1. Try to include an image in your tweets. Twitter is like looking out the window of a fast moving train. If you insert insert a “billboard” (photo or graphic image) tweet, people will notice it.-  Noland Hoshino
2. Always, always check your links!–  Jenn Johnson
3. For every self serving post you tweet…engage with one of your constituents. Michael Dougherty
4. Don’t let your tweets devolve to mere “press releases.” Experiment with your nonprofit’s voice so that you can be interesting to those who choose to follow you.-  Marc A. Pitman
5. Write specific thank you messages to your supporters along with their twitter handles during online fundraising efforts. More likely than not they’ll retweet you and expand your campaign’s reach.-  Mark Hallman

1. Schedule 15 mins in the morning, afternoon and evening to spend time on Twitter actively engaging with others content, not just promoting our own. Be visual; use properly sized images to grab attention and experiment with 30 second videos, such as interviews with staff, donors and volunteers — or a trailer for a longer video linking to your website. And create Twitter Lists to more easily manage organizational partners, staff Twitter accounts, influencers, press and others related to your work to make it easier to cut through the noise and focus on those you most want to engage with. –  Chris Tuttle
2. Spend 15-30 minutes, twice a day (with a timer; gets you focused). Segment, balance out your tweets, respond to everyone. Finally, empower your supporters to engage on Twitter on your behalf by including pre-written tweets in your emails. – Pamela Grow
3. I love Twitter for media relations. Follow all the reporters and producers as individuals, in addition to the official accounts, for your target media, put them in a list and check it frequently to see if they are working on stories related to your work. Pass on good news tips to them too, not just from your org, but from your field in general. Kivi Leroux Miller
4. Master hashtags. Tweets with hashtags usually get more engagement. Use tools such as Twitonomy, Ritetag and Hashtagify.me to research relevant tags for your audience and combine them in smart ways. Monitor your key hashtags to help you find new people and engage in relevant conversations. And hashtags aren’t just for Twitter – think event signage, emails, advertisements. – Kerri Karvetski 
5. Always, always research hashtags before you use them – something that may seem benign may be used by people with whom you shouldn’t associate your brand. – Nora Brathol
6. Really think through hashtags you create for a campaign – how might it be coopted? And will that be ok? – Gurukarm Kaur Khalsa
7. Segment those you follow into lists. Put those you follow you care most about interacting with, keeping up with, and cultivating into lists so that you can focus on those relationships and their news. Import those lists into your Twitter app (Tweetdeck, Hootsuite), and judiciously cultivate and interact with your list using the app. It makes Twitter manageable, fun, and easy to use! Debra Askanase
8. Segment prospects into columns so you can stalk them! Joe Waters
9. When tweeting your content, experiment with sharing it more than once, each time with a different approach. Variations include: share just the headline, write a tweet in an alternate engaging format (e.g. ask a question, quote a juicy bit), add an image, try a new hashtag, share at a different time of day or on the weekend, or add ICYMI (in case you missed it). – Lauren Girardin
10. Don’t be so quick to jump onto trends and memes — they usually *aren’t* the right way to engage your community. If you would roll your eyes at your meme tweet if it came from another org, don’t post it. – Jenna Sauber
11. Welcome your new Twitter followers and thank people for tweeting and really respond to people. – Beth Kanter
12. Craft a balanced mix of tweets totally from you, about other’s content with your spin and links to others’ content. And don’t be afraid to throw in an occasional wildcard when you feel like it — good to have a personality even if EVERYONE doesn’t like it. Some always will! – Nancy E. Schwartz
13. Find and participate in Twitter Chats in your segment or related segments. It is a great way for you to connect with people that might have an interest in what you do. And related to that, use a personal touch, let people know who they are talking with from the organization’s account. – Kami Watson Huyse
14. Respond to everyone – EVERYONE. In a timely manner. For us it’s 24 hours. Set up monitoring for those that tweet their donation and thank every person. Don’t just respond to people who tag you – monitor convos about your brand throughout the twitter sphere. For example, many people call us the “American Humane Society”. So we monitor that phrase and engage accordingly. – Carie Lewis Carlson
15. Find your audience by looking through your followers’ lists including those they put you on. Follow the breadcrumbs. Oh and take part in Twitter chats. – Maddie Grant
16. Make your tweets short enough so RTs can add a comment to make it more meaningful to their Followers. Short and sweet is the key! – David Krumlauf
17. Optimize your bio with keywords and use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite to pre-schedule content so you can focus on real-time engagement. – Melanie Mathos
18. Learn about your followers, what they like and do so you can create content that is relevant to them. – Janet Fouts
19. Look at your new followers a few times a day. Often very influential people will follow, but rarely to they say “hello” when they do. – Mark Horvath
20. Don’t waste time engaging with users who don’t have strong networks. Use Klout score to prioritize influencers. Use the Klout filter in Hootsuite, and the Klout browser extension which displays Klout scores when using Twitter.com. – John Haydon

What else would you add?

The post 25 Nonprofit Twitter tips from the pros appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Ian Cleary of RazorSocial recently published an infographic highlighting the daily tasks of a social media marketer. But what’s really useful about this infographic isn’t a rundown of daily tasks. It’s the 29 tools.

