2 Time-Saving Social-Media Tools

Let’s be honest, the holidays make us even more aware of the fact that many times, despite the song, time is not on our side. We are a society of people with too much to do and too little time to do it.

For nonprofits, this statement is often made around 15 minutes into any presentation I give about integrating social media into a marketing or communications strategy: “We just think we have the time for this kind of a thing.”

I feel your pain. I do. But luckily technology has advanced along with us and our hectic lives to help make things a little more efficient for us. Below are two of the tools that I have found to be the best time-savers in my social media day-to-day listening, communication and analysis of online activity.

HootSuite: is a website and online brand-management service that publishes to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace and WordPress. It is also a Twitter client.

This tool is hands down my ultimate time-saver. HootSuite is designed for people who manage multiple pages across multiple social-media platforms. It has a lot of perks; here are just some:

• It’s free.
• The ability to schedule tweets or posts in advance (perfect for tweeting over the weekend or later at night for those of us who want to “unplug” after leaving work).
• Clean and easy to use interface/dashboard.
• Analytics that in my opinion are unmatched for a free tool with all the bells and whistles HootSuite incorporates. HootSuite also allows you to integrate your website’s Google Analytics into the HootSuite platform, allowing you to obtain a better overall picture of where you traffic is coming from and what content is most popular.

Netvibes: is the first personalized dashboard publishing platform for the Web including digital life management, widget distribution services and brand observation rooms. Interactive agencies, businesses and brands rely on Netvibes Premium Dashboards to better monitor the real-time Web.