Social media can suck up all your time and energy if you are not careful. That’s why it is important to find ways to slot your social media marketing into your life rather than the other way around. Phone applications have become a very successful way to manage your social networks and the iPhone has a host of tools that can be used to your social media marketing. Here are my Top 10 Social Media iPhone Applications.
Read it later
Read it later is an important social media tool because it helps in posting relevant information to your social networks in the form of links to interesting articles. People enjoy following people who are not purely self-serving and who off additional information in their social profiles, not just blog updates. This app allows you to tag articles relevant to your choosen niche market and then, after reading them, provides easy access to posting them to your social profiles. My twitter profile @mikesaunders would not be updated as often if it weren’t for this tool.
As far as I am aware this is the only iPhone application that allows you to manage your linkedin profile. Therefore it is an important part of your socila media toolset. The Linkedin application has recently been updated and Mashable once again has a great overview of the application:
If you’ve used the previous version of LinkedIn for iPhone, you’ll immediately notice the difference. The new interface is very similar to Facebook 3.0 in that it displays 12 icons on the homepage that provide shortcuts to features like the inbox, invitations, status updates and profiles. The update also improves LinkedIn 3.0’s search interface. The goal is to make it easy for you to find information on anybody you meet by bringing up profile information and mutual connections. There’s also a favorites feature to save profiles you may want to bring up again later.
Perhaps the coolest addition to LinkedIn 3.0 is the “In Person” feature. Using a bluetooth connection, you can transfer contact information and automatically connect with someone else almost instantly.
This upgrade is worthy of your download: It has a bunch of UI upgrades, added functionality and some really innovative additions.
WordPress
A few months ago I wrote a post on my top ten iphone applications for 2009 which may have been a bit soon to place judgement on future applications coming out in 2009. Now that we have reached the end of this last year I feel a little more equipped to provide a more substantial list of useful apps in the iPhone. So here’s my list for 2009:
Echofon
This is my primary twitter application. It only manages a single profile and therefore allows complete focus on my main profile. I also use twitteriffic to manage my other profiles but I find the UI a bit to complicated. Echofon have done a great job at simpliying the proceeses of twitter and sticking to the neccessities rather than the trinkets.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite as a web-based application has grown leaps and bounds in 2009. Starting off as a way to update Twitter and schedule tweets the software has now extended to faceook, linkedin, ping.fm and a host of other services. The only thing missing (for me) was the iPhone app. I have since installed the app, and although it only allows access to updating twitter accounts for now, it is great to start scheduling tweets on the fly. This has already become a time saver for me.
The facebook application needs little introduction as it is the top downloaded app from the appstore. It is most likely that if you own an iPhone you have this app already. In 2009 this application became very useful to Social Media marketers with the ability to manage Facebook Pages, events, chats, friend requests, photo albums and notes.
Hackbitly
A funky little app that lets you get the stats of your it.ly links. Very useful to track the success of your blog posts.
Ego
Aptly named, the Ego application is all about checking on the status of your online ego. How many followers on twitter do you have, has anyone signed up to your feedburner RSS today or ha any visited my webiste. The EGO app will kep you up to date with the latest results of your marketing efforts in a neat and concise manner.
Pingle
If you are a ping.fm account holder then this will help alot. It uses a simple and straightforward UI (User Interface) to send an update to your ping.fm account, which in turn updates all of your social networks simultaneously. One update = many updated profiles!!!
Analytics Lite
Google Analytics is the measurement tool of choice for most internet marketers and this application gives you access to your acount. In depth stats can be downloaded quickly and easily. Literally putting all your websites statistical data in your pocket.