Some of these tools you may already know about, but here’s a quick rundown of the highlights:

Learning and content curation tools

• Downcast – This is an iOS (Apple) app that let’s you and listen to podcasts directly from your iOS device without the need to sync with iTunes. Perfect for iPhone and iPad users on the go.
• Evernote  – There are thousands of things you can do with Evernote, including curating, creating and organizing content. My friend Joe Waters is a huge Evernote fan.
• Zite – This is a magazine app that helps you discover content based on your interests. Personally, I like Flipboard.
• Feedly – Imagine if Google Reader was reborn looking beautiful and easy to use, and you’ll have an idea of what Feedly is.

Content publishing tools

• AWeber – This is an email marketing tool that’s super popular with bloggers and small businesses. Most nonprofits use Constant Contact or Mailchimp, but AWeber is definitely worth a look.
• WordPress – The best blogging (and website) platform on the planet. Enough said.

Scheduling tools

• dlvr.it – This tool allows you to schedule and share content on almost every major social media platform. It includes many notification and analytics features that you can learn about here.
• PostPlanner –  This tool is a must for any Facebook manager. Particularly if you manage multiple Facebook pages or have multiple administrators. It even has an excellent content curation feature!
• Buffer – With Buffer, throw content in a hopper that spits it out at predetermined times. I use Buffer every morning to schedule retweets from specific Twitter Lists I’ve created.
• Hootsuite – Another tool you probably already know about, HootSuite is a must-have for any social media marketer. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter streams, schedule and post content to multiple platforms, and even publish beautiful analytics reports.

Facebook contest tools

• Agora Pulse – I recently used this to develop a custom quiz app for a breast cancer foundation. The app worked beautifully, allowing me to acquire emails and analyze engagement rates in the process.
• ShortStack – This tool allows you to run any type of photo contest or giveaway, in addition to creating any type of custom tab you can imagine. No coding required, but yet highly customizable.

Monitoring tools

• Mention – Create alerts for mentions of your name, your brand, your cause and even your competitors on the web and social networks. I haven’t use this myself, but I’ve only heard good things.

Analytics tools

• Google Analytics – In my opinion a must-have for every social media marketer. Over the past year, Google Analytics has undergone a major overhaul to make measuring social media more meaningful.
• Tailwind – If you use Pinterest, you will want to use Tailwind. With Tailwind you can track follower repins, likes and comments, and even drill down into content performance by category, board, keyword and #hashtag.

Infographic on how to make your marketing more productive

Check out all 29 tools mentioned in the infographic below:

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Facebook scheduling, Twitter Lists, HootSuite & more

Guest post by Carrie Romanazzi Chwierut

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Facebook users.

Every day there are new online tools being touted as the newest, greatest thing sure to make your social media life easy. To help, I’ve summarized a few that make my social media life easier – and hopefully yours, too!

Facebook scheduling: Pick your time to shine

1If you use Facebook as your primary social media outlet, then you should take advantage of the scheduling feature Facebook recently introduced. It’s very simple to use. Enter your post, then click on the little clock icon. Select the day and time you’d like your text to post and hit schedule. So far, this is one of my favorite tools – I’ve used it quite a bit and have not run into any issues with it working properly.

Tip: The scheduling feature only works on pages, not personal profiles, and does not work with sharing someone else’s post. I hope this is something Facebook will implement in the near future.

Twitter lists: Focus on those who matter

2When you click to view a Twitter list, you’ll see a stream of tweets from only the users included in that group. The nice thing is that you don’t have to be following a Twitter user to add them to your list. This is a great way to cut through the hundreds of tweets in your stream and narrow it down to just those you really want to see.

Tip: To create a list, go to your Twitter home page and click the profile drop-down icon in the top navigation bar. To add someone to your list, go to their profile and click on the drop-down icon of the little person (next to the Follow/Following button).

Google Reader: Make the Web come to you

3Google Reader is a free service from Google that uses RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. RSS feeds offer a simplified view of Web content down to just text, pictures and videos — minus the site’s style and formatting, which can sometimes hinder or befuddle casual reading. When you want to do a quick scan of your favorite sites, this is a real time saver.

Tip: Nearly every site has an RSS feed, and you can usually find it by scrolling around and hunting for the little RSS logo, a little orange box with three white waves.

HootSuite: Manage your accounts in one place

4I’ve long been a huge fan of HootSuite and other third-party schedulers, like Tweetdeck. The service lets you post to several different social media platforms from one site. The dashboard lets you monitor those same platforms in an easy-to-view format.

Tip: At the free level, you can add up to five social media platforms, which is enough for most people. Once you begin to use HootSuite as your team’s social media dashboard, expect to pay $5 to $15 per month per additional team member.

And there you have it. Did I miss any? Are there any tools you can’t live without? Please share in the comments!

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HootSuite, Post Planner, Buffer can provide productivity boost

Guest post by Shonali Burke
VP Digital, MSL, Washington, DC

When it comes to staying on top of social media, one of the big challenges we have is to find the social media tools that will help us achieve a happy medium between curating, listening, engaging and producing content.

Frankly, I think that sweet spot is tough to find, and when we do find it, it stays with us for a while before it goes dancing off into the sunset, leaving us to figure it out all over again.

What to do? There are a ton of tools — and new ones coming out nearly every day — that purport to help us do this. I haven’t tested all of them, of course, but of those I have tested, here is what I currently think is the holy trinity of managing social media.

HootSuite: Scheduling updates made easy

1I’ve been a HootSuite fan for a long time. It’s a terrific way to post to a number of social networks, schedule posts and listen in on what’s going on, either by creating dedicated searches or creating streams of Twitter lists you’ve set up.

