Social Mediarology

If you’ve already created a Twitter account, a Facebook Fan Page and a WordPress blog for your organization, you’re on the right track. Now that you have accounts at a handful of social media sites, how do you manage them all?

There are dozens of social media management platforms out there, including some great ones like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both are great applications, but they need to be installed on your computer. One of the many great things about Hootsuite is it’s 100% web-based. You simply visit Hootsuite.com, log in and you can manage your social media initiatives from any computer with an internet connection.

Hootsuite Screenshot

Hootsuite originally launched in late 2008 as a dedicated Twitter client. As you can see from this screenshot, it’s evolved into a powerful social media management platform. In addition to Twitter, you can now manage Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages), LinkedIn, WordPress and the lesser-used Ping.FM.

Do you want to post the same message to your Facebook page and your Twitter account? Do you want to set up your blog to feed through to your Twitter and Facebook accounts? Do you want to set up multiple accounts so different people at your organization can help manage your social media strategy? Hootsuite lets you do all this and more.

Hootsuite Stats Screenshot

Hootsuite also automatically shortens links using their Ow.ly URL shortener and gives you detailed stats about each links posted through Hootsuite. You can look at link stats from the past 24 hours, past week, past month or any other timeframe.

I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary social media management tool for the past several months and I’ve been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and I’m waiting for the Blackberry app that will hopefully follow.

Have you used Hootsuite?