Ways to streamline your social media (how to take the daily hassle out of your SM)

This brill post was written by Marrianne Williams of Smelly Chicks Online. Thanks Marr for all of your research and this really helpful post (I’ve now gotten myself some of those Firefox add-ons). As a thank you I’ll be sending you one of these shiny badges to pop on your site:

If you have any craft business advice or experiences you’d like to share with us here on CraftBoom! please get in touch. You’d be doing a great service to us business crafters and in recognition of your hard work you’ll get a link to your site/blog and the CraftBoom! badge above for you to display on in your shop/site

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Ways to Streamline your Social Media - Flickr, Facebook and Twitter – Oh My!

In Lisa’s article: Meeting people inside and outside of your computer to make friends or market yourself, she wrote about using social media to network with other crafty people in order to share ideas, critique your products, and beat the loneliness that comes with running a home based business. Social media is indeed a great way to accomplish this but it can also be a very time consuming endeavor. Lisa asked me to write an article on tools that helps to consolidate and streamline tasks and software required to participate regularly in social networks.

Instant Messaging Tools

Trillian
I have several instant messaging accounts that I use nearly every day. I have a group of friends and family on Yahoo and another group on Google Talk. In addition to those, I have co-workers that are using AOL and s

ome are using MSN. All of this makes for a very messy desktop which is why for the past few years I have been using Trillian.

Trillian is free to download and easy to install. The program offers simultaneous access to five chat clients: Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, mIRC, and AIM. You can import your passwords, buddy lists, and client preferences into the Trillian interface to communicate with all your IM accounts using one desktop program. I’ve been very pleased with it’s performance for last few years but have grown out of it for a few reasons. First, it does not yet support Google Talk, which I have recently started using. Second, it is a desktop client specific to my computer which leaves me helpless if I am on someone else’s. Surprisingly enough, this has been an issue several times over the past months. However, if Trillian adds Google Talk to their line-up, I will surely use the program again regularly.

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Meebo
Now that my beloved Trillian is less than perfect for me, I use Meebo, a web-based instant message system that works on any computer. From my Meebo account, I have access to AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber all in one spot just as I did with Trillian. It’s nearly perfect for me. In fact, the only complaint I have is that it’s a little slow to update at times. It’s rare that it’s an issue for me, but it can present a problem from time to time. On the flip side, I can hop on any computer with an internet connection and have complete access to all of my IM contacts.

Browsers

Flock
Flock is a Mozilla-based browser that functions a lot like Firefox which made it easy to use from the get-go. However, Flock’s additional built-in features makes it very different than Firefox. Flock integrates with a long list of online social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and more. A simple click on the friends icon will display what your friends are up to all in one place.

Flock’s media stream panel displays photos and video at the top of the browser, allowing you to view a friend’s photos from Flickr, from Facebook and any other account you might use frequently. Flock also includes a photo uploader complete with basic editing tools like crop and rotate, as well as basic settings like description, viewing privileges and tags.

Flock also has a blog feature that allows you to create and post to your blog directly from the browser window. The web clipboard feature lets you save text, images, web pagesand integrates with the blog tool to make writing those blog posts so much easier.

Flock has many other features for you to utilize. In fact, you might find that there is a bit of a learning curve associated with it. Luckily, the Flock crew have made easy to follow videos to steer you through the process. You can find them on their website. I’ve found a Flock user generated tutorial video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crB8CcYBnBQ

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Firefox
While Flock is great, you don’t have to leave Firefox to have a great social networking experience. Independent developers have been hard at work creating add-ons to assist you. If you do a search in the Firefox add-on database, you can find downloads for almost any social media account you are looking to streamline in conjunction with Firefox. The following add-ons are my personal favorites:

Boost for Facebook: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3120
TwitterFox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081
Uploadr for Flickr: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3923
Social Bookmarking: Sharaholic: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5457

Google Notebook: http://www.google.com/notebook/
While not technically a Firefox Add-on, Google Notebook integrates well with Firefox and works much like Flock’s Clipboard feature. I can’t live without it.

There are many applications designed to help streamline your social networking efforts and still more are being created all the time. I’ve only touched on those that I’ve found to work well for me. If you’re using something different, leave a comment and share them with us!