Manage Your Social Media
Social media has become an effective and low cost social media marketing tool for many companies that know how to leverage the social media streams. To be able to communicate, interact, streamline, automate and schedule social media streams they need professional tools to be able to effectively promote their services. Lots of these tool are free or very inexpensive. They only need some practice to make them work for you. Social media is however not only being used to promote products and services but has got much more potential useful features.
Use Social Media Sites to:
- Communication between team members that can be selected by yourself.
- Sending messages to groups of people. You can make your own groups and add people to them and send them targeted messages.
- Interaction with an audience you will specify. Can be as open or wide as you want.
- Promoting coupons and easy sharing between users.
- Launching prize games (word by mouth can go fast on Twitter)
- Sometimes even for asking question to important people that are normally hard to connect with.
Remember that every time someone Tweets about your message it can be picked up by other social media users and the story can go viral, meaning lots of attention! And as a bonus you will get a backlink to your site if users talk about your article, product, service or coupon page and link to that web page on your site.
When using these media services on a large scale and with a large audience it will be impossible to manage these massive amounts of information streams. There are several services available that give you far more control and features than you would get from your standard Twitter or other account. In this article I want to compare the two most popular and widely used tools SocialOomph and its rival HootSuite.
SocialOomph Review
SocialOomph offers the most features and can be used for Twitter, StatusNet and updating Facebook pages or posts scheduled blogs. The most valuable function of both services are the ability to schedule updates you want to post online. When Tweets or updates are posted at the wrong time of the day, then it is almost guaranteed that you will not get as many people reading them as you would like. Being able to schedule your update means that you will never have to be online to post at the correct time and you can even stay in sync with international followers when you are asleep.
Apart from the benefit of time saving and organization there is a great deal of added functionality. Rather than having to keep track off all your @replies you can have a summary emailed to you (or your client) on a regular basis. You can also monitor the public Twitter stream for keywords that you are interested in.
The basic profile which is provided by Twitter will be extended. Basic management becomes much easier with functions like being able to clear all your messages or delete all friends at once. It is also easy to set up for multi user use. Just provide your staff with the secret email address and they can use it to send messages by emailing them to that email address.
SocialOomph Screenshots (click for larger image):
SocialOomph Schedule New Update
SocialOomph Schedule New Future Updates
Wipe all Twitter friends option in SocialOomph, Start fresh and hope people will not unfollow you 
SocialOomph @username mentions of all your accounts in one overview
Social Oomph Tweet Cockpit - View, manage, reply and DM to messages
Free Basic Features SocialOomph:
- Extent the information you can add to your Twitter profile
- Automatically follow people who follow you
- Automatic send DM (direct messages) to followers
- Track Tweets with specific keywords
- Track @yourusernames mentions. Track multiple social media accounts communication in one dashboard.
- Manage unlimited accounts
- Schedule auto posting on specific days, dates, times and time intervals.
Professional Features SocialOomph:
- Schedule recurring updates with spinnable text and @replies
- No 12 updates per hour limit for posting
- Drip feeding accounts with predefined messages and/or RSS feed
- Pause scheduled recurring updates so you can send out more important messages instead
- Find friends based on keyword searches
- Friend finder Spam filter so you will only be presented with quality profiles
- Auto unfollow people who don’t follow you back
- Only receive messages from people you define in your Tweet Channel. You can set up multiple channels which will enable you to categorize the messages you are receiving
- Schedule Facebook activity
- Scheduled and posting on multiple blogs. You can set up these automatic posts on self hosted WordPress sites by using the WordPress API and other blog types like Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com, metaWeblog API, Movable Type API, Blogger API, and Atom API.
- Submit Social Updates with Email
- Private Networking
- Finding influencers within your branch, these make powerful followers increasing the weight the search engines put on your social media messages.
- Automatically add the people you found with the keyword search to Twitter lists by simply connection one or more keywords to the list. I miss the option to manage your Twitter lists
- Better DM (Direct Message) control for multiple accounts in one panel (schedule, forward form Twitter to Statusnet, set Spam filters etc.)
- Mute annoying Tweeters
- Multi level control access management enables you to outsource your social media management by giving the social media manager limited account control. You can even let multiple social media managers work together on one account from wherever they are in the world.
- Turn a RSS feed into a 24×7 linkbuilding monster!
- Ping.fm integration to spread your message to even more services which are integrated in Ping.fm, such as Linkedin and Myspace.
You can create a free account and try the professional features 168 hours for free. If you don’t upgrade it will automatically return into a free account. The upgrade is $35.94 a month or $25.94 if you are only want to use the Twitter scheduled posting features. If you are on a budget and want to use SoocialOomph only to make your Twitter accounts more healthy (more quality followers) you could use it for one month and then continue to manage them with the free version or with HootSuite.
Social Oomph’s advantage compared to Hootsuite
SocialOomph makes is easier to find the best people to follow by searching for keywords and quality indicators. It is also really easy to find relevant updates that you are interested in by selecting different channels that divide updates into different groups.
Below you will see Two Short Video Demonstration of SocialOomph:
HootSuite Review
HootSuite has got a free and a professional option. The most important difference between the free and the paid version is the ability to add an unlimited numbers of people who can be part of the team that manage the social media streams through Hootsuite. Most people and small businesses will have enough social media managing power with the free version.
HootSuite Screenshots (click for larger image):
HootShuite Dashboard - First Page
Hootsuite Free Basic Social Statistics Available when using Ow.ly links
HootShuite Dashboard: Manage Different Social Media Accounts in one app
Create Your Own Extended Customized Social Analytics Reports With a Hootsuite Premium Account
Free Features of HootSuite:
- Max 5 Social Profiles
- Max 2 RSS / ATOM Feed Imports
- Scheduling News Updates one by one
- Basic Social Analytics
- URL Shortening service OW.ly / Ow.li and Ht.ly / Ht.li
- Free Hootsuite Extenions: Add a Hootsuite social bookmarker to your Firefox or Chrome toolbar. When on a page it will auto grab the URL and title of the page, saving you time going to the HootSuite site and copying and pasting the URL.
Premium Features Hootsuite:
- Bulk Message Scheduling
- Unlimited Social Profiles
- Add team members
- Get Social Reports
- Facebook Statistics, view likes etcetera…
- Social Media Influence Score measurements
- View Enhanced Social Analytics with Google Analytics integration
- Archive Tweets and download keywords related to these messages
- Ad Vanity URLs; If you want to brand your links with a custom domain name but still want to be able to view statistics and have the security of Ow.ly, you can add your existing vanity URL into HootSuite.
- Unlimited RSS Feed imports
- Disable Promoted Tweets in The Settings
Hootsuite advanced features are available from $5.99/month and can be used for free during a 7 day trial.
HootSuite Advantages vs SocialOomph
With Hootsuite you can schedule your messages without the need to get a premium account. A lot of people people are using both Hootsuite and SocialOomph at the same time. This way they can use the free features of both products and get great results.
Unique Features of HootSuite:
- Allows for very detailed analytics which can even send out reports to any number of people.
- Comes with a free Firefox Addon (called Hootlet)which allows you to quick post pages you want to promote and auto fills the fields for you. The title will be used as text which you can instantly Tweet.
- Manage Google Plus page from Hootsuite Dashboard
- And as a bonus they have a free mobile application that allows anyone to publish news on the go by sending messages with your phone. This way you can have a conversation with the by you specified audience (can be as large or small as you want).
Below two Video Review of HootSuite:
Conclusion; Social Oomph Vs HootSuite; Which one is better?
HootSuite can make team collaboration a little bit easier. It would also cost less if you only have one extra team member but as you want to add more team members you will have to pay a significantly higher price tag. Hootsuite professional also provides better highly custmizable Analytic reports which will give indepth insight into your social media performance. On the other hand I would prefer SocialOomph for better management of your Twitter list and for improving the quality of your Twitter and Statusnet profile by creating a better balance in followers/unfollowers and get more influencers to follow you. I personally don’t see anyone being better or wrong. They are both good and I would use them in conjunction to get the most control.
Both tools come with lots of features. It will take quite some time to get familiar with them all. You will definitely need at least two days to figure out all features of both tools. But once you do you will be able to manage all social media streams effectively through one panel (or two if you use both tools).
What I am missing in both tools is the option to delete users by adding a keyword filter. Another feature I am looking for is to auto DM whenever someone is Tweeting about a specific keyword. That would make a great targeted promotion tool. What I am missing in Hootsuite is the feature to automatic unfollow people who stop following you. With this method you can exponentially grow you Twitter list because you can set up to automatic follow people who are Tweeting about a keyword you are targeting and then auto follow these people. If they then unfollow you, you can unfollow them as well. This way you can create a Twitter magnet that will look very interesting because of the follow/following ratio. Google tends to give more weight to Twitter profiles with a good follow/following ratio because this is one important sign that the profile belongs to an authoritative person or company. These profiles get higher Pagerank and better backlink power. The tool which can do this probably even better than SocialOomph is Tweet Adder. More about Tweet Adder in another Review.
Professional Internet Marketeer and SEO Consultant at Simple SEO Agency Amsterdam. We hope you enjoy reading our internet business articles and that you will share your thoughts in the comments. Quality comments will be published and rewarded with a keyword link to your site. Guest bloggers will be even more rewarded with a high value dofollow text link and free internet promotion.