While I don’t use this tool to post to LinkedIn, etc., as much as I could, what I do find very useful, in addition to the publishing/scheduling dashboard, is the ability to monitor and post to Facebook Groups directly from HootSuite:

Typically I like to do my Facebook work “in” Facebook, but I know plenty of people who’d rather do all their Facebook management from a third-party app. And this fits the bill.

And just to go back to the scheduling feature, when people ask me to help them promote specific events, fundraisers, etc. I find the easiest way to do so is to schedule a ton of posts in HootSuite. (Assuming, that is, that those are things I want to help promote.) I find this feature very useful; I can simply copy a post and bung it in at various points in the “publisher” view, making minor edits if I want.

So if you are really pressed for time, then I honestly don’t know of a better one-stop management shop for the primary social networks than HootSuite.

Post Planner: The easiest way to schedule Facebook updates

2I’ve also been a fan of Post Planner for a long time. I find the team extremely responsive and the app just superb. Sure, you can post to Facebook from a number of different apps (including HootSuite), but PP rules, in my book, because:

• There’s nothing like having your own branded footer, as I wrote about a while back.
• Even though Facebook has recently introduced the ability to schedule posts, the feature is extremely clunky, and Post Planner makes it a breeze.

• Post Planner now lets you create lists of Pages and Groups to schedule posts to (though if you’re smart, you’ll still send them out at different times, but at least now you don’t have to schedule the same post over and over again).
• Its “status ideas” feature is just genius.

• You can syndicate your blog posts to Facebook via your RSS feed.
• If you don’t want your posts publishing automatically, you can still set up the RSS feature but set the publishing option to “suggest,” so that you can then send/not send out posts, or edit the accompanying status, as you wish.
• You can give posting rights to a team for group posting, which is terrific! The app costs a little more if you add this feature, but I think it’s worth it.
• Analytics, which can help you figure out not just which type of post performs the best, but when.

Buffer: Integration with Google Reader

3I love Buffer, and not just because Jay Pinkert posted such a thorough write-up of it on Spin Sucks. Buffer has made a lot of changes in recent months. It introduced an iPhone app not too long ago, and while that’s still a little clunky, overall it works pretty well.

But why would I need Buffer when I have HootSuite and Post Planner, you might ask?

Here is what makes Buffer critical for me: It integrates with Google Reader. And though most of the posts I share on a regular basis are through my participation in various Triberr groups or “tribes,” my Google Reader is a critical component of my reading and learning.

So I use Buffer to schedule posts when I:

• See a really great post in my Reader and know that’s something I’ll want to share. This becomes particularly important if there are bloggers I read/learn from regularly with whom I’m not connected on Triberr.

• Want to share posts as a backup to Triberr.
• Am on the go and want to schedule posts from my iPhone or iPad; Buffer integrates with the RSS+ app (on my iPhone) and Mr. Reader (on my iPad). Note, I find it works better on the latter.

Though I have set up Buffer so that I could post to Facebook and LinkedIn from the platform, I usually don’t. This is for two reasons:

1. My primary platform for content curation is Twitter. So they typically contain the @ handle of the blogger publishing that post, etc. And I believe updates with a significant amount of “platform-ese” or terms specific to a certain platform are best reserved for use on that platform alone;
2. I like Post Planner better for Facebook (or posting directly to Facebook), and I’m just not very active on LinkedIn at all.

Recently, Buffer has also integrated with Twitter and Facebook, so you have another way to schedule posts to either platform (i.e. buffer them). That is very useful, but since I’m used to HootSuite and Post Planner, I haven’t really used that feature yet.

Strengths of the three platforms

So, to summarize:

1. HootSuite rocks posting to multiple platforms, scheduling and “pay it forward” karma kind of tweets.

2. Post Planner rocks posting to Facebook probably better than Facebook will ever manage.

3. Buffer rocks sharing posts from Google Reader, from your laptop as well as while on the go (and you can also use it as an alternative to scheduling via the two platforms above).

There you have it: my holy trinity of managing social media. I hope this is helpful! Please tell me: What are your favorite apps/platforms to manage your personal/company social media presence? Are there other platforms I should be looking at? Why? What has your experience of Post Planner, HootSuite and Buffer been? I’d love to know.

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Choose one of these 7 tools to improve your Twitter workflow

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, businesses, brands, bloggers, social media managers, individuals.

Summary: As Twitter becomes part of your routine — and especially if you manage multiple accounts — it’s easy to feel as if you’re floundering in the incessant flood of information. But a good Twitter dashboard (sometimes called an application or client) gives you access to your accounts in one place and can help you stay afloat by making it easier to monitor, plan and track updates and conversations.

Here we compare our top seven Twitter dashboards, as well as list others that may work best for you and your organization. Compare these to our earlier roundup of Top 10 social media dashboard tools.

This is the part of our ongoing series on how organizations can get the most out of Twitter. Please check back weekly for the next installment. Also see:

• 8 nonprofit Twitter superstars
• 12-step guide on how to live-tweet an event
• 24 best practices for nonprofits using Twitter
• 7 top tools to measure performance & influence on Twitter

By Lindsay Oberst
Socialbrite staff

Twitter dashboards come in two types: desktop and Web-based. Which one best fits your organization depends on your preferences. While some people prefer to separate their Twitter and Internet experiences, other people find it easier to keep everything within the Web browser.

