#8: Social Media Management Tools

I've got the social media thing figured out on a personal level.  I have the sites I use, and the sites I don't plan to use because you just have to stop somewhere.  I am a very "devoted" Facebook user and a somewhat devoted Twitter user.  I have an Instagram account, but don't use it, and I am not on Tumblr.  I use Edmodo to "socialize" with the kids at work.

The idea of trying out an app to put things into one place seems unnecessary to me, but I know a lot of people do it......you can tell because the same posts that appear on their Facebooks show up on Twitter.  I don't tweet very much, and say more on Facebook because I get more than 140 characters to do so. I used to teach English; I like words.

I decided to download Hootsuite, but when I searched for it, NewzSocial came up as well.  When I read about it, it claimed to be similar to Flipboard (which I love!)....so I downloaded it too.  After getting "in", I wasn't that impressed.  I have no "friends" on it, so there's no point....unless I want to annoy everyone by inviting them in to join or "follow" my channel.   It's basically a personalized magazine app with social components, but if I read an article I like, I'd much rather share my like of it by Twitter or Facebook. Oh well....learned something new.

Okay....Hootsuite. This was easy enough to get set up, as I just connected it to Facebook and Twitter with my account names and passwords, but once it was up and running...we'll, it was "okay". If someone was running social media for a company or organization  and had to post the same things to multiple places, this would make sense.  For me...not so much.  It was easy enough to figure out, but it wasn't beautiful.....and I still had to click between my two social networks anyway, so why not just have two apps?  It only had two and a half stars in the reviews, so I wasn't surprised it was pretty basic....and some of the complaints of the reviewers were pretty understandable.

Cloze had some much better reviews (4+ stars).  They say the following:

*We learn who is important to you and put them up front, filtering out the rest. 

*Everything about the people you know in one place, pulled together for you.

*Circulate the best of what you discover on social media with your team. 

Sounds good.

I made my account on Cloze, then added Twitter and Facebook easily (not LinkedIn, as I don't use that one). Then, I added my Hotmail account and personal Gmail account . 

Then I got this....at 4:45 pm:

By 4:49 it said we were ready to begin!

Cloze had my "people" grouped the way Facebook has them in groups....but I didn't find the navigation to be easy or hard...just meh I guess. I know they use some special algorithms to determine who is the most important to me, but I don't like that they have determined who my "key people" are.  I also didn't like that in reading my mail I had to archive messages but couldn't delete them. The whole "sharing with your team" stuff didn't fit with what I would use social media for, so those are lost on me.  Again, I can see this being a cool app for the right person, but I'm happy accessing Twitter and Facebook separately, or getting to my Facebook via Flipboard.

It's nice to know these apps are out there, and to have played around with them enough to have some background if students or staff ever have questions, but I don't see myself using any of them in the future.