Tools and Deals

Even maintaining one blog, a few twitter accounts and a facebook business page can be tons of work. Hootsuite is a tool that can be used every day to manage twitter, facebook business pages and an RSS feeds. These are some of the benefits:

Hootsuite makes it easier to manage twitter and facebook, period. You can switch between ALL of your accounts with one click. Chose which account to send your tweets, or send it to all of them at once.

Facebook is streamlined when using Hootsuite - you see just the the image and text from each post on your News Feed. Like and make comments on your friend's posts. You can also schedule future tweets but I prefer to use the completely awesome Tweetadder for scheduled tweets (see below).

The best thing is that Hootsuite will shorten the URL for a tweet only if you want to. Other twitter applications automatically shorten your links with a proprietary URL minimizer service, and that can be a problem with tracking and analytics. Hootsuite is the only way to get special bit.ly links into the stream (with optional "UTM" variables encoded) without being re-shortened again by another service.

New and improved Hootsuite

HootSuite Adds Advanced Facebook Management Tools

Disclaimer: If you're interested in using HootSuite - Social Media Dashboard, we are compensated by their affiliate program (and others on this page) if you choose to signup with Hootsuite. We're happy to promote excellent products that we use every day.

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Tweetadder

 Tweetadder is the best piece of software we've purchased for automatically posting on twitter, at the best price. The program paid for itself many times over, and the developer periodically sends out free updates to all customers. Tweetadder is a separate application that runs in the background on your desktop computer.   The program has many features, but the most important is scheduled tweets.  I have it pre-loaded with over 300 different tweets.  You tell it how many posts you want to publish per day and they are posted automatically..  I let the program run all day while the computer is turned on.  Tweetadder also includes features that you find with other programs: follow backs, unfollow, Twitter and user search, tweets from an RSS feed, automatic re-tweets and thank you messages.

Gremln

My second favorite auto-tweeter is Gremln (formerly Twaitter). Not only can you schedule tweets far into the future, if you want, Twaitter can serve up your tweets in several different languages with a built-in translator. Get visitors from all over the earth with international tweets. Note: I have had trouble sending text with umlauts and accents and other special characters when posting on the Twitter web page application. To get around this (temporary) problem, we use Hootsuite to schedule tweets with funky punctuation or different alphabets, like Hindi and Russian.

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Fotolia Stock Images

 

We prefer to use stock images from Fotolia because they have a convenient dashboard to organize your images, and they attract artists from around the world to contribute raster and vector images.