One downside of running a separate desktop client is that it can slow down your computer. However, even though Web-based solutions don’t require updates as do desktop ones, they also occasionally don’t work properly. Many of these clients also work on other platforms, including iPhones, Androids, iPads and others. All of these tools can be a bit daunting at first, so expect to spend some time getting familiar with them.

TweetDeck: An all-in-one desktop dashboard

1TweetDeck allows you to schedule tweets, to follow and unfollow accounts, and to create separate columns to track hashtags, keywords and Twitter lists. It also supports Geo-tagged tweets. You can track links using the url shortener bit.ly, and if you feel limited by 140 characters, a service called deck.ly allows you to tweet longer. The pop-up notifications can be helpful if you need to stay updated on a certain topic or keyword throughout the day. Unfortunately, you can’t filter the pop-ups but you can turn them off. On the negative side, this desktop tool has been known to slow some computers down since it uses Adobe AIR.

Twitter acquired Tweetdeck in May 2011, and although they have not done so yet, and haven’t shown any signs that they will, some people have concerns that Twitter might shut down Tweetdeck to protect itself. For now, this dashboard also simplifies Facebook, Myspace and Foursquare account management. Plus, its Android app gets the best reviews.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, iPad, Android

Hootsuite: Web-based productivity dashboard

2Like TweetDeck, Hootsuite can also schedule tweets, follow and unfollow people, and create separate tabs for monitoring. This intuitive dashboard has several useful features. First, it is designed to make collaborating and organization easy. Second, it offers free analytics, including a built-in url shortener, which tracks your tweeted links. Other useful features include displaying a user’s Klout score, which measures online influence, and a bookmarklet that allows you to tweet about a page without leaving your current tab. It also supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress.com, MySpace, Foursquare and mixi. Plus, real-time searches can be embedded on your website. On the downside, this client can fall asleep with inactivity, which disrupts any monitored streams.

The free version of this tool provides you with free social analytics, five social profiles and it’s ad-supported. Or you can opt for the $5.99 per month Pro version that allows you to have one team member, plus unlimited social profiles, enhanced analytics, no ads and more. The iPhone app is excellent for tweeting on the go. Hootsuite also continues to improve its service. Three updates announced this month provide geo-analytic technology, deeper integration with LinkedIn and crowd-sourced explanations of trending topics.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web, iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Keitai

Seesmic: Powerful multi-platform tool

5If Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are for power users, Seesmic is for regular folks. The Seesmic Desktop offering is an Adobe Air application that integrates multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts and pages. Seesmic also offers a browser-based client for Twitter that allows you to manage your Twitter stream in a Gmail-like interface; save your Twitter searches synchronized with your Twitter account; and hold threaded conversations in your direct messages (DM’s). Seesmic Desktop allows you to manage several Twitter accounts, build groups, create saved searches and utilize an anti-spam tool. Klout can be integrated into this client using an app; however, you won’t get analytics with this tool, and the Web and desktop versions have different features.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, Web, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry

Mixero: Improving workflow, reducing noise

6Dubbed a “new generation Twitter client,” Mixero cuts out much of the distracting Twitter noise and allows you to manage multiple accounts without becoming overwhelmed. This desktop client runs on Adobe Air, but users report fewer glitches than similar applications. Many clients attempt to take over your computer and give you little control; however, Mixero gives you detachable, re-sizable columns. And they also have a unique Avatar mode, which allows the program to hide itself except for your ActiveList. The icon cluster stays on top of the desktop and shows when new items are received. This is great for not getting caught up with every little thing everyone is saying.

Its ActiveList allows you to choose a number of sources that are really important for you at the time. You can filter groups and create channels using keywords and user names. MicroChats give you the ability to create a private (or public) chat room and quickly invite your Twitter friends and followers to talk with you in real time. Another useful feature for getting work done is that the app allows you to create two dashboard setups, meaning you can have one for work and one for home. It also works with Facebook.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, Android

Brizzly: A simple, Web-based reader

7Brizzly simplifies your Twitter browsing and allows you to manage up to five accounts for free; however, it does not allow scheduling. One neat thing about this tool is that it helps you keep up with news and trends and explains trending topics in its Brizzly Guide. This way your nonprofit can stay relevant. Also, when you get a direct message (DM,) an IM-like notification pops up which you can view and answer in the pop-up window. Another useful feature is that you can mute a user without unfollowing them. In June 2010, Brizzly launched picnics, a feature that allows you to exchange links, photos and comments with members of your nonprofit and without anyone else seeing them.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web, iPhone, iPad, Android

Other choices

We haven’t used all of these additional Twitter dashboards and clients — which ones do you think are worth a tryout?

• DestroyTwitter. A super simple desktop dashboard. It leaves an incredibly small footprint.
• EasyChirp. An alternative to the Twitter.com website, the site is designed to be easier to use and optimized for disabled users. Formerly called Accessible Twitter.
• UberSocial: A full-featured app with an excellent iPhone component. Also, available for Android and Blackberry.
• CoTweet: Wed-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution. Offers anayltics, although they are not intuitive.
• TwitterLocal: Good for connecting with local people and businesses.
• Twitterific: A Mac OS X and iOS client.
• Echofon : A minimalist client for Mac, also with a Firefox add-on.
• Pwytter : A free, open source Twitter client for Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Tweetie for Mac: A Twitter app for Mac (desktop and laptop) users. Note: Twitter purchased Tweetie2, an iPhone app, in April 2010.
• Digsby: Digsby combines IM, email and social networks in one app.
• Twinja : A downloadable desktop app built on Adobe AIR for those who prefer a different UI. Works on both Mac and PC.
• TwInbox : TwInbox seamlessly integrates Twitter into Outlook, giving you full Twitter functionality without having to open any other apps.
• Spaz: An open-source Twitter app for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
• Tweetr : Twitter client for Mac / PC.
• Twittm : Twitter for desktop.
• Statuzer : Twitter client running through Adobe AIR.
• Chirpr : Windows sidebar gadget for Twitter.

Have a favorite of these Twitter clients? Which ones do you like or dislike? Know of others we missed? Please share in the comments!

Additional Twitter articles on Socialbrite

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools

• 40 hashtags for social good

• 12 great nonprofits & causes to follow on Twitter

• Build a fan base: How to get more followers on Twitter

• Go viral: 13 ways to get your blog posts retweeted

• Twitter tutorials: Twitter Lists, hashtags, Twitter stats & more

The post Best Twitter dashboards for nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

Trackur, Sprout Social, Thrive & other monitoring tools worth paying for

Target audience: Mid-size nonprofits, cause organizations, agencies, brands, NGOs, Web publishers, individuals. This is part of our series on social media monitoring:
• Guide to monitoring social media conversations
• 20 free, awesome social media monitoring tools
• How to create & manage a monitoring dashboard

Search engines and free monitoring tools can help you find mentions of your brand easily, but if you want to take your social media efforts to the next level, you may want to consider using a social media monitoring vendor.

Once your nonprofit or business reaches a certain size — with, say, hundreds of daily mentions — a paid social media monitoring vendor or service can help you smartly assess the conversations taking place about your brand. In many cases, they offer tools for you to respond and forge deeper levels of engagement. A good paid service will offer not just data but ways for you to draw insight and develop strategy by tapping into actionable intelligence.

Paid subscription services for social media monitoring can save staff time and provide insight into influence, authority, sentiment and reach. But remember: For your social media program to work, you’ll need to designate someone on your staff to own this. The person or team should analyze the results, act on time-sensitive issues and make recommendations about how to integrate the learnings from the community into your operation. (Socialbrite can help you get your program up and running.)

Social media vendors come in all shapes and flavors. Some cater to small organizations with modest budgets that want to handle monitoring internally. Others service large nonprofits and corporations that want a robust suite of tools and access to expert analysts. So we’ve broken this package into two parts:

• 10 paid social media monitoring services for nonprofits (below)
• Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business (on our sister site, Sociamedia.biz), which includes Radian6, Lithium and 18 other vendors that work with nonprofits

Please note that we’ve already covered a number of monitoring services in our roundups Top 10 social media dashboard tools and 14 free tools to measure your social influence — including TweetDeck, CoTweet, Seesmic, Spredfast, MediaFunnel, Bit.ly and others  — so think of this as a package of monitoring resources.

Commercial social media monitoring services

Here is our guide to 10 subscription-based social media monitoring services for nonprofits and organizations, with the most affordable ones listed first. Have your own favorites? Please add them in the comments below.

Trackur: Affordable tracking & engagement

1An online reputation management and social media monitoring tool created by reputation expert Andy Beal and team, Trackur is sort of a Google Alerts on steroids. Trackur provides all the monitoring tools you need. It is brandable, will rate the sway power of your influencers for prioritized responses and will deliver results to your inbox, RSS feed or Web-based dashboard. Quickly monitor your reputation, check on trends and analyze media mentions for your company, brands, sector, cause or clients. Cost: Four plans range from $18 to $377/month and vary depending on number of searches and features used. Free 10-day money-back guarantee. Clients: 27,000+ users. Affordability makes it popular among small businesses. Owner: Independent.

Sprout Social: Track & grow your social footprint

2We’ve heard good things about Chicago-based Sprout Social, which lets you target and discover new customers or supporters, monitor your brand across the social Web, organize your social networks and manage up to five identities with the basic plan. The service offers an easy-to-digest summary of what’s happening online around your social presence. Cost: Pro Plan at $9/month is geared to small, independent businesses, nonprofits and organizations. Business Plan at $49/month is tailored to larger companies. Free trial. Clients: Chiefly small businesses, independent service providers such as attorneys and real estate agents, bloggers. Owner: Independent.

uberVU: Affordable for smaller operations

3A social media monitoring tool that combines powerful features (e.g., historical and real-time data, sentiment analysis, platform filtering) and ease of use, uberVU offers a monthly price that should be more attractive to nonprofits and small and mid-size brands. Cost: Four packages:$49.99/month for individuals, $180/month for popular Plus program, $400/month for big companies, contact team for PR agencies. 14-day free trial. Clients: OMD, Edelman, Sharp. Clients generally consist of small businesses and startups, PR & marketing agencies, bloggers. Owner: Independent.

Thrive: Convert fans into donors

4Thrive, from the consultancy Small Act of McLean, Va., is an all-in-one social media tool that lets you listen, publish, report and engage with donors and supporters. Features like contact tagging and sorting, automated keyword searching and automated conversation archiving help you cultivate relationships over time, turning fans into donors. Import your existing email lists and convert them into detailed social profiles so you can jump-start your social media program. Small Act is also launching a service that takes an organization’s donor database to help them build social communities from that data. Cost: Recommended plan for most nonprofits is $1,188/year per user ($99/month per user). Small Act offers a one-month free trial as part of the contract if requested. See the demo, too. Clients: AARP, KaBoom, Global Giving, Ashoka, Office Depot, National Geographic. Owner: Independent.

ReSearch.ly: Newcomer packs a lot of power

5Launched in December 2010 and in development for two years, ReSearch.ly — from the folks behind Sydney- and San Francisco-based PeopleBrowsr — is essentially a powerful social search tool that gives a window into informal communities of interest on Twitter. You can look for mentions of a brand, cause or event in real time, filter out unimportant mentions and funnel in all Twitter users, Twitter folks you’re following or just your followers. Segment by media or content type (like photography or bios) to identify key influencers or communities of interest on the fly. We got an advance look at ReSearch.ly at BlogWorld Expo and liked what we saw. Cost: $99/month per user. The cost quickly goes up if you want to add data from Facebook, blogs and other networks. Clients: New service. Owner: Independent.

eCairn: Conversation & influencer mining

6Find your tribes, rank your influencers, listen to the people who matter and engage in meaningful conversations with eCairn Conversations. This video on YouTube describes a number of enhancements — campaign management, influencer geo-location, relevance filtering — released in November 2010. Cost: Pricing starts at $99/month. Clients: HP, Chanel, L’Oreal and several PR and communication agencies. Owner: Independent.

Hootsuite: Integrate your social platforms

7We like Hootsuite because we think of monitoring as part of an integrated approach to social media. (Other monitoring dashboards offering tiered pricing include TweetDeck, CoTweet and Seesmic.) With Hootsuite you can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or mobile device. Your team can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Social Insights, which comes with the Pro editions, gives you access to information about your social network and intelligence about how to enlarge your network and adjust your marketing strategy. Cost: For $5.99/month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $15/month. Clients: The White House, Oxfam, Martha Stewart Media, SXSW, Zappos, TED, LA Times, Fox, BET. Owner: Independent.

Actionly: Low cost and no frills

8Actionly tracks keywords across Twitter, Facebook, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, etc. and pulls updates every hour. The information is gathered, analyzed and stored in an easy-to-use dashboard that allows you to manage multiple Twitter or Facebook accounts and lets you export all data for future use. The service also offers customized reports, email alerts and sentiment analysis, and its integration with Google Analytics allows you to see your social media ROI. See this tutorial on how to use Actionly strategically. Cost: Basic monitoring for $20/month, premium for $50/month and a Pro option at $100/month. Free one-search trial. Clients: Public relations professionals, others. Owner: Independent.

BuzzStream: Build & manage relationships

9BuzzStream helps you build a dossier about your influencers. Search mainstream news, blogs posts, blog comments, Twitter posts, forums, message boards and many other social sites for mentions of your keywords. Cost: Pricing starts at $49/month for one person and 10,000 search results, $99/month for three users. If you monitor social media to find link opportunities or conduct reputation management, you can set up media monitoring searches in BuzzStream starting at $29/month. Clients: Sapient, Rubbermaid, Random House, HomeAway, Bazaarvoice. Owner: Rel Equals, Inc.

Meltwater News: Mixed reports

10Meltwater News combines broad search capabilities, analytical tools and a consultative relationship with its clients. Through its Web-based interface, users can evaluate trends, map press activity, identify target markets and measure the ROI of marketing and PR campaigns. Track keywords, phrases and topics from 130,000 sources and receive daily reports. We’re reluctant to recommend Meltwater News, however, based on some recent feedback. Cost: In line with other basic monitoring services. Clients: Meltwater News has more than 20,000 clients, including Airtran Airways, European Tour, USA Cycling. Owner: Meltwater Group. Its nonprofit arm, the Meltwater Foundation, operates the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology. Also see: Meltwater Buzz in Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business.

Other paid social media monitoring solutions

There are more than 200 social media monitoring services in the marketplace, so this is meant as a sampling of some of the notable vendors that would be of most use to nonprofits and small to mid-size organizations and businesses rather than a comprehensive list. If you’ve had success with other vendors, please your experiences in the comments below.

More social media monitoring vendors and tools:

• Top 10 social media dashboard tools (Socialbrite)

• 14 free tools to measure your social influence (Socialbrite)

• Socialmedia.biz’s Top 20 social media monitoring vendors for business includes a host of vendors that also cater to nonprofits, including Radian6, BuzzGain and many others.

Related

• Social media monitoring: Articles (Socialbrite)

• Social media metrics: Articles (Socialbrite)

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How to manage the torrent of social media conversations — and increase your productivity!

By Kim Bale
Socialbrite staff

One of the things we often hear from nonprofits and social enterprises is: How do I manage the torrent of social media conversations coming at me?

The answer used to be: Painstakingly and one conversation at a time. But a new crop of social media tools aims to tamp down the social media gusher by letting you update, monitor, manage and maintain several communication outlets at once. (While it’s sometimes hard to know what counts as a social media dashboard, we’re not including a wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) or social media monitoring tools here.)

When selecting a dashboard for personal or professional use, you should consider such items as cost, analytics and which social networks they support, among other things. Our list is meant to feature some of the breakout social media dashboards in the space and highlight their distinguishing features to make the selection process a bit easier.

Here are 10 of our favorite social media dashboard tools:

Threadsy: Unify your email, social networks

1Threadsy is an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard that allows organizations to connect through multiple email accounts as well as Facebook and Twitter. Free to use, Threadsy is great for managing your nonprofit or business’s brand from one clean dashboard across the big names in social media platforms. With no fees and no downloads, this service should make a splash in the space for both personal use and use by your organization.

Myweboo: Organize your information streams

2Haven’t heard of Myweboo? That’s OK. This upstart startup invites users to discover, browse and read popular streams and share them with friends and followers. You or your organization can choose from a wide variety of “applications” to connect to and stream to a dashboard from categories like news, social, fashion, photo and video. These streams can be viewed together of filtered from “My Dashboard” and then easily shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious and other networks. You’re in complete control of which sites will make up your dashboard. Free to use, Myweboo is run by an appealing brother-and-sister pair of young tech stars.

Hootsuite: Integrate all your platforms

3Our personal favorite is Hootsuite because of the depth of its products and services. Nonprofits and cause organizations can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device. A team of users can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Hootsuite offers two versions. One is free and aggregates up to five social network and two RSS feeds; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For $5.99 a month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $10 per month.

Spredfast: For teams of social marketers

4Spredfast allows an organization not only to manage its social media presence but also to monitor and measure its voice across multiple social media channels from one easy-to-use dashboard. A great choice for organizations with multiple hands in social media marketing efforts, Spredfast offers superb organizational tools that help identify and assign tasks to multiple users across multiple social media sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and blogging platforms. It also lets you publish video to many video sites at once, similar to TubeMogul. Free for 30 days, Spredfast has pricing tiers that start around $212 per month for nonprofits. See the new writeup on Spredfast on our sister site, Socialmedia.biz.

MediaFunnel: Collaborative, permission-based system

5Coordinate and manage your nonprofit’s social media presence with MediaFunnel, a collaboration platform that lets you navigate and moderate online conversations about your brand. One interesting feature: You can use MediaFunnel to manage your team member’s social media updates — say, by holding your intern’s tweets in a queue until approved by a supervisor (roles include admins, publishers and contributors). Chiefly geared to businesses, MediaFunnel makes it easy to combine several social media accounts and to offer solutions for presenting a brand’s presence through multiple voices. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported.

CoTweet: Advanced features for Enterprise users

6CoTweet is used by thousands of individuals and employees at nonprofits and corporations around the world. The free Standard edition is limited to a few Twitter accounts and geared to a couple of team members. The paid Enterprise edition supports Facebook, too, and is geared to brands more deeply engaged in social marketing, brand building and customer support. It supports an unlimited number of users, advanced workflow, more analytics, third-party integrations — including Salesforce.com — productivity tools, unlimited conversation history for deeper customer relationships, a mobile app, rich profiles of fans and followers and more.

Seesmic: Free, clean & credible

7Seesmic allows users to manage unlimited Twitter accounts as well as Facebook, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare accounts. Another free service, this dashboard is well-organized and can be sorted into a variety of timelines detailing tweets, retweets, @mentions, direct messages and lists. Seesmic also publishes trending topics, making it easy to join already popular conversations. This dashboard — created by Loic Le Meur, founder of LeWeb, and his San Francisco-based team — is clean, simple and affords the ability to update several statuses, send direct messages and check in to locations from one easily navigated page.

Netvibes: Share your widgets with the world

8Netvibes lets organizations keep track of the news and trends that matter, create unique personal and public dashboards and share these public dashboards or sites with anyone, anywhere, at any time. You can easily create fun and personalized widgets — detailing the weather, to-do lists, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts or Flickr updates, among many others — and post them to both personal and public dashboards. Organizations can choose a theme, name their pages and organize them with tabs and share them with the world.

TweetDeck: Connect with your contacts

9If you’re a Twitter aficionado, you may already use TweetDeck, which works on the Mac, PC, Linux, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. It connects organizations with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and many more. Free of charge, TweetDeck allows users to schedule future posts, manage multiple accounts and update several social media sites at once to maintain consistency. One unique feature allows users to send tweets longer than 140 characters through smart cross-posting to both a Buzz and Twitter account. Twitter is a desktop app and not Web-based, so one thing we don’t like is the inability to manage the app’s font size on different screens.

Brizzly: Simplify your updating

10Brizzly simplifies your social media browsing and updating experience while taking some of the work out of keeping up to date with trends and followers. It lets you update on Twitter and Facebook. Its Brizzly Guide helps explain trending topics on Twitter. Brizzly is free.

Tools that can integrate your social networks

There are, of course, other social media dashboard solutions for the enterprise. One good choice for businesses is Awareness, which lets your team publish, manage, measure and engage across multiple social media channels.

Another is Sprout Social: Social media tools for business, a social media management suite. We listed Sprout Social in our roundup of Paid social media monitoring services.

Also, don’t forget other tools that can integrate your social networks:

• You might want to try using a browser as your social media dashboard. Flock has been the most social of the social browsers for the past five years. Others say Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox will get you a social media dashboard with the right add-ons/extensions. And Marc Andreessen’s upcoming RockMelt (Mashable review) will take it a step further, requiring you to log into Facebook before using it.

• Unilyzer has a social media dashboard to unify your Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts.

• We’re impressed by the private beta of Nimble and will report back when we’ve used it more extensively.

• TwitterFeed lets you feed your blog to Twitter, Facebook and more.

• Ping.fm is a free service that makes it easy to update your social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Delicious.

• RowFeeder is a tool to cross-post, to track conversations on Twitter and Facebook and to create analytical reports.

What’s your favorite social media dashboard? Please add a comment.

Related articles

• Spredfast: A tool to organize your conversations (socialmedia.biz)
• HootSuite Adds Facebook Analytics to Its Social Media Dashboard [TNW Canada] (thenextweb.com)
• 7 + Social Media Cross Platform Branding Tools (verticalmeasures.com)
• What is HootSuite and How to Use it for Your Small Business (techtalkformoms.com)

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The screencast above helps nonprofits take advantage of HootSuite‘s new capabilities. As I say in this short tutorial, it’s one tool to manage your organization’s presence across a wide range of social networks. Very cool.

One of HootSuite’s advantages over rival apps like Tweetdeck and Seesmic is that it’s entirely Web-based, and the company takes advantage of Ajax — a programming protocol — to let you drag and drop to your heart’s content.

Have you used HootSuite? What do you think?

Cross-posted from JohnHaydon.com.

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Guest post by Chris Abraham
Abraham-Harrison

Back in the earlier days of third-party Twitter apps (just a few months ago, actually), a few very effective web-based services got my attention: SocialToo, TweetLater, and HootSuite. Sad thing was, while they were all very powerful services, they were all poorly designed, very hacked together, and fugly. Enter the elegant, sexy, feature-rich HootSuite 2.0 (no matter what you think about all the controversy and extortion — see below).

Everyone’s talking about HootSuite 2.0

Today, while I was monitoring my stream-o-tweets, I noticed that every third person of the 2,587 I currently follow were tweeting that they “upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade.” HootSuite — pronounced like it sounds (HOOT-sweet) and a play on the French phrase tout de suite — was the first online player to offer multi-Twitter-account management and Twittering, an essential tool to any business application of Twitter that required the management of more than one Twitter account, such as @marcon, @abrahamharrison, @chrisabraham, etc.

HootSuite 1.0 was ugly

I used HootSuite to manage multiple accounts, in spite of very basic, very Web 1.0 forms-based interface. HootSuite allowed me to simply pop tweets to one or more account and to manage as many as I wanted. I used it as I expanded into new accounts. And then there was Seesmic Desktop, by Loic Le Meur, and now there is TweetDeck, both AIR apps that are multi-platform clients that I personally really love: their ease of use, their look and feel, and their modern design.

HootSuite 2.0 is a hottie

Today, as I alluded to earlier, HootSuite got a lot of work done. In fact, I feel like I am in some sort of before and after makeover scene in morning TV. HootSuite 2.0 is a hottie: gorgeous, stunning, modern and Ajaxy, integrating new levels of innovation that leaves every Twitter-inspired web services in its technological wake — even Twitter!

Looking good even on my small-screen laptop

I run a Lenovo x61 ThinkPad, which only has a 12.1-inch screen, which doesn’t work very well with TweetDeck (it just isn’t wide enough). Seesmic Desktop does a little better with a pretty cool “shuffling” innovation. However, HootSuite does it the best, using a regular browser to display lots and lots of information by means of scrollers and tabs, allowing everything to be contained simply and quickly using even my pathetically small “executive” laptop and might even work swimmingly in a netbook with a 10-inch screen.

All of the other stuff is crap compared to what’s really cool

I have been saving the best for last: HootSuite allows you to create columns with persistent search, meaning you can keep your eyes on what is going on around your brand, your name, your competitors, and your industry. Psych! That’s not the big deal! The big deal is that “you can now take your column with you,” meaning you can create a search for something like #Socialmedia.biz. This is really cool and so innovative! You can set up your own dashboard, you can shoehorn the stream into your blog’s or site’s nav bar — lots of stuff. Nobody else offers this, as far as I can tell, and this is a winner! The reason why we all use and worship YouTube is partially because it was one of the first video hosting sites that allowed one to embed content. You might not know it now, but this is a big deal!

Embeddable columns widget

Apparently, Twitter embeddable search, too

Update: Right after I posted this article, I popped the link to the lovely and brilliant Adele McAlear, who popped me the note via Google Talk, “I think someone else does the widget… I’ll find it…one sec. Yeah…its Twitter themselves. Customizable. Announced this week based on search.twitter. I’ve already embedded one on my blog (which explains why I’ve seen it, smacks head). Yes, the link works in my left sidebar. Custom search terms, sizes, colours, mouse over “join the conversation” in the widget to see the search terms used.” Well, there you have it! Here’s the link to the Twitter Widget Search.

Controversy

Now, the controversy: remember that “I upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade” tweet I have been seeing all over the Twittosphere? Well, here’s the controversy and the genius: if you want to upgrade to HootSuite version 2 — if you really want to upgrade — then you have to be willing to tweet “I upgraded to #HootSuite 2.0 because it works http://hootsuite.com/upgrade” or there’s no moving forward. Coercion! Blackmail! Extortion! Brilliant! Worth it! Shameless! Arrogant! How dare you!

Well, I think it worked. Just today, there were at least 2,133 mentions of the Twitter hashtag #hootsuite, roughly equivalent to a minor earthquake or coup d’état insurrection. I mean, it works and it got my attention, it got JD’s attention, and the messaging — my messaging — wasn’t even the result of a direct mail. And, when I repeated the message to my 10k+ followers, it was willingly. I mean, what price tweeting to get a glimpse of what everyone is on about.

Do you use HootSuite? What do you think?

Update: Blake Samic commented that there are parts of HootSuite that I hadn’t yet explored, “I’m interested to see how their analytics engine stacks up to something like ‘su.pr‘ (another great scheduled-tweet app). The other interesting feature I noticed in Hootsuite was the ability to have multiple people managing a Twitter account (kind of like Co-Tweet).”

Cross-posted from Socialmedia.biz.

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