a whole lot more – all in a very pretty and nicely designed interface.
Seesmic –www.seesmic.com Getting back to the freebies, Seesmic does the same as TweetDeck, along with allowing the user to break up their Twitter stream into multiple columns, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and even plug into Salesforce and Chatter. A clean user interface.
PostRank – www.postrank.com– more of a social media analysis tool and perhaps as such suited better for professionals or small business people. PostRank connects people where they share, critique and interact with content and each other. It has an impressive engine. It is also claimed to be the largest aggregator of social media data to date. And no – it’s not free – they customise packages to suit.
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