Tools & Tips

Social media is ideally suited for collaboration, sharing, and information discovery, and many great tools and techniques support the important business activities. Here are some that we use and like.

The following tools and communities are only a few of the many social media resources available, so if you have others to add, tell us about your favorites in the comments.

Tweetdeck

Looking for a way to keep track of your tweets?

Why it’s great: Twitter message can become an overwhelming barrage of information. While there are many tools that can help you stay organized and aware of twitter messages mentioning you or other subjects of interest, we’re recommending Tweetdeck.

Expert tips: Create columns in Tweetdeck to track conversations around keywords or the names of other Twitter friends who regularly talk about topics of interest. In addition, you can connect your LinkedIn and Facebook status updates here. In recent months, Tweetdeck has grown beyond its humble Twitter-tracking roots into a more fully-functional social media monitoring platform.

Tweetdeck is a free download and runs using Adobe AIR as a standalone client.

About.me

Collect all your social links in one place

Why it’s great: With the proliferation of online social media identities we all juggle, about.me promises to gather all of your links in one easy “splash page” so you can easily share them with others.

Expert tips: Upload a high quality picture of yourself along with your social media links and write a full professional (or personal) summary of yourself. For maximum value, include this link in your email signature rather than the list for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others you’ve been using. Your email recipients will thank you for reducing the clutter and you’ll be able to see analytics about who has been visiting your personal splash page.

About.me is a free web-based service.