Social Media Toolbox
Social Media Toolbox
Wikipedia defines social media as media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. The following are some tools I highly recommend for for managing and disseminating information across your online social channels.
- Shareaholic plug-in for Firefox and IE8 lets you easily share information across a multitude of online services including delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Evernote, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, and Ping.fm, and many more.
- Ping.fm is a powerful service that lets you update messages across multiple social networks simultaneously. Ping.fm supports over 40 different services and messages can be sent to the through mobile phones, instant message, email, and a number of third party apps such as MePing.
- Google Reader is my feed reader of choice, this web app frees your feeds from your desktop allowing you to read them from any computer with an internet connection. It has options below each feed which allow you to easily tag feed items, share with your Google contacts, email , like a feed item which will be seen by any other Google Reader users who read the same feed, star a feed item, add to your shared feed, and share feed items on various social networks.
- LastPass is a password manager I’d recommended to any social media buff because all of those online services mean lots of passwords to keep track of. LastPass has all the features you’d expect from a password manager, with the added benefit of being accessible via browser plug-in for Firefox and IE, or the LastPass web site.
- Delicious is my book marking site of choice, and I consider it to be distinctly a bookmarking service as opposed to services like Digg and StumbleUpon while sometimes referred to as bookmarking sites I’d consider them to be content ranking sites. Delicious has a send feature which lets you type in email addresses to send a bookmark to one or more email addresses, user names of other delicious users to send bookmarks to them, or “twitter” to share bookmarks on Twitter. Delicious also has a handy plug-in for Firefox and IE as well as a bookmarklet which can be used in all browsers.
- FoxyTunes which I’ve recently have started using, is a must have for any social music addict. This plug-in for Firefox and IE sits in your status bar and lets you control virtually any media player such as Windows Media Player, iTunes, and VLC, it is also compatible with online music streaming services such as Blip.fm, Last.fm, and Pandora, and if that weren’t enough it also gives you the option to control audio that’s embedded into any site you visit. The player controls can also be minimized down to one button when you’re not using them. The social part of this program is that it lets you automatically share what you’re listening to on Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo Profiles and Yahoo Messenger, automatically or by pushing a button (which I prefer).
- TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop is a must have for anyone with a large number of Twitter friends, the best feature of both clients is that they let you group your friends into categories, bringing some order to the chaos, both also allow users to add Facebook accounts, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses, I’d recommend you try them both for your self if you haven’t and decide which is best for you.
- YooNo is another great app which I happened to come across during the writing of this post. YooNo comes in the form of a browser plug-in for Firefox and IE, as well as a desktop app. This service supports 10 different networks and lets you update your status across networks and can display updates and messages from all of your networks in a single stream, the desktop version can also show new updates in a small pop up at the bottom of your screen.
Feel free to share any software or services which make it easier for you to manage your networks, share information, and reach your audience in the comments below.
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