Oh-so-simple social media

Published on April 24th, 2012

Tags: Chrome, dashboard, Facebook, social media, technology, twitter

Every new technology should make our lives simpler.

Take the telephone; that made easy work of Morse code and jungle drums. Or the digital camera; bad news for photographic film manufacturers, but great news for the rest of us standing in line at the Boots photo counter.

And then along came social media and we could suddenly communicate instantly with anyone, any time; simple, right?

Wrong. There’s a darker side to most new technology. We wouldn’t be without phones – but sometimes it would be nice to be out of contact. We wouldn’t be without digital photos – but what do we do when we have archives of thousands of photos? And social media? The flip side of being able to do whatever we want online is that keeping up with everyone else is difficult to say the least. The simplicity of social media has made us all victims of its own success.

And with the number of popular social networks growing larger by the week, staying on top of your company’s social media has become a marathon task.

Enter Hootsuite; a ‘social media dashboard’ now used by over 3 million people each day. It’s called a dashboard because it lets you manage all your social media channels together in one place without having to log on to the individual websites each time.

Facebook and Linked In profiles are all covered, along with Twitter; where Hootsuite really comes into its own. Anyone responsible for managing multiple Twitter accounts will appreciate being able to switch accounts instantly.

Hootsuite’s basic package is free; a big plus. It gives you one user profile, lets you customise your screen view and schedule your updates in advance – useful if you’re off on holiday or just too busy to spend all day tweeting.

Once you’ve learnt the ropes you can upgrade your account from $5.99 per month and get access to pro features like multiple users and advanced analytics tools.

Personally, I’ve been getting the most out of it after downloading the desktop icon – or widget – through Google’s Chrome web browser. This even saves me the hassle of having to keep logging into the Hootsuite website.

And by downloading the ‘hootlet’ bookmark and adding it to my web browser, I can post straight to my social media sites when I find a link worth sharing.

If you’re not on it already, it’s worth giving it a try – it is arguably the most user-friendly dashboard on the market – and there’s a mobile app for it too.

Suddenly social media seems a bit simpler again.