Any suggestions on dashboard / program to handle social media?

[NoahsDad]

I'm looking for a good way to mange my social media communities.  I've been logging into facebook, youtube, twitter, wordpress, etc to reply to our community. But that takes so much time. Can anyone suggest a dashboard where I can respond to our community in one place instead of logging into each online community?

It would be great if I could also reply to blog comments also, but since this isn't really a "social network" I'm not sure if any of the dashboards let you reply to blog comments. If so, that's ok. But a perfect one would allow for this also.

In regard to posting new content (especially on Facebook) it's been my experience that posting from anything other than directly to their webpage (no 3rd party app/dashboard) reduces the exposure of that content on your fans news feeds. Has anyone found any work arounds for this, or is the best method using the dashboards to reply to fans, keep up with social networks, etc...and to actaully use the webpage to post new content?

Looking forward to your advice.

Thanks!

[jennita]

Hi Rick!

You're totally right about Facebook. If you post from 3rd party sites, FB doesn't display your posts in people's timelines as much. It's pretty annoying but we use Facebook to manage Facebook, Google+ to manage Google+, LinkedIn to manage LinkedIn, etc. The only one where we use a 3rd party site is Twitter and we use SocialEngage (aka Cotweet) for that.

I have heard really good things about SproutSocial although I've never used it personally. I know other Community Managers swear by it. I'm thinking though that Hootsuite will work best for you. It looks like you can add Youtube and maybe even your blog comments. I'd definitely take a free trial and give it a whirl.

Hope that helps!

Jen

[brianhughes]

Thank you for posting this question Rick and thank you for the great suggestion Jennifer! I have been planning and plotting to start using a Social Media dashboard for the past couple of months and I just finally signed up for an account with Hootsuite thanks to this thread.

Brian

[jennita]

Awesome! Glad to hear it. Let us know how it works out for you.

[EwanFisher]

Hi Rick

Hootsuite is good, but I would recommend sprout social been using this for a while now and its fantastic.

http://sproutsocial.com/

Matthew