Tools To Make The Most Of Your Social Media Experience

 

When Partner Professional Staffing was preparing to launch into the world of social media as a way to connect with our customers, we did a lot of research. With such a large percentage of our customers engaged in at least one of the social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, we wanted to make sure we were easily accessible and responsive. This required researching and testing some of the many tools that are available to make keeping up with these networks easier, faster and more productive.
 
Now that we have done the due diligence, we want to share with you a few of the discoveries we made and share how they can help enhance your social media experience, whether you’re just an occasional user trying to stay connected or a power user. Below are our top five picks of the best kept secrets to making the most of your social media experience:
 
  1. Namechk.com is a good site for everyone getting into social networking or those that have already embraced it and want to protect their image or brand. Your name, the name of your company or product is important when creating and protecting your online social media image. This tool will check your name availability across the most popular 145 social media sites and give you the results in an easy to view layout that allows you to access each site on which you want to register. Knowem.com is another similar alternative that checks 340 social media networks. While Knowem.com is not as simple to use, it does have a premium paid service that will register your chosen name on all 340 sites.
  1. TweetDeck is one of our favorites. With this tool, you can monitor news and conversations across your networks. It will connect you with your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace accounts and enable you to receive the all the updates in one place. The real power of this tool is the ability to quickly reply to any of your posts or to create a post and select to have it posted on all, one or any combination of accounts. This application, available from TweetDeck.com, is downloadable onto your desktop or iPhone. 
  1. IceRocket.com might be the perfect tool for anyone wanting to know what is being said about a particular topic, such as a company or even themselves! This tool lets you select the type of information you would like to search, such as Blogs, Twitter, MySpace, news, images or Big Buzz. A similar service, Google Alerts (google.com/alerts), delivers this information to your inbox on a regular basis, rather than giving you instant results
  1. Animoto is a terrific tool for making your photos much more appealing and engaging rather than just posting them in your Facebook photo album. This technology, available for free at Animoto.com, allows you to create short videos set to music using any photos or video shorts you already have. The best part is that it is so simple to use that in minutes you can have a pretty neat video to share.   Though you can upgrade to a paid account at a very reasonable price, the free account still offers good lengths that keeps your audiences’ attention. 
  1. SlideShare.net enables you to easily share a presentation or document publicly or privately with your network. Though this sounds like Google Docs, it is actually a much more powerful tool when it comes to increasing the value of your presentations. For social media networking, you can upload a presentation showing your portfolio of work or a presentation you recently gave at an industry event. You’ll get a URL that can be posted on Facebook, Twitter, a blog or your Web site. SlideShare recently released an app for LinkedIn, making it even more useful. The best part is the ability to create a SlideCast, which is a presentation that you add audio to using their tool to synchronize it with the presentation slides, essentially creating your own webinar.
As you can see, there are a multitude of tools that exist to help enhance your experience. The trend in new and better applications will only continue to accelerate as social media matures. Those that embrace and leverage these new tools stand to gain the richest social networking experience.

 

 

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