Are you Using a Social Media Dashboard

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As i mentioned in my last post, i am currently testing the Hootsuite social media dashboard in my marketing setup. Managing multiple accounts on multiple platforms requires such software to speed up the process and keep everything organized. I’ve been using MarketMeSuite for a while, the truth is i selected MarketMeSuite for their “self-branded tweets” option. Having your tweets branded with your website or company name is valuable, but should it decide which application to choose? Let’s see.

Hootsuite: Social Media Dashboard

Hoostsuite is a social media dashboard used to manage all your social profiles from one platform. It allows you to easily add your different social networks, view the activity and post content to them.

Social Networks included in Hoostuite:

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• Twitter
• Facebook (profile)
• Facebook (fan page)
• Linkedin
• MySpace

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• WordPress
• Foursquare
• Mixi (Japan)
• Ning
• **Also connects with Ping.fm

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Easy to setup and use

The first thing i notice from using Hootsuite is it’s so easy to use, the general layout of the application is intuitive and easy to learn. I found it much easier to setup than MarketMeSuite, as i had to communicate about 5 times with customer support to get my Facebook Fan page added. The final solution was a temporary external page built just for that action. Great customer support from Tammy and the support team, but a little time wasted because of that.

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All Setup and Ready to go, now what?

After joining Hootsuite, you can literally have all your social networks combined into a well designed dashboard in a matter of minutes.

Ok what now? Hootsuite (and similar products) is not a social networks auto-pilot tool, it’s a productivity tool. What i mean is, if you have no idea how to manage and build your social networks, these dashboards won’t do the job for you.

A common challenge in social media marketing is not managing your accounts and profiles, it’s what you do with it, how you interact and most importantly, what content you share. Having a Wilson tennis racket doesn’t make me hit like Federer, i’ve tried!

Yes, but Some Features Missing

At $6 per month, I believe these tools are a must for me, managing multiple accounts, each with multiple and different profiles requires organization. But i find that these softwares are missing important features at the moment.

For example, the @ tag used on Facebook to write from your pages to other pages isn’t available.

LinkedIn Feature, Average

The LinkedIn feature was important to me, since i use LinkedIn at the heart of my web marketing, i expected more customization features. It’s an unattractive display of your network feed. Although commenting is available, the “share” and “like” options would have been a nice touch.

I would have also liked to be able to sort some stuff, like new connections, posts, profile changes…

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Conclusion

Social media dashboards are a very good thing if you plan to grow using social medias, but also plan on using the websites themselves from time to time (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…). They are very affordable and will save you some time.

From my experience with Hootsuite and MarketMeSuite, i prefer Hootsuite for the general layout and ease of use. I believe it’s a superior product, apart from the self branding feature on MarketMeSuite which is sweet! Confused…

